New Super Mario Bros. 2

3D Mario games have always excelled at renewing themselves, making its most basic mechanics – like jumping – more interesting in the most imaginative ways possible, either by abusing and twisting gravity in Super Mario Galaxy or by prolonging the jump in Super Mario Sunshine. The current 2D titles appear to follow a different guideline, basing their design on familiar elements while highlighting their main gimmick: the Wii version, for example, focused on its multiplayer mode and was reasonably successful. The point of New Super Mario Bros. 2, however, is the collection of coins, which is a poor decision that goes against the intricate level design that the franchise has always cherished.

Mario games rarely boast a deep storyline: the Italian plumber always has to save Princess Peach, who was abducted by Bowser. And the developers also rarely aim with each game to make the gameplay more complex. After all, a Mario game, above all else, needs to be intuitive. In other words, each new title doesn’t intend to be more complicated than the previous one but tries to expand, in an innovative way, the use of its primary mechanics.

Super Mario Bros.’ stages are excellent examples in this regard. All of their elements have the purpose of driving the player to the final flag. The initial goomba introduces the player to the urgency of jumping. Pipes accustom the player to this essential mechanic while serving as secret shortcuts. Coins encourage exploration, creating opportunities to reach places that would never be considered without them, and reward their collection with one life. And the music follows the rhythm of these actions. That is, all the elements present in the game are there for the same reason: to extend the possibilities of gameplay. The evolution then came with Super Mario Bros. 3, which added the possibility to go back to previous screens – making horizontal movement complete – and to fly, thanks to the power of the Racoon Suit – thus also developing vertical movement through the stages.

In New Super Mario Bros. 2 you don’t find any significant expansion of the possibilities of gameplay. Its central gimmick, however, is also poorly implemented. The goal in the game is to collect a lot of gold coins, or, more precisely, one million of them. However, rather than building the levels around this objective, the developers chose to just implement this goal to the design of the first New Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo DS.

The result is not a good one: levels usually struggle to accommodate this large number of coins – which are also often randomly positioned – while attempting to retain the franchise’s familiar platform elements and bring back some of the old ones, such as the increase in verticality caused by the Racoon Suit.

The absurd amount of coins also contradicts the purpose of the various functions correlated to their collection. The purposes of the coins in a conventional Mario game are numerous: they give one life after one hundred of them collected; those placed in dangerous places allow players to adjust the difficulty at their own pace and be rewarded for it; and they also encouraged exploration, revealing hidden passages, shortcuts, and other secrets. The problem is that for these factors to work effectively, the coins’ positioning in the stages is crucial and needs to be meticulously planned. This was usually achieved following these rules: Mario’s basic path to the flag should not contain too much of them, as this would discourage exploration, and they should not exist in large numbers, which would prevent them from alerting the player to the importance of their locations.

Therefore, the abundance of coins in New Super Mario Bros. 2 goes against their usual purpose and even affects other elements of the design. Finding a secret block or collecting eight red coins to get a life is made irrelevant now, as the thousands of ordinary coins collected throughout the game make the player have more than four hundred lives – no exaggeration here – to spare. At the same time, taking the risk of picking up five coins positioned along a pit is of little value, as there will be twenty more on the next platform. And exploration becomes the search for a needle in a haystack since, with so much coin scattered, it becomes more difficult to perceive which ones are actually indicating something.

The S-3 stage serves as a good example of arbitrariness in their positioning. To get the third Star Coin, the player should obviously limit their searching to the final area, to the right of the second coin. After thoroughly exploring the environment – testing all pipes, killing all enemies, jumping against all blocks, and jumping randomly for invisible ones – they should encounter a high platform that can only be reached with the Raccoon Suit. When flying there, they should perceive a line of coins, rising out diagonally of the screen in the exact direction of their flight. To follow this line of coins, however, will not make them arrive in a secret area containing the Star Coin. Following the line of coins will make them just collect those coins and fall to the ground. Now, on firm ground, frustrated, players could then notice the existence of two other platforms high above them. They would have to fly back to the first platform, ignore the coins, and then fly to those two. As they are separated by a small gap, players could then assume that this is the visual indication of an invisible block and would jump between them, but discover… nothing. Returning a second time to these two platforms, they would have to jump now without any pattern, and following any logic whatsoever, to finally discover the invisible block above the platform on the left. That is, not only do coins serve, in this level, a purpose opposite to what they should, distracting players and leading them on the wrong path, but the lack of logic in the position of the invisible block, instead of rewarding for exploration, will most probably infuriate players instead,.

Even the act of collecting coins, the supposed focus of the game, is not a fully developed idea. There is a gauge informing the player how many they have collected up to that moment, but there is no online leaderboard, which would serve as a great incentive. Its absence means that the record the player achieves will be almost exclusively personal; “almost” because at least you can show it to another player by the 3DS Street Pass functionality. But, in any case, the developers even decided to set a maximum limit of 30,000 coins per stage, which would have prevented a variety of high scores in a possible detailed online leaderboard anyway.

The new powers are, at least, better suited to the goal of collecting coins. The Gold Flower turns the plumber into gold and makes him capable of casting golden energy balls that turn any block or enemy into coins – and is possible to increase the amount gained if you can eliminate several at the same time. The golden circle makes the enemies golden – when eliminated by Mario they also produce coins – and finally, there is the golden block, the best of them: after being hit several times it fits on the protagonist’s head and starts to generate coins over time. What makes this power more interesting is the risk-reward element it adds to the game: if positioned in a dangerous place, the block can leave the player undecided about staying put for a while to grab it. And since the block generates more coins if the player is running, it still encourages and rewards dangerous behavior.

The Coin Rush mode is equally exhilarating. In it, players will go through three stages in a row, with limited lives and time, with the goal of collecting as many coins as possible. The difference of this mode is that when jumping on top of the final flag, instead of earning a useless life, the player will have the number of coins they’ve collected doubled. Coin Rush, therefore, is a fun mode that implements the collection of coins better than the main adventure. It is only stupefying that the reward for so much work, when reaching the goal of one million coins, is absurdly disappointing (spoilers): a new title screen.

Regarding its presentation, New Super Mario Bros. 2 uses the same engine and art style of its predecessors, adding very few particle effects. The themes of the levels are the same and follow practically the same order – the second “world” is a desert, the fourth is ice, and so on – and they are all organized in that same linear mode, being linked by lines, which eventually diverge in some rare parallel path that can be opened if five Star Coins are paid. Even the stereoscopic 3D, which might have added some air of novelty, is not well implemented: due to the small depth of field, the difference is barely noticeable – only in stages filled with fire particles or snow can you see the slight increase in depth. And the soundtrack is completely reused from previous entries as well.

What saves New Super Mario Bros. 2 then is the solid foundation on which it is built, after all, it is still a 2D Mario game. This means that the action is extremely fluid, the mechanics around the enemies stimulate fast and continuous thinking, and that the Star Coins, which still reward exploration, are present. Therefore, when the level design is not being completely destroyed by the violent disharmony between its various elements, New Super Mario Bros. 2 is a reasonably decent platform game. Too bad it is built around the wrong gimmick.

December 04, 2018.

Originally published on March 11, 2015.