Month of Mario: Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis (DS)

In the original Mario vs. Donkey Kong, the big gorilla is driven mad by his desire to own the wind-up Mini Mario toys and causes trouble by stealing them from the factory. However, it seems he wasn’t the only person mad about Mini Marios, the game designers embracing the toys more than the title characters across multiple follow-up entries. Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis is the first game that started to explore how the Mini Marios can be used in puzzle solving stages, but even with the wide range of ideas featured in it, it still feels strange this particular game concept would be returned to again and again in future entries.

Mini mania seems to be quite common in the world of Mario, Mario’s toy company having such success with his self-styled wind-up toys he’s chosen to create a Super Mini Mario World where toys of his other friends are also available. Donkey Kong shows up with good intentions initially, quickly pleased to see there are even Mini Donkey Kong toys available, but then a face from his past shows up and throws things out of whack. Pauline, the lady he kidnapped all the way back in the original Donkey Kong arcade game, is here to help with the theme park’s grand opening, DK quickly charmed by her once again and looking to earn her favor by presenting a Mini Donkey Kong. When Pauline accidentally snubs him by showing a preference for Mini Mario toys though, DK captures Pauline and scales an enormous tower. While Mario’s been a capable hero in the past, it seems he’s leaving conquering this tower in his own amusement park up to the Mini Mario toys, Mario presumably the one setting them into motion as they begin their effort to climb a tower filled with dangers.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis is a puzzle platformer, but the degree of control you have over the Mini Marios is deliberately limited. Once you tap them on the touchscreen, they’ll automatically begin walking forward, the player clearing levels by successfully guiding the little toys to the stage exit. However, there are plenty of obstacles, enemies, and other systems in the path of reaching that end goal, it becoming important to use all the minis in a stage strategically to avoid any being broken along the way. Minis are rather fragile things, breaking if they fall from too high and touching an enemy or a flame will wipe them out instantly, but if you are too afraid for the marching toys’ safety, you can always tap them again to make them come to a stop. Swipe the stylus across them right or left and they’ll move in that direction, swipe upwards to make them leap, and on occasion even swipe down to have them travel through pipes. Technically you do have a good degree of control over the minis should you wish to exert it, but should you play it too safe, you’ll fail to get decent star ratings on levels.

When a level is finished, you’ll be judged based on your score, this tied to things like how quickly the level was completed, how many coins you might have grabbed with the minis in it, and if all the Mini Marios survived. However, to earn a decent star rating, you’ll also need to engage with a few trickier elements. If you have all of the minis in a level enter the exit door in quick succession, you’ll get a chain bonus, this even more valuable if the level has a gold Mini Mario and it enters at the end of the chain. A card with one of the letters in MINI MARIO is found in the level to serve as an extra task, although its purpose is more for unlocking a minigame, but the main decider on whether you get a silver or gold star will often be the Nonstop bonus. A huge surge of points is granted at the end of a level should you never bring a Mini Mario to a stop once it starts marching. Luckily, the game won’t hold it against you if a Mini Mario comes to a stop because of special mechanics such as waiting on a moving platform to come into place or how exiting a pipe often leaves them standing still, and it can even be a strategic trick to bring a mini to a halt this way. However, if you want to earn the 40 silver and 40 gold stars needed to unlock a pair of hidden boss fights, you’ll need to engage with this Nonstop bonus and quickly learn its problems. Since you’re swiping the minis often to change their direction or make them jump, it’s not unheard of for the game to misread your intent and register it instead as you telling them to stop. There’s no recourse if it does besides to try the stage again, an aggravating element in some of the game’s more complicated later levels if you do care for earning those stars. Some stages can leave you swiping them back and forth to buy time as you wait out a nearby enemy’s cycles as well, the waiting game made into a bit more of a chore if you do pursue this technically optional element of the adventure.

If you focus in solely on clearing stages though, Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis actually concocts a wide range of ideas on how to jeopardize the safety of the little wind-ups toys or provide them interesting mechanics to work with. Magnetized flooring for example will allow them to walk on ceilings and walls. Switches will make barriers or platforms of the matching colors appear or disappear so minis in different areas of the level can clear the path for others. Mini Marios can sometimes turn the tables on the many Donkey Kong toys obstructing their adventure, grabbing hammers or Fire Flowers to attack the foes in their path. Other times though, a toy may help, the minis able to ride atop some of their enemies or even receive a lift to higher places thanks to a Donkey Kong toy tossing them around. One recurring element are blocks you can tap to remove or place in set locations, these able to create or eliminate walls and flooring based on what will help or hurt you at the time, but later on these same blocks can grant you a bomb or fire to use to destroy the environment instead. There are eight floors with nine regular levels each, each floor focusing on a different theme like a tropical island or spooky attic, but while the game whips out so many elements to change up the play, it doesn’t seem to mix them as much as you’d expect. Magnet floors are unique to the levels found on Floor 4 for example, the only area they can interact being the Construction Zone where you can make your own levels, and even then you need to unlock Special Kit 3 to do so. In the main adventure, certain objects will never interact with each other, which in turn means a floor often needs to spend its time introducing and acclimating you to something before it can start to really test it out, but by then you’re moving along to something new. You certainly can’t say the entire game plays similarly at least as these new elements do ask you to approach managing minis differently, although the level of interest in the star system you have may either make it rather easy as you can just move minis when it’s convenient or you’re left doing the constant management of their movement that can grow a bit tedious or annoying.

To cap off each floor, there are two new breaks from the normal mini managing formula featured. One is your reward for finding those cards with the letters spelling out MINI MARIO, this manifesting as a whack-a-mole style minigame where Shy Guy toys pop out of pipes and you need to tap them with your stylus while avoiding Bob-ombs. No matter the floor, you only need to break 25 Shy Guys and even at its hardest you still don’t need to be too fast, it not exactly a great reward for deviating within a stage to grab the cards. The floor’s boss fight though is both meaningfully different from regular play and much tougher. A showdown with Donkey Kong caps off each floor, the ape finding many weird ways to fight you. Whether he’s raining bananas, spiked balls, or fire down on you from above, to beat DK you need to utilize special Mini Mario firing cannons that utilize the minis you had saved across the floor. You must aim the cannon properly, it either sliding left to right or turning like a dial via the touch screen. To hurt DK involves either hitting him dead on or knocking objects into him, but the fragility of the Mini Marios means it is very easy to break them by hitting anything else, the boss arenas often having a few fair hazards in play to make it pretty tough to get through a fight unscathed. You usually get around 30 minis per floor so you have strong reserves, but the star system appears here and rates you mostly on how few you lose in the fight, this technically being harder to achieve than a regular stage but also a great way of enhancing the fight since you take the incoming threats much more seriously when a single mini’s destruction might send you over into silver territory.

THE VERDICT: Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis utilizes plenty of creative ideas to test its touch screen controlled toys even if it seems unable to mix them well. The star rating system does at times strain the specific controls chosen for guiding the Mini Marios and yet some puzzles end up all too easy if you ignore the stars. You’ll definitely find a range of stages that try to concoct challenging arrangements that still require some thought and planning to pull off no matter how you approach the adventure, but even looking past the occasional touchiness of the touch screen controls, it feels like Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis can’t bring in the brain busting puzzles because it’s too busy introducing ideas rather than iterating on the ones you previously learned.

And so, I give Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis for Nintendo DS…

An OKAY rating. The presence of Special Kit 3 over in the Construction Zone is baffling as it seems to imply Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis could happily mix its elements more often, and yet it chooses not to. While it is nice for floors to have thematic elements to give them a specific direction, it also feels like strong ideas are discarded so that they can instead be preserved as the defining pieces of levels you will only replay if you want to go back for better star ratings. The star rating system, despite its faults with the Nonstop bonus rubbing up against the touch-based controls, is still a smart idea for adding depth to the levels since otherwise many could be approached a bit too leisurely. Keeping the toys moving leads to you taking certain obstacles and enemies more seriously even if level design can sometimes lead to wait periods that leave you little to do. Despite the basic design of the Shy Guy breaking minigame, it and the battle with Donkey Kong are a nice change of pace to finish off a floor so the mini herding doesn’t get too old, and while the puzzle design doesn’t often impress with anything too outlandish, it is nice that it is able to keep evolving and avoid wearing out its welcome through constant new pursuits. There are a few ideas already like crumbling floors and the crab toys that mean even a slower player has to keep things moving at times, but it’s likely ideas like the colored switches feel closer to how the game should have iterated. Color switches eventually lead to levels where you do need to activate them at the right time or risk having to backtrack and try again, so a mix of strategic manipulation of objects with timed pressures like the crumbling floors may have been key to keeping Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis consistently challenging on top of frequently novel.

It’s actually not too much of a surprise Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis would receive at least one follow-up, this a solid start for a style of play and one the designers likely wanted a second crack at to tool it into something cleaner and better able to mix together its best ideas. They would perhaps get a bit too out of control over time, there are five 2D Mini Mario puzzlers that look rather similar despite the new ideas introduced and refined, this initial experiment with the format leading to a series that got a little out of hand. The many unique dangers and mechanics do show there is a lot that can be done with the idea though, Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis brimming with creativity that it just needed to better integrate to take it to the next level.