As I understand it, each classic Super Mario platformer has these as their core themes:
SMB1: Alice in Wonderland
SMB2: Masks (from Fuji TV's Yume Koujou event)
SMB3: Japanese mythology
SMW: Dinosaurs
SML1: Ancient civilisations
SML2: Uhhhhhhh…… every wacky idea they had left??
I feel like all the sequels - 2, 3, and World - succeed at feeling like "a big adventure", but 3 and World both do so on a macro level, with the map screen and short one-note levels, whereas 2 is more "episodic", where each level is an adventure in miniature.
Everyone talks about SMB3, but to me Doki Doki Panic is where Nintendo starts to break out the memorable platformer level designs… riding on a bird through 6-2, climbing up through a hollow tree in 5-3… even the little shortcuts in 1-1 and 3-1…
Replaying Super Mario Bros. 3 for the first time in awhile, and noticing how often, even more than World or anything since, it presents little micro-puzzles involving hitting blocks with shells, an interaction they were right to be proud of.
The fascination with grounded blocks feels like a delicious subversion of what SMB1's blocks fundamentally were, and I wonder if the tail swipe attack was added explicitly to continue exploring that design space after programming the shells…
TRIVIA CORNER
The ?-marks on the blocks in SMB3 animate by sliding to the right. But on the airship levels, they do not. Why?
Actually, each airship is flying backwards at the same speed as the ?-mark, so it only appears to be motionless.
This has been another TRIVIA CORNER.
I'm reminded, funnily enough, of Super Mario Bros. 3, and how its one "big thing" (which it probably didn't invent but did popularise) was taking the arcade-like platformer and adding an RPG-like map screen with "inventory" and multiple paths, becoming an "adventure-platformer".
