Now we've come to my favorite Mario game of all time. In the fourth grade, I was invited to a classmate's house for his birthday. He got an SNES for his birthday, and we hooked it up that night and played it until morning. A few years later, I got my own SNES with World, Mario All-Stars, and another game that's on this list. Despite owning the previous entries, this is actually the first Mario entry I've ever beaten.
There has always been an argument over whether Super Mario Bros 3 or Super Mario World is the best 2D Mario game, and to be fair, they both have a lot of similarities. I feel that what makes Mario World Stand out to me more is that despite having almost the same amount of levels, World tends to have multiple paths within their levels that open up the world differently. SMB3 had the stages pretty much blocked out, and needed to be completed in some relative order to reach all stages, but World hid the maps to you, so you couldn't see how many stages there were, and the alternate exits could open up pathways and reach stages you may not have realized was there. This dynamic layout always felt more exciting to me than SMB3's static design, and secondly, the fact that many of these stages could only be opened by finding alternate exits within stages often meant really combing the levels and increase replay value.
SMB3 had some cool alternate mini-games on the stage for fun, but I prefer World's more intriguing secrets like the Block Palaces that would fill in the special blocks, and the Star Warps that lead you to Star Road, and eventually the Special Zone. The secrets in World simply felt more meaningful as you got rewarded with quick travel, extra stages, and unique Yoshi's. My absolute favorite secret is completing the Special Zone and unlocking the Fall version of Super Mario World, which was a nice Easter egg.
Boss battles have a bit more variety to them as well. The Koopa Kids all basically fought the same way in SMB3, but World made them a little unique by at least giving us a few different types of battles. It isn't a huge leap, but I appreciate the effort. Also, the Ghost Houses are some of the coolest stages in this game and brings us back everything cool about the Fortress Stages in SMB3 but making them even more twisted since the Ghost Houses will likely be the player's real first taste of having multiple paths to complete the stage.
The level design overall is pretty solid in this game, which is par the course for the franchise, but World is devoid of some of the more obnoxious stages from previous games. I still shutter when I think about Pipe World from SMB3, whereas World has only a few small handfuls of stages I actively dread. While the removal of the various costumes is a bit sad, I felt the new item mechanic in the game was a bit more functional and less exploitative than SMB3's system, where I could save a few P-Wings to trivialize half the stages in a world I don't like. Though, we probably could have done without Yoshi's Secret Stage that allows you to get infinite 1-UPs. It's not like World is terribly difficult to begin with compared to say... Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels.
Overall, the cool new enemies, better world set-up, cool secrets and tight level design has always made this game one of my favorites. Letting Mario ride around on a dinosaur was also pretty rad, too. Man, the 90s, what a time to be a kid and a gamer.
Last edited by Wolf Kanno; 03-17-2023 at 10:16 PM.
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