Super Mario Maker (Wii U)
When Youtube was young, I remember being really impressed with the videos where people played custom Mario levels made through fan-made programs. You could always count on Nintendo to put the platforming plumber in quality stages, but in the hands of the masses, there were levels meant to trick and infuriate, complicated levels where objects and enemies moved Mario around automatically while making noises that linked together into music, and creative uses of ideas that the original games only briefly brushed against. However, these fan-made stages weren’t always the easiest to download and play and were still technically illegal. Come 2015 though, and Nintendo decided it was finally time to provide a way to create and share Mario levels with their blessing, Super Mario Maker the official endorsement of democratized Super Mario Bros. level design.
Super Mario Maker provides the player with a level making tool that taps into many different titles from the history of video gaming’s biggest mascot. When you’re ready to build a level, you can do so in four different styles, the game reproducing the aesthetic and many of the features from the original Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros. U. Super Mario Bros. is certainly the simplest with its old school look, and while many enemies and items that appeared in later games are available in this style, the simplicity in the running and jumping from this original game is definitely still in focus. Super Mario Bros. 3 and World have the Leaf and Cape power-ups respectively for flight and Super Mario World throws in the spin jump for breaking block or bouncing across hazards, and the then very recent New Super Mario Bros. U has levels built in its style able to tap into things like wall jumps and midair spins for stalling descents. It is certainly nice that these different game styles aren’t just surface level visuals as you can build stages where Mario’s abilities will be restricted or enhanced in interesting ways, but Super Mario Maker is also very wise in not overly restricting what tools are available to you. Only Super Mario World and New Super Bros. U get to include the rideable dinosaur Yoshi, but Bowser and his son Bowser Jr. are available as bosses you can easily plop into any theme even though Bowser Jr. didn’t even exist at the time most of those games were made.
When making a level though, there’s technically only one requirement: you need to be able to beat it yourself. So long as you can reach the end of level goal, it doesn’t matter how hard or easy the stage or which obstacles you place in it, it is a level that is considered complete. How creative you get in filling that space will influence who wants to play your stage though, and there are even greater considerations than which Mario game you want to borrow the physics and looks from. You can have different level themes like underwater stages or castles with lava pits, you have a range of hazards like spinning fire bars and saws that can travel on rails, you have enemies like the Wiggler caterpillars that turn aggressive if you try to jump on them like you would most enemies or the Magikoopa who teleports around to fire at the player with their magic wand. You don’t just need to add adversity either, as you can place down coins or arrows to help guide players through more advanced levels, you can hide power-ups that let Mario take more hits or give him extra powers like fireballs to scorch enemies or a propeller hat that lets him take one massive jump upward, and with warp pipes you can even take them to an entirely different subarea of your stage for extra room to build in.
All of the mentioned ideas are things that have previously existed in older Mario games, but Super Mario Maker lets you mess with the objects you’re placing down too. You can stack enemies on top of each other for a dangerous monster tower, you can shake them when using the touch screen level editor to sometimes shift them into different forms, and you can even add wings to them or place them in flying clown cars to help them move in ways they couldn’t before. Feed them a Mushroom usually meant to make Mario grow in size and they’ll become huge instead, there being plenty of ways to mix and match your building options to make levels that either feel like they’d be right at home in a normal platformer or complicated and inventive concept levels that only exist thanks to this creation tool’s freedom. Those automatic levels that play themselves or play a tune can be built in this game if you’ve got the know-how, but you can also really toy with the way different objects interact. Players have created fascinating stages like ones where you escort a bouncing star or a turtle enemy, the player and their partner cut off from each other but interacting with objects to help move them along so they too can activate alterations to the player’s path. The ghostly Boo enemy that only follows Mario when he looks away can make for an interesting transport system for some foe that could be tricked into helping the player out, and levels can include hidden keys or red coins necessary for making progress that the player might be asked to solve puzzles to collect.
Super Mario Maker’s potential certainly isn’t limitless, but in the hands of the right players, incredible stages can be built that utilize the common features of Super Mario games to make advanced and eccentric level designs that usually would not be included in a typical line-up of video game levels. Stages that try to evoke recognizable properties like Mission Impossible or Indiana Jones can be thrown together by fans without any legal repercussions and levels that deliberately play with a player’s expectations can find purchase in this canvas without many high standards, and that freedom can be a beautiful thing. In some ways you could say Super Mario Maker has the potential to be the best Mario game ever in the right hands, but at the same time, you can just as easily end up playing rotten levels that exist to waste time or ones with barely any thought put into them at all. You can play any level that’s been successfully beaten by the creator and uploaded, and although it is now not possible to upload new stages, the wide range of stages that did manage to make it up can be experienced in a few different ways.
Super Mario Maker’s Course World lets you go online and look up levels to play. You can find exact levels if you manage to get their code, you can follow creators so potentially you can easily play anything a friend made, or you could just browse areas like the highest rated courses and creators. Super Mario Maker did release a little rough and didn’t always sort the levels well based on their assumed quality based on plays and player ratings, but it also didn’t have Checkpoints initially either and after a range of updates, it does manage to have a pretty solid way of sorting out the highest quality levels for you to look through. Advanced concepts and novelty stage designs were definitely embraced by the community and thus easy enough to find, and there are definitely players out there who put a lot of work into making levels that are enjoyable to overcome even if by the concept of the game you are mostly recycling preexisting Mario content rather than able to truly manufacture a distinct level gimmick. Essentially, while you may not always know what a level will be going in, it’s not like excellent levels are out of reach so digging through low quality slapdash stage designs isn’t a necessity.
Super Mario Maker’s online courses are definitely filled with outright trash levels too though. The deliberately low barrier of entry means little kids can upload a level where you just walk forward and win and there’s no vetting process to remove such hollow level concepts, but if you’re going through picking individual levels you can usually avoid such weak stages. A small layout preview exists in the stage browser that can give you an idea of what you’re getting into and you can see things like how many players have finished a level and if they gave it a star rating after.
Super Mario Maker does offer a way of playing levels that sounds nifty at first though, the 100 Mario Challenge giving you 100 lives to clear a selection of stages plucked essentially at random from all available player-made levels. If you play it on Easy you’ll pretty much get those levels where you can clear them without much opposition, but play on Expert or Super Expert and you will get levels where each one has the potential to clear away all your lives unless you’re exceptionally good at platforming or figuring out challenging puzzles. This is where you’d hope Normal mode would come in with levels that provide a good challenge but aren’t basically designed to be learned through constant failure, but there does seem to be a bit of an issue in how the game determines a stage’s difficulty. Seemingly, it ties into how often a stage has been cleared and how often players die in them, which can lead to Normal mode getting populated with levels where just a bunch of enemies drop in near you to start a stage but there’s not much more going on than that. You might run into automatic levels that people accidentally died in because they couldn’t read the level’s name in a foreign language even though thankfully most creators do try and pick a relevant name for the level you’re about to enter. The bright side is you can skip levels meaning you’re never trapped and forced to complete a terrible level, but it is a shame you need to be the one to sort things out when you’re just looking for a quick and easy way to jump right into some levels. The 100 Mario Challenge ends up too uneven, less likely to uncover hidden gems and more likely to throw the rough stones of the Mario Maker world at you to make you happy to see when something is merely decent.
There are some more professionally designed levels to play as well though. The 10 Mario Challenge is made up of sample courses meant to acclimate you to what might be found in an online course, although them being merely samples also means they’re more concept showcases than full-fledged stages. There are official course making profiles to be found in Course World as well, some still a bit gimmicky like some made supposedly by Bowser that aim to torment the player a bit with their difficulty, but the Event Courses are perhaps the highlight. In the normal Super Mario Bros. level format there are Mystery Mushrooms you can unlock that will make Mario look like various characters. Some are other characters from his series, others are from different video games, but the Event Courses can provide the wildest playable characters, from Hello Kitty to the Japanese metal band BABYMETAL to even beloved claymation character Shaun the Sheep. While other Mystery Mushroom costumes are random unlockables from 100 Mario Challenge for the most part, you need to clear the Event Courses for these stranger ones, and the Event Courses are often interesting marriages of showcasing the visiting franchise and providing a solid Mario level. For example, the Pokémon themed stage has you pick which of three of the monsters you turn into and then face an obstacle course matching their associated element. Some of the Event Courses are just there to be tough too, coming from real in-person contests so you’ll definitely find some solid skill tests without having to try your luck in Course World. It’s thankfully not difficult to find quality Super Mario Maker stages during an active search then, the randomly thrown together 100 Mario Challenge ill-handled but not some necessary element to playing intriguing and entertaining player-made content.
THE VERDICT: Super Mario Maker’s level creator is robust and varied, providing excellent tools from already high quality games that can make for entertaining stage designs before you even dabble in the more inventive or artistic ways of utilizing your tools. The touch screen interface makes it easy to put together your own creations, and Course World is well sorted to put the best levels forward so you can find something enjoyable even if you don’t have an urge to create. 100 Mario Challenge unfortunately can’t seem to weigh a level’s difficulty well making it always messy to play, but while you’ll undoubtedly come across some levels you’ll wish you hadn’t played, the tools here ensure there are plenty of wonderful ones that will make wading through those weaker ones worth it.
And so, I give Super Mario Maker for Wii U…
A GREAT rating. It can get a bit rough at times when the 100 Mario Maker takes you to yet another player’s level where they just copied the layout of the first level from Super Mario Bros., but the tools and platform in Super Mario Maker are still too strong to be weighed down by the inevitable low points. The platforming is as smooth as the games Super Mario Maker pulls its tools and themes from meaning they are entertaining to play when placed in a reasonably challenging arrangement but they can go so much further or evoke such enchanting themes in the hands of the right creators that it definitely realizes the idea of fan-made Mario levels well. For the most part, 100 Mario Challenge is the only place you’re going to run into those levels without any charm or much thought put into them, and even then the random nature means you can be thrown some good ones so it’s not a total loss to try. This game’s sequel already rectified many of the obvious problems funnily enough, Super Mario Maker 2 adding a level tag system that means you can avoid things like levels that complete themselves automatically after their novelty wears off. Course World here in Super Mario Maker isn’t perfect but it’s not a lost cause thanks to it at least having a good sense for how to weigh rankings, so while a smarter approach to determining stage difficulty for the 100 Mario Challenge would make that random grab bag mode more fun, you are given both a way to construct your own stages that is intuitive and full of potential and a way to see how others managed to make some impressive creations.
Super Mario Maker will unfortunately go entirely offline come April of 2024, and already part of the game’s charm was lost when you could no longer add new levels to Course World for others to play. Super Mario Maker 2 is such a thorough attempt to basically provide the same thing but with many more features that not much was left behind in this Wii U title though, things like the Mystery Mushroom not making the jump but it was mostly just a means of inspiring creators to use certain level themes rather than something with a unique gameplay mechanic. Super Mario Maker will still technically be entertaining even after online functions cease even if you won’t really have a reliable source for new stages, and perhaps something like QR codes that could port in a level without an internet connection could have ensured immortality for every stage design. There’s not much reason to pick it up due to its unfortunate destiny, but that doesn’t change the fact that inherently, Super Mario Maker provides an excellent level creating tool with a wealth of options for how you can put together entertaining levels, the ample options able to certainly stack up in quality to the Mario games they came from and exciting to get your hands on because they worked so well back when they were part of such excellent titles.