Though it may borrow the branding of a known sub-franchise, 3D Land can't compare to a specific brand of Nintendo weirdness.
The title "Super Mario 3D Land" might be a bit misleading; sure, the game stars Mario, exists on a platform capable of displaying 3D graphics, and presumably features land of some sort, but this new portable adventure in The Mushroom Kingdom really doesn't have much in common with the Land-branded titles of the past. 3D Land is still in capable hands, though, with the talented folks of Nintendo EAD Tokyo heading up development -- specifically, the uber-talented team behind the Super Mario Galaxy series. Those who've demoed the game at trade shows can tell you Mario's newest portable outing stands as a tightly-designed mashup of his greatest moments over the past 25 years, with some new elements thrown in to take advantage of the hardware.
Despite 3D Land's apparent quality, one important element implied by its title seems to be missing: the balls-out game-changing weirdness of Nintendo Research & Development 1 -- now known as SPD Group No. 1 -- the in-house development studio responsible for Super Mario Land, Wario Land, WarioWare, Rhythm Heaven, and many other Nintendo classics. While their games didn't take an explicitly revolutionary tack from the very beginning, subverting expectations eventually became the studio's M.O., all thanks to the creative minds of directors like Hiroji Kiyotuke (Super Mario Land 2 and 3), Takehiko Hosokawa (Wario Land 2 and 3), and Hirofumi Matsuoka (Wario Land 4 and the original WarioWare.
Of course, the creative team of Super Mario 3D Land aren't exactly second-stringers at Nintendo; Super Mario Galaxy and Sunshine director (and longtime Nintendo employee) Yoshiaki Koizumi acted as producer during development, while 3D Land director Koichi Hayashida served the same role he held on Mario Galaxy 2. 3D Land takes the same approach as the Galaxy series, dropping the sprawling worlds of Sunshine for more compact and tightly-focused challenges. And to go along with their back-to-basics approach, the power-ups of 3D Land actually empower Mario, rather than give him a limited set of abilities needed to clear a specific area tailored for the use of said abilities, as was the case with the spring, bee, and boo suits of Galaxy. The game even retains the antiquated lives system, an expected Mario trope that stopped making sense with the advent of battery-powered backup.
This attachment to tradition isn't necessarily a bad thing, and those who've played 3D Land can tell you that Nintendo clearly knows what they're doing. But jump back in time 20 years, and you'll see that the Land franchise once existed as a sandbox for crazy ideas -- not a place for traditional Mario elements to coalesce. The first Mario Land stood more of a proof of concept than anything; while the game dramatically simplified Mario's antics, it also showed that a 2D side-scroller could be made on Nintendo's blurry green portable -- and besides, in a world with single-screen launch games like Alleyway and Baseball, it didn't take much to impress us.
With three years and a great deal of Game Boy mastery behind them, R&D1 returned to the Mario series in 1992 with Super Mario Land 2 -- and that's where things started getting weird. While Mario always toured fantastical worlds, this beefed-up Mario Land sequel brimmed over with a sense of madcap energy not found in the main series. Land 2 marks Mario's most varied adventure to date, and sends our chubby hero to outer space, inside of a giant turtle, and through the inner workings of a colossal Mario statue; and within each of these levels, Mario encounters a legion of oddball enemies that haven't been seen before or since. Wario makes his first appearance in Land 2, as does R&D1's first inklings of frustration over certain sacred cows; while lives exist in the game, saving up 999 coins -- admittedly, not the simplest of tasks -- gives Mario the opportunity to play a slot machine with 99 lives as the ultimate reward. Of course, savvy gamers could always savescum the system, transforming lives into the moot point R&D1 would soon adopt as their design philosophy.
With Mario Land's second sequel, all bets were off; even though the game still carries the subtitle of "Super Mario Land 3," Wario takes center stage, and with much different aims than those of Mario. While nearly 20 years of Wario may have dulled his initial edginess, let's not forget that having such a piggish and greedy (though still lovable in his own right) main character was an entirely new approach for the normally family-friendly Nintendo. After all, 8-bit heroes usually had honorable goals; Wario only wants to be filthy rich. And Wario Land also marks the point where R&D1 started really thinking about the unspoken "rules" of video games; here, they began to make baby steps to change them. Breaking one of gaming's cardinal rules, Wario didn't suffer damage simply by touching enemies -- the ones not carrying sharp things, anyway -- he just knocked them the hell over.
Wario Land 2 would feature the greatest shift a platformer had seen to date; within the game, the concept of lives is completely abolished in favor of enemy attacks changing Wario's form; the tubby protagonist can inflate, grow fatter, get squished, become undead, and even get drunk (cleverly localized as "crazy Wario") in order to reach normally unnavigable areas. This idea would later be expanded in Wario Land 3, an epic and sprawling expansion of the concepts featured in the previous game, which added a day and night cycle, as well as levels that required revisiting, Metroid-style, to unlock new areas and treasures with recently-gained abilities. And while this revolutionary take on the platformer could have been refined even further on the Game Boy Advance with Wario Land 4, R&D1 instead decided to dial back a bit and instead present a small and refined set of levels with a unique mechanic: after Wario reaches the end of the level, he's forced to dash back to the beginning within a certain time limit -- and with his previously-trodden path having changed greatly in the interim.
In retrospect, it's not surprising that R&D1 grew tired of constantly trying to reinvent the 2D platformer; their next game would borrow the odd visuals and bizarre sampled music of Wario Land 4, but put them to use in a style of gaming boiled down to its most basic components -- and in an era when video game controls were growing increasingly complex. 2003's WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgame$ features a rapid-fire succession of insane tasks that employ the control pad and a single button at most; and while further installments of this series would eventually add twists to the formula, the franchise's essential simplicity always remained. The development team would eventually move on to the Rhythm Heaven series, which features what can best be described as long-form Wario Ware mini-games, though set to music and only requiring players to hit a single button. Ultimately, Rhythm Heaven is the logical conclusion to R&D1's unspoken mission statement; through years of work, the team -- though it's seen key creative figures come and go -- has been able to shake all but the most essential elements of gaming, while still being able to deliver a thoroughly engaging experience.
In a sense, while R&D1 constantly sought to reinvent the wheel, EAD -- specifically, the relatively new Galaxy team -- instead tries to make a better wheel. Neither approach is superior, as they both yield interesting and highly playable results, but those expecting the experimentation synonymous with "Land" aren't going to find it with Mario's newest 3DS game -- in fact, you're not even going to find it in the Wario series these days. Thankfully, the 3DS eShop has the potential to offer past Land-branded games through the power of emulation, so, in a perfect world, both EAD and R&D1's take on the platformer can peacefully exist, side-by-side on the same system. Still, it's easy to get wistful for a time when picking up a seemingly standard Nintendo game could result in the sense of surprise once spearheaded by the Land franchise.
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