Retrospective: Super Mario World

Format: SNES Publisher: Nintendo Developer: In-house Release: 1992

It’s almost a matter of course, discussing a Nintendo great in a retrospective, to detail its innovations at length. If it was the first in beloved series on a new platform – and Super Mario World was just that – then so much the better, because Shigeru Miyamoto and his team are bound to have littered it with paradigm shifts, breathtaking new technology, and courageous reversals of accepted thinking in videogame design. Rewriting the rule book is what Nintendo does, and a debut Mario game at the launch of a new console is when it does so. Isn’t it?

Not this time. The surprising truth is that Super Mario World is, by the admittedly insane standards of the Mushroom Kingdom, quite conservative. Its ideas are few that aren’t refined or expanded versions of things that appeared in the truly visionary Super Mario Bros 3. The liberal, non-linear structure, the world map, the item granting the power of flight, and eight-way scrolling all made their debut in the preceding NES game. The only major addition in World is Yoshi, Mario’s cute dinosaur steed, and subsequent star of his own SNES classic, Yoshi’s Island (which formed a beautifully apposite bookend for the machine’s library when it was released at the very end of its life, five years later).

Neither was Super Mario World a technical showboat for Nintendo’s new platform. It was left to Sega’s freshly conceived rival Sonic The Hedgehog to invent the bravura generational launch title, and Nintendo’s game looked slow and plain by comparison to the huge, vivid sprites and bold settings the Mega Drive was throwing around with wild abandon. Its modest parallax backgrounds were an almost token concession to the onward march of technology. With World’s release coming hot on the heels of Mario Bros 3, Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka simply hadn’t had time to make it the brash system-seller Nintendo needed, especially in the west.

It wasn’t a mistake they’d make again. There was a six-year gap before the release of the next proper Mario title, on much-delayed but powerful hardware, and there weren’t many things about videogames that Super Mario 64 didn’t address. And yet many fans would be hard pressed to choose between the two games. So what went right?

The overworld map makes Super Mario World look like a simplistically structured place. The reality is different…

In a word: everything. Super Mario World is, uniquely for a headline launch game, about perfection over progress. It is a rare example of Nintendo’s designers forgoing reinvention and just letting their creation sing – and with Super Mario Bros 3, they’d already laid the best possible groundwork. Their imaginations focused solely on constructing the most bizarre, complex, hilarious, precarious, contrary and surprising levels the world had ever seen, they created nothing less than the side-scrolling 2D platformer in excelsis.

It may lack grand gestures, but Super Mario World is a simply astonishing, never-ending torrent of ideas, from start to finish. Each is so clearly defined, so precisely picked out in those simple graphics, that it can be appreciated in a fraction of a second as you barrel head-first through the game, drunk on the joy of Mario’s unstoppable momentum. Miyamoto’s team revelled in detail. They set up gratuitous gags – the earliest and most irresisitable being that red shell and the line of koopas in Yoshi’s Island 2 – with the immaculate slapstick timing of a Buster Keaton. They constructed ever more devilish puzzles, and went to new lengths to conceal and misdirect around them. They went higher, deeper and further than before, and built levels within levels within levels, never missing a chance to elaborate the physical structure of Mario’s world, or to seed it with secrets. They enriched the cause-and-effect complexity of the chain reactions of blocks and items and enemies.

They dared construct terrifying, vertiginous sequences of unstable and moving platforms, making solid ground a luxurious rarity, urging you to never stop, never think too hard, just keep that dash button held down and lurch from one heart-stopping, instinctive leap to the next. They placed enemies with pixel-perfect precision. They bent space and time in the impossible Ghost Houses, still perhaps the most mind-bending conceptual traps ever committed to code. They created clockwork death machines in the castles that you need almost supernatural foresight and timing to get through. And they intensified the joyous surrealism of the Mushroom Kingdom in locations like the Vanilla Dome and Cheese Bridge Area.

Bowser’s castles throw up the biggest challenges outside of the ‘secret’ areas, requiring quick thinking and speed.

Notwithstanding the inconceivable amount of attention to detail in the levels themselves, one of Super Mario World’s standout touches is its world map. Although SMB3 did indeed pre-empt this non-linear level interface that allowed you to choose your route through the game, it wasn’t anything like as natural or involved as Mario World’s. Linking together the surfeit of secret exits, levels and shortcuts becomes an overriding obsession, more important by far than rescuing Peach from Bowser; the amazing, inufriating Forest of Illusion, where every standard exit leads to a dead end, is a particular highlight. The world even has a super-structure – Star Road, a sequence of dreamlike night-time levels that can teleport you around the map – and an epilogue, in the form of the almost comically tricky Special levels. Super Mario World was one of the first mainstream action games that really wasn’t over when it was over.

What Yoshi brought to the game shouldn’t be underestimated, either. More than a mere power-up, the dinosaur (or flock of them) was a tremendously charming addition whose huge leaps and bottomless appetite rewrote Mario’s playing style so completely that he eventually deserved his own game. Along with the cape feather that allowed you to circumvent entire levels by flying through them, Yoshi was a theoretical get-out-of-jail-free card, an overpowered item that ought to have rendered the game’s hardest levels – some of the hardest ever conceived in a 2D platformer – comically easy.

But they never did. Balance is one thing, but in Super Mario World, there is simply too much going on for it to even be an issue. Even its lesser levels constantly distract you into stupid mistakes with the sheer density of their brilliance. It may not have changed the world, but simply put, it is more game, more of the time, than any other 2D platformer.

The post Retrospective: Super Mario World appeared first on Edge Online.

Source http://ift.tt/1f7cmvC