Month of Mario: Mario Sports Superstars (3DS)

While Mario Sports Superstars isn’t Nintendo’s first attempt at creating a package of sports games starring Mario and friends, it is the odder one. Mario Sports Mix on the Wii was a bundle of four sports, dodgeball and volleyball reasonable inclusions since they likely wouldn’t sell well as standalone games, hockey a bit more debatable, but they could all ride on the more broadly popular basketball that rounded out the package. Mario Sports Superstars on the other hand features five sports in total, including four that have already received standalone entries of good quality. The new sport introduced here is oddly enough horse racing, and there must have been little faith in it if it needed to be buoyed by golf, soccer, tennis, and baseball all at once. However, these aren’t the sports as they were featured in other Mario sports titles, their representation here boiled down to such bare essentials that the horse racing actually feels like it’s being held back by its more popular company.

Mario Sports Superstars features 18 recognizable Mario series regulars as playable athletes across all of the sports, two of them unlockable and a few of them somewhat amusing choices. While Mario, Princess Peach, Bowser, and Donkey Kong are practically expected, Boo the ghost is here despite lacking many of the expected parts for riding horses and sliding into bases, and both Baby Mario and Baby Luigi are present to possibly put everyone to shame if they manage to outgolf them. Most characters will have similar boosts across all the sports, Yoshi the dinosaur always a bit speedy and Wario packing more power where its relevant, but each player can be made into a Star Player by clearing the final tournament for that sport so they’re a bit more capable. There won’t really be much to do with that character beyond multiplayer competitions if you clear the tournament as them, but it is technically a goal to shoot for in a game in desperate need of them. Most every sport on offer just features a small arrangement of tournaments in the most basic arenas, the no frill tourneys sometimes joined by ring games where you try to hit or move through rings that provide more points based on their size and if you pass through multiple at once. The optional modes can often be cleared fairly quick with ring challenges offering very few variations, so instead you’re left with standard sports play to try and carry the day.

Soccer is the first sport presented in Mario Sports Superstars’s menu and it is unfortunately the worst one on offer. At first, it may seem like standard 11 vs. 11 association football, although only two of the game’s playable athletes can be on your team. The rest of the spots will be filled in by more generic enemies and allies from the Mario series, Shy Guys, Goombas, Koopas and the like joined by some oddly specific iterations like Stone Spikes and Yellow Flying Squirrel Toads. There isn’t much unusual about the soccer play beyond the characters involved sometimes being dinosaurs or apes, but after the ball is in play for a while, a special shot can be pulled off by a team captain, these sometimes able to force a goalie back and earn you a point but at other times they’re just a way to help aim a kick a bit more reliably. If this was just standard soccer with that little bit of flair, it could be tolerable, but as you make your way through the four cups that get steadily harder, you’ll notice something strange about how both you and AI opponents play. Mario Sports Superstars is pretty awful at reading the intent of a pass, even the game’s hardest computer controlled opponents routinely just sending it to one of your team’s players by accident without you needing to work to intercept it. Already it’s surprisingly easy to steal a ball, running out in front of a player more reliable than the actual stealing maneuvers, but both sides will frequently end up accidentally handing off the ball, and the game does not account for ball position well either. Normally the game will try and swap you to a player near the ball if you’re not in possession, but sometimes even when trying to shift control to a nearby player, the game will keep selecting pretty much any player but the one that could likely steal possession in an instant if you were in control. Soccer just feels poorly programmed as a result, too often bogged down by players looking like amateurs as they mess up passes or can’t intercept an easy target.

Baseball is a touch better in that it’s consistent but unfortunately very shallow. Again your teams are filled out in a similar manner with two captains and a team of less notable minions, and the degree of control you have of them during fielding is yours to decide on even though it doesn’t feel like automatic or manual control really vary in how effective you’ll be. Instead, almost all the focus is on pitching and batting, and yet both are far too straightforward. At bat, a large indicator will mark the area within the strike zone your bat will hit with decent power. The pitches are fairly slow meaning it is usually easy to see if they’re coming for the strike zone, and while you can move your batting indicator right or left a bit if you do want to nail something that’s almost a Ball rather than a Strike, you can probably win games just by going for ones that hit the bright obvious red indicated area. There is no winding up for batting, and while you can bunt, most of the time you just need to swing at the right moment and you’ll send the ball flying. This does mean games of baseball often have a lot of hits, but that’s also because the pitcher isn’t given much room to overcome the batter’s big visibility advantage. Different pitchers may be able to throw curveballs and sliders, but having the hit area be so obviously indicated means players often can tell in time if the incoming ball is fair game so it can often feel futile to try and get tricky. The pitcher also has to stop an indicator on a wheel to pitch with optimal strength and positioning, this getting harder as your pitcher gets tired, but the batter isn’t going to have a tougher time so it just ends up feeling like your praying the foe won’t hit rather than it being a bit of interplay between batter and pitcher.

Luckily, we move into the sports that are essentially borrowing mechanics from other 3DS Mario sports games next with tennis. Very much a copy of what was seen in Mario Tennis Open, Mario Sports Superstars’s take on the sport utilizes the hit indicator system where sometimes a spot on the court will be marked and if you utilize the right hit type while standing on it, it will move in more exaggerated manners. A power shot might have a stronger hook, a drop shot will drop even closer to the net so it’s harder to reach in time, and the Ultra Smash can be almost impossible to counter due to the speed and height of the ball after its first bounce. At first, using the indicators will absolutely destroy the computer players in the tournaments, but as you near the tougher cups, they’ll be better at countering the special hits and start using them against you better as well. The final tournament can be rather tense as you keep hoping you don’t accidentally set up an indicator or struggle to keep returning enhanced shots, trying to find the moment you can use one to increase your chances of winning a volley. The generic stadiums and lack of any strong gimmickry can almost make it feel like a demo for Mario Tennis Open rather than something worthy of much attention, but it does at least stand out as perhaps the best executed sport simply because it wasn’t messed with too much in its adaptation here.

Golf almost got to earn similar praise to tennis by borrowing ideas from Mario Golf: World Tour, but it also unfortunately throws away others like having memorable and creative courses. Mario Sports Superstars does give you a good degree of control over your golf game, a range of clubs, hitting your ball in certain regions to add or prevent rolls, and the option to do a few power shots for further distance. Hitting the ball relies mostly on timing when you press A to stop an indicator on a meter to determine both the power and how accurate the shot is, and putting is handled quite well by having 3D greens to view but a grid that helps visualize subtle slopes a bit better than the naked eye. Where golf comes up a little short is a lack in course design ambition. Individual holes aren’t badly designed, but things do feel a bit too grounded, golfing near a beach resort or in a place with golden foliage the wildest it gets. Some holes can be reached in a single swing and others are longer and winding, and some interesting ideas like one where you golf into and out of a valley or need to reach a hole on a high hill stand out a touch, but it’s mostly just unassuming and effective golf. Perhaps the one nice touch that adds a bit of personality are the way characters celebrate or lament their performance after a hole, all of them taking things way too seriously both in the aggressive tantrums thrown after something as simple as a bogey or their dancing joy for getting under par.

Horse racing, the newly added sport that joins these recontextualizations and reductions of sports Mario has played before, is a bit of a strange one as it features the most additional content beyond the tournament. Here you not only pick your athlete but a horse, the different types having unique advantages like better control, speed, or stamina. Then, you can go to the stable to pamper your horse with brushing or treats, and even ride them around in first person either on the ranch or practice tracks to find goodies like accessories. Increasing your bond with a horse isn’t all that important to success unfortunately, although that can be chalked up to some unusual mechanics featured in the races. While horse racing in Mario Sports Superstars perhaps features the most unique and visually lovely locations as a lot more work was put into diversifying the courses and providing unique sections for them, the racing faces an issue when it comes to stamina and star boosts. Stamina is a way to give your horse a tiny bit of speed as needed, this free to use often but you do need to manage it so the horse doesn’t wear out. Grabbing carrot icons along the track will restore it as will just letting up on your horse, but so does running alongside the other racers. This herd bonus actually leads to all the racers bunching up fairly often; even after someone tries to get a big lead, everyone seems to drift back into a herd rather quickly. Star boosts are collected on the course as well and you can store up to three of them, these much faster than regular stamina-based dashes. You can use them if you fall behind the pack or want to feel like you’re doing well before the herd finds you, but what their best use ends up being is holding onto three boosts for the final lap, watching the touch screen map to see when the finish line is getting near, and then blow through them for an easy victory. If the herd bonus didn’t feel like such an enforced element, the courses definitely would have effective designs for interesting races, and trying to build up the stars for the boost at least encourages you to engage with that, but sadly it feels like this mode doesn’t justify the stable section because it too ends up too simple.

The last mode of note isn’t even a sport, players who have Mario Sports Superstars amiibo cards able to scan three and play a block-busting game called Road to Superstar to unlock superstar variants of players that get small boosts to their abilities. The block-busting has you hitting enemies with balls and moving character cards about as paddles, but you also earn coins playing the regular game and can use those to open card packs featuring the game’s athletes or equipment. Card packs can unlock character-specific gear that just looks a little different, but collecting them does feel a little hollow when the cards have no interesting descriptors, you can receive doubles, and they can’t be used in Road to Superstar. Even worse, a canny eye can spot the game recycling old character art from previous Mario games for them, the designs feeling lazy and lifeless since they’re not often meant to even look good it seems.

THE VERDICT: Mario Sports Superstars likely thought it could get away with bare minimum versions of the sports on show and hope the Mario brand would carry it, but then it didn’t even muster up enough energy to make all of the sports work well. Baseball is too heavily skewed towards batters, soccer seems to lead to constant issues with unintentional interceptions and an occasional inability to get you near the ball, and horse racing’s herd mechanic makes much of the race not that important compared to the final stretch. Tennis and golf are in fine form despite golf feeling a bit too straightforward, but the cribbed ideas from better Mario sports games can’t undo the weak implementation of the others, Mario Sports Superstars overall a poor package full of inferior adaptations.

And so, I give Mario Sports Superstars for Nintendo 3DS…

A BAD rating. This rating is not some form of irritation at not receiving an immaculate collection of five well-realized sports. Tennis and golf are okay and sometimes border on good, but the other three sports feel like they try to get away with their rickety implementation by tagging along with the two properly handled sports. It’s little surprise that Camelot Software Planning, the designer of Mario Golf World Tour and Mario Tennis Open, developed the golf and tennis here while the three inferior sports were handled by Bandai Namco Studios who seemingly saw this package deal as an excuse to get sloppy. Horse racing almost feels like it was meant to be the focus when you see the horse care elements and range of unlockables for it, the courses even feeling more involved than the generic stadiums elsewhere, but then the herd mechanic ends up introducing a counterintuitive element that is easily exploited. Soccer doesn’t feel finished with how often ball handling becomes a minor problem, and baseball almost feels like it doesn’t want you playing it for long so hits are easy and you can at least find out quickly if you’re out or on base. Fielding might as well be automatic since there’s little reason to wrest control from the game when it’s mostly doing the best you can, and while it has its own special pitches, they are almost as forgettable as the special shots in soccer. Buy the tennis and golf games that inspired these thinned down versions and you’ll get a richer experience, and you can rest assured that you’re not missing out on barebones versions of soccer and baseball. The horse racing unfortunately joins as something new but unable to grow into something of substance, the start of a proper game built around the idea here but held back since rather than exploring its potential or figuring out what really works, it got forced to share space with hollow reminders of better sports games.

Mario Sports Superstars funnily enough feels like it called in two ringers in the form of tennis and golf to try and make up for the other three sports being so sloppy and often shallow. Perhaps horse racing might not have attracted much attention on its own, but if this was an effort to sneak a sport through, the chance to tinker with the formula was wasted as attention was split in making hollow add-on sports instead. Mario Sports Superstars probably thought it could just be okay at many things to slip on through with begrudging acceptance of its mediocre nature, but it didn’t even put in enough effort to see each sport was effective on a basic level.