Working through my backlog: Super Mario 3D Land is okay I guess.

I didn't really experience the 3DS growing up, despite my love of its predecessor. My family was struggling financially during its heyday, and when I did finally get one as a hand-me-down from a family friend, I had lost my entire DS and 3DS games a while after. Yes, I was in fact really fucking angry when that happened. That tragedy killed my enthusiasm for game collecting for a long time, and so the 3DS passed without much investment from me. Back in 2023 I decided I wanted to experience what I missed so long ago, and thus I bought a 3DS which, thanks to being jailbroken when I got it, introduced me to the wonders of MASS COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT which allowed me to do so without going bankrupt. And let me say, I was whelmed.

Looking back on it, the 3DS wasn't something that would've appealed to me greatly when I was younger. My favorite games on the DS were things like Simcity Creator or Anno 1701; the only Nintendo franchise I played on the platform was Pokémon. When I got that fire red 3DS, my tastes were, if anything, more limited than me in my youth as I pretty much only played sim/strategy games with the occasional exception. I didn't even use it much to play DS games as the types of games I was playing at the time were not worth revisiting, so it sadly sat mostly unused (not helping was the fact the system I bought had a busted circle pad.) I have grown much as a person, however, and now my tastes in games have diversified greatly. This combined with life circumstances forcing me on the road, and I've had the time to finish my first 3DS game: Super Mario 3D Land. And let me say, I was whelmed.

Obvious statement incoming: this is a good game. It's a mainline Mario game, it looks sounds and controls great. In fact, I'm a bit impressed by how nice this game looks; before this I replayed 64 DS (with circle pad support,) and I know logically that the 3DS is significantly more powerful than its predecessor, but I'm so used to the DS' crunchy graphics that the Gamecube-level graphics still surprise me. The 3D effect is similarly impressive sort of. The general consensus I've seen online is that the 3D is best utilized amongst the entire 3DS library, and it's still something of a novelty than a real mechanic; I must be yet another parrot to the chorus of the internet hive-mind and concur with this assessment. To be frank, the 3D effect wasn't terribly impressive most of the time; perhaps it's my bad eye, but the effect was only noticeable on select levels for me.

While the game is perfectly fine, it isn't perfect. The game puts up very little fight; I was never at risk of running out of lives, and the Tanooki suit powerup is so strong that it can trivialize entire levels. There's a lack of theming across the entire game that, when combined with the linearity and difficulty, makes the game fairly forgettable in the grand tapestry of the Mario franchise. This impression is amplified by my playthrough of 64 DS (with analog controls,) which is genuinely one of the best platformers of all time (when it has analog controls.) In a way, I kinda wish the games had been developed for each other's platforms; 3D World showed this style of Mario game could work with 8 directions and thus the DS, while I would've killed to play 64 with Gamecube level graphics and a circle pad. Alas, that is nothing but ahistorical thought experiments.

It is something of a shame this is the first 3DS game I chose to play; it's a good showcase of the system's capabilities, but my feelings towards it is primarily numb positivity. I played it, enjoyed it, I will likely never go out of my way to play it again.