There are very few single entries in the pantheon of game franchises which can claim to bring sweeping, long-lasting changes to the franchise. This feat is even more impressive in a storied franchise such as Mario.
That is why Super Mario Bros 3 is a classic retro game that has stood the test of time and brought mechanics and modifications to the series that we still feel the echoes of more than two decades later. The complete formula for the Mario series was truly changed by Super Mario Bros 3 and influenced every 2D platform entry in the series after it.
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There are several factors why individuals will always point to Super Mario Brothers 3 as one of the greatest video games of all-time classics. I mean, the easiest things to point to when you look at it are things like how it told you that it was a story that was constantly moving forward through the graphics through the way they had these world maps.
It's a game that my family can play with me when they don't play a lot of games, and they still have a lot of fun too. Gamers who have been playing games all their lives can also participate and just have a blast. Super Mario Brothers 3 was the first real Super Mario Brothers sequel that we were able to play here. It takes everything that made the original Mario Brothers so special and it just blows it up and cranks it all the way up to 11. Super Mario Brothers 3 is exactly what you want to see in a sequel.
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The first time Miyamoto and his team looked at the game that defined the genre of platforming and built something completely new from scratch was Super Mario Brothers 3, which would hopefully be a worthy sequel to the original and I think they were able to improve on it. In virtually every way, they were able to improve on perfection.
It was the first game I ever played in which you could only explore level by running around to find secrets that do things like that, but then you could just take to the skies as well. The levels were so much bigger than you thought they were. Now they seemed little, but every time you hit your level, it was like so much to explore back then. The level is amazing, it's simple level design that is definitely important to what makes the game so great. You see exactly what you need to do and, depending on how difficult you want to make it for yourself, you can choose to go one route or another.
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You started in this grass area, you walked through the desert, you ended up in the ocean for a little while, and you finally found a land of giants. In Super Mario Brothers 3, the most unexpected level of all the world I'd say is the giant world, there are giant versions of all the enemies, and all the question mark blocks are enormous, and you have to figure out how to kill all the stuff you've been jumping throughout the game. You know, they were all a lot smaller than you or your size, and now they're four times as big as you. It seems to be such a simple idea, but it's just as fun as seeing something unique and familiar in a slightly different way.
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All the new suits, like the hammer suit, allow you to dress up as enemies that we had to be Frog Mario, which was kind of not so great on land, but great to use underwater. There's a raccoon suit on the game cover, so I love it! It's one of my favorite pictures of Mario you put on, you get cute little ears, you get a little tail, Mario Wiggles a little bit. Of course, you can fly when you run, and then there is, of course, the Tanooki suit that allows you to turn into a stone.
This game was just full of imagination and you never knew what Mario was going to turn into next in every single level in every single world and what obstacles you were going to face. It's like you were really simply told that you were on this great quest to save all these kingdoms from the Koopalings, and then rescue a princess again. Traditionally, just the control in Super Mario games, only playing the game is one of the big selling factors and new control features have been added here. Like the ability to slide down hills, there's no problem you're trying to solve a simple action such as that there's no conflict, you're just sliding down a hill and too few games do that too few games elicit joy just by controlling your character.
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The original Mario Brothers certainly had secrets when you could go above level 1-and find the warp zone somehow and that felt really cool, but Mario 3 took those secrets and really cranked it up. It was the first game I could remember playing as a kid where I just didn't know what to expect and didn't know what the next corner was going to be. You can find warp whistles that allow you to skip through different levels of the game and you can skip straight to the final world if you manage to find warp whistles, and that felt really special. In a video game, we've never really seen anything like that before, and certainly we've never seen anything like that before in a Mario game, and that influence is still being felt on Mario.
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There's just so much greatness in it, and just so much that you discover the more you play it, that you didn't discover it when you first experienced it, at least when I was a kid, or when you're a teenager, even when you're an adult, you find all these little quirks. At Super Mario Brothers 3 look at this cartridge, no game I played in my whole life got so much love it's just completely destroyed by so much love or maybe a little bit of anger because Super Mario Brothers 3 could get really hard.
There's a big chip in this, but it was such a great game that I don't know anyone who didn't play it flying around Nintendo. I mean, Nintendo was doing things that were leaps and bounds ahead of some of their rivals, you know, coming up with these really original ideas and then gracefully walking away from them, and that's still something the Mario series is doing to this day. But it all began, it feels like I was really just a kid from that pivotal third chapter when Super Mario Brothers 3 came out, then it blew my mind and it still blows my mind 25 years later today, and that's why Super Mario Brothers 3 is so special.