To follow up on my last post, Super Mario Maker 2’s final major update has been out for a few days now, and I’ve given the new “World Maker” feature a little bit of a whirl. I haven’t uploaded anything, but I’ve been tinkering with the tools a bit, and playing other people’s worlds.
First and foremost, the ability to make your own worlds is, simply put, amazing in and of itself. With that said, however, the World Maker’s status as a last addition to the game, as opposed to a key ingredient from the start, is evidenced by a few unfortunate limitations.
Again, I stress that the World Maker feature is a welcome addition just by being what it is. I’ve seen some people complain that the world maps are limited to the Super Mario World visual style, but I don’t see anything wrong with that, seeing as Super Mario World is one of those games that just looks timeless.
Super Mario World is a good point of reference, however, because the big issue I have with the World Maker feature – fun as it is – is that its status as a late addition to the game means it lacks a key feature that made Super Mario World so great.
The problem is that, for a year now, the player created stages of Super Mario Maker 2 have been made in a vacuum. Each one its own entity, not part of a greater whole. But the World Maker feature requires players to fill their world maps with courses they have already uploaded to the game’s servers, and doesn’t include any new features to accommodate the transition.
Sure, some clever players will find ways to fill a world with levels all featuring similar gameplay themes, but there’s some things that are completely outside of the player’s ability.
One of Super Mario World’s best contributions to the Mario series (and gaming as a whole) was how the world map was, itself, a level of sorts. Some stages had multiple exits that lead to different branching paths, and you could replay stages to find different exits and pathways.
Because the levels of Super Mario Maker have – since the 2015 original – been made as their own entities, they will always ultimately have one exit. Yes, some players get really creative and create different pathways through their stage, but they’ll always ultimately end up at the same goal. And while players can create branching pathways on their world maps in Super Mario Maker 2’s new update, it’s very limited in how you can go about doing that. What’s more, you can’t replay levels you’ve beaten in someone’s created world, so despite the Super Mario World aesthetic, it plays in the more linear fashion of Super Mario Bros. 3.
Now, I’m not going to complain too much, because I figured this would be the case, given the World Maker being a late addition to Super Mario Maker 2. But I’m writing this because, should there ever be a Super Mario Maker 3, I think Nintendo could add so many features to World Maker so that player’s creations feel like their own full-blown Mario games (no matter how short), as opposed to a series of seemingly unrelated levels strung together.
The Super Mario Maker titles are among Nintendo’s best ideas, but there’s no doubt they have their limitations. What better way to justify a third entry than for Nintendo to take their gloves off, and expand what they’ve managed to achieve in this sub-series over the past five years in such a way that players can make grand Mario adventures?
With World Maker now established, Nintendo could emphasize it in a potential third game, allowing players to more fluidly create and link similar stages. Perhaps they can include the option to have multiple exits, make the stages replayable, create branching paths out of said different exits to allow for bigger, more versatile world maps. And it could give Nintendo the ability to add more options for secrets and collectible items to the game (as opposed to leaving players to pretend like those multi-value coins are worth the effort), as a means of giving players an added depth to their worlds. Perhaps a certain number of a particular collectible is required to open a new path, or a secret level?
The new World Maker feature in Super Mario Maker 2 is great in its own right. But if the future gives us a third Mario Maker, one that can prioritize World Maker as opposed to making it a late addition, it could really take this series to a whole new level. Or world, as it were.
Wizard Dojo 