At what point does endless nostalgia become tiring? In the Mario universe, the answer is "seemingly never," because, goddammit, Super Mario 3D Land is still so unbelievable. And especially in the face of the sometimes-rehash-y-feeling New Super Mario Bros. series and its gargantuan sales, not merely delivering a simple retread of past glories is in its own way a revelation.
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. After the wonder and majesty of Super Mario Galaxy, I felt like Super Mario Galaxy 2 was going to be a boring, uninteresting "victory lap" of sorts for the Italian plumber. Then that game came and knocked my socks off completely. Or to go a little further back, my interest in New Super Mario Bros. Wii was pretty much nonexistent, if only because it seemed like a simple upgrade to the original on the DS. Instead it was as raucous and important a multiplayer game as they come, and a staple of my Wii diet. The lesson should have been clear: never doubt the plumber.
But can you blame me? Nintendo has been tossing around the same Mario iconography for over a decade now: a cheery, surreal landscape of fire flowers and tunnels that still make their same NES "boop boop" sounds, of stolen princesses and Bowser and airships and on and on. The more cynical might yearn for a change to that iconography, especially in the face of Galaxy's Lumas and gravity-swapping.
Here's the rub, though: that iconography is a simple platform for Nintendo to attach their games to. Each Mario game, despite the endless in-jokes and the call-backs and the signifiers, are as defiantly their own thing as any other game in any other series, and while it can be easy to lose sight of that, a game like Super Mario 3D Land puts everything important back in focus.
This newest entry and its classic Gameboy-recalling name understand video game design principles on a level that is seemingly lost on a generation of developers. For starters, few games in modern history are as inextricable with the hardware upon which it has been released as SM3DL. On a very direct level, yes, this is a game that takes advantage of 3DS features like StreetPass and SpotPass, and signing up for the SpotPass service allows the game's producers (like Yoshiaki Koizumi, a genius in his own right) to send messages to the players. But the game's cohesive nature really comes together in two ways: the first one new-fangled, and the second a trait inherent to portable video games.
It's right there in the title: Super Mario 3D Land is all about 3D, and in the same way that Skyward Sword legitimized motion controls in one fell swoop, so too does Mario legitimize 3D. This isn't to say that SM3DL's approach to 3D is necessarily the way that all developers have to approach the form in all future 3DS games, but when 3D is as inextricable to the process of running and jumping in a 3D space as SM3DL is, there's a good chance that a game that happens to not do it as well as it has been here will be straight-up vilified. Here, Mario's jumping in 3D space has never been as sharp and defined: judging precise distances and making accurate jumps is better than it ever has been before, and handily solves the problem that the jump to 3D has created for the Mario series since Mario 64 – it finally feels just as natural as it did on the NES, and that's as big a feat as it comes.
The 3D is applied in a particularly Nintendo-y fashion elsewhere, though. Given the challenge of persuading the populace of 3D's necessity, Nintendo has very liberally spiced the game with 3D elements, with Escherian puzzle boxes, gigantic freefalls and telescopes that allow the player to see into the distance. It's a game positively rotten with 3D-ness, and even if every game doesn't reach that level of integration, it was absolutely necessary for Nintendo's mascot to plant his metaphorical flag there first, if people were to buy into the system (and obviously, that strategy has worked).
The other aspect of the game, though, and perhaps the one that I was even more impressed about was the game's commitment to a handheld development form. The levels are short bursts of pure creativity, suitable for portable play. It's not like Mario's turned into Angry Birds or anything like that, but the game does prove to be a true, 3D portable Mario title, and while it might look like a Galaxy game, it plays like a 3D NES game. In fact, with the Tanooki suit making its return, this feels like the first 3D Mario game to truly tackle the design blueprint laid down by Super Mario 3, and if doesn't quite reach those highs, it's only because of twenty years of excellence in between to temper our expectations.
Like Mario 3, though, the game offers short bursts of pure creativity, dazzling the player in a flurry of imagination from some of the most brilliant level designers in the industry. Right when a level might feel safe or pedestrian, a new twist or a new gimmick is thrown at the player. That's always been the Mario way, though: you're never allowed to become bored, and concerns about iconography disappear into the background of the amazing gameplay. It's always been a simple template, the Mario formula: moreso than Peach, moreso than Bowser, moreso than Mario himself, the real star has always been the levels and their ingenious design, and that's as true here as it ever has been.
I mean, Super Mario 3D Land had a lot to prove, and the fact that it did prove those things (the relevance of 3D, the ability to make a console-quality Mario game on a handheld) is a testament to the skill of Nintendo. It might not feel like quite the revolution that past Mario titles have been (remember that between 1985 and 1991, Mario had already progressed from his first platforming game to the masterful Super Mario World), but when this level of quality is achieved, what use is there complaining about how it got that way? When Nintendo continues to expand the limits of the possibilities of that running and jumping formula, nearly 30 years after Mario's inception, that deserves as many accolades as can be thrown at that chubby plumber's feet.