3D Mario games have always exceled at renewing themselves, making its most basic mechanics – jumping – more interesting in the most imaginative ways possible, either by abusing and twisting gravity in Super Mario Galaxy or by prolonging the jump, as in Super Mario Sunshine. The current 2D titles appear to follow a different guideline, basing its existence on familiar elements, while enhancing its main gimmick: the Wii version, for example, focuses on its multiplayer mode and is reasonably successful in that task, adapting only the size of the stages, without modifying their internal logic. The point of New Super Mario Bros. 2, however, is the collection of coins: a poor decision that goes against the intricate level design that the franchise has always cherished.
Mario games rarely have a deep storyline: the Italian plumber always have to save Princess Peach, abducted by Bowser. However, unlike the rest of the industry, the developers also don’t aim to make the gameplay more complex with each entry. After all, a Mario game, above all, needs to be intuitive. In other words, each new title is not intended to be more complicated than the previous one, but is expected to expand, in an innovative way, the use of its primary mechanics through an organic level design.
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 go places that would never be attempted without them, and reward their collection with a 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 the gameplay. The evolution then comes in Super Mario Bros. 3, when is 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 this expansion of the gameplay is rarely observed. The level design here is troubled by the poor implementation of its main gimmick. The goal in the game is to get a lot of gold coins, or, more precisely, one million of them. However, rather than building stages 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 stages that struggle to accommodate a large number of coins – often randomly positioned – while attempting to maintain the franchise’s familiar platform elements and return with old ones, such as the increase in verticality caused by the Racoon Suit. In addition, the generous amount of coins also contradicts the purpose of the various functions correlated to their collection.
The functions 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, whether because of nearby enemies or pits and traps, allow players to adjust the difficulty at their own pleasure 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 is achieved in the following ways: Mario’s basic path to the flag should not contain them, since 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 for a life is irrelevant now, as the thousands of ordinary coins collected throughout the game make the player have more than four hundred lives – no exaggeration – 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, players 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 one – 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, would not make them arrive in a secret area containing the Star Coin. Following the line of coins would 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, discovering 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 stage, 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 also infuriate players, since what they find here is an extremely troubled level design that hardly results in the organic combination of its elements.
Even the act of collecting coins, the supposed focus of the game, is not a wholly developed idea. There is a gauge informing the player how many he has 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.
The new powers of Mario are at least better suited to the goal of collecting coins. 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 generate gold – and finally there is the golden block, the best of them: after being hit several times it fits in 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 about seven seconds to grab it. And since the block generates more coins if the player is running, it still encourages and rewards careless behavior.
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