SUPER MARIO MAKER 2 Is A Lot of Fun If You Like Creating and Playing Levels from the Community
Super Mario Maker 2 is the successor to the 2015 Wii U game Super Mario Maker. The entire game is about being able to create and share your own Super Mario levels for you, your friends, and even strangers on the internet to enjoy. Now, I cannot compare the two since I never got the chance to play the original, but here are my thoughts on the sequel.
This is a very different game for me. A game based around building a game (more or less) is a fun break from slaying monsters and solving puzzles. There are three main parts to Super Mario Maker 2: Story Mode, Course World, and Course Maker.
The story in Story Mode is not very deep. Mario and his friends have just finished rebuilding Peach’s castle when someone accidentally hits the reset button and undoes all their hard work. That means Mario and friends have to rebuild the castle again from the ground up. You do this by playing premade courses to get coins. Also, once work starts on a section, you’ll have to complete so many courses in order to finish that section. The story is really weak, but it’s not the point of this game. The pre-made courses used are really interesting and can help give you inspiration for your own courses.
You’ll probably spend quite a bit of time in Course World, as that’s the place where you can play other people’s courses. These range wildly in their difficulty and in themes. The nice thing is that you know that they can be finished as creators have to complete the course in order to upload it. This also makes you wonder how crazy skilled some people are at Mario. Some of these courses are ridiculous.
Course Maker is where you’ll probably spend most of your time though. This is where, you guessed it, you get to make courses. The first thing you’ll probably want to do is decide which Super Mario game’s aesthetic you’d like. You can choose from a variety including Super Mario Bros., Super Mario World (my personal favorite), or even New Super Mario Bros. After selecting the aesthetic, the sky is pretty much the limit. I will say though that if you’re using the Switch in Handheld mode, you’ll probably want to get a stylus for creating courses.
I’ve really enjoyed my time with Super Mario Maker 2. I’m not super creative, but it’s still fun to try out ideas when building courses and to see what others in the community can think of. The story is lackluster, but if you’re playing this game for the story, I have many recommendations instead of this one. It is slightly annoying that you need a stylus to really optimize the creating portion of the game, but those are fairly inexpensive, and many people already have one, so it’s not a big deal. My biggest complaint though is that putting items in boxes is not intuitive at all and I could not find any part of the tutorial that actually teaches you to do it. What you have to do is place the block, place the item you want in the block by the block, and then drag the item into the block.
In short, if you love creating courses for Mario games, you’ll love Super Mario Maker 2. If you don’t want to create courses but enjoy Mario platformers, you’ll still have some fun (but maybe look for a good sale). If you’re looking for an intricate story, don’t bother.
