Month of Mario: Super Mario Maker 2 (Switch)

The original Super Mario Maker on Wii U was a great democratization of making levels in the Super Mario mold, but most everyone who played it could see there was room for improvement. Whether it was something as simple as being able to make sloped ground or a way to find levels better since they were mostly just thrown into one giant pool of stages, it felt like should a follow-up add those requested elements, it would no doubt be a phenomenal level editor. Super Mario Maker 2 came to Switch with a bevvy of requested features and subsequent updates rolled out even more creation options, it no doubt superior to the original game in most every way, but it is perhaps the curse of a level editor based on pre-existing video game styles to always make you wonder if it couldn’t have been more.

That certainly isn’t to diminish the incredible flexibility of Super Mario Maker 2’s customization options. For 2D side-scrolling stages, players are able to pick from five different formats based on old Mario titles. The original Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros. U all return from the original Super Mario Maker’s selection of modes, but you also get a bit of a surprise style that is specifically separated from the other four. Despite Super Mario 3D World featuring three-dimensional movement, it has been adapted into one of this game’s 2D level-making formats, bringing over its unique mechanics, enemies, and power-ups for you to use despite everything being limited to two axes. It is certainly a bit of a shame that it is kept so separate from the other formats though. Each format will have some unique enemies or power-ups to them, but for the most part an object or foe available in one will also appear in the others even if their behavior is shifted some. The four regular formats are all essentially compatible with each other even though swapping between them might mess up some things, but Super Mario 3D World is kept apart with its own unique set of tools and creatures. It still provides a good range of options though to justify its inclusion despite its segregation.

Super Mario Maker 2 invites players to make traditional Super Mario stages however they like, the only rules in place being that you have to be able to reach the level’s end yourself to be able to upload it and share it with other players. What you place between the start and the end is for your creativity to decide, and the editor, despite requiring some learning through tinkering, is arranged fairly reasonably. If you play with the Switch’s touchscreen most of what you work with is easy enough to tap, and a wheel system that puts similar objects together allows for navigating all your options without it getting overwhelming. Some features are a bit hidden, holding down on a character or object will bring up a submenu, and while most enemies can be enlarged or given wings for example, you might not even know about certain variants existing unless you take the time to hold down each object to see their other formats. There are tutorials both direct and indirect, although Yamamura’s Dojo that tries to teach you good level making feels very slow and keeps you from more fun and interactive elements. After a bit of experimenting though, even making levels with the controller can start to become fluid and fast, imaginative design able to take over as the focus over realizing what’s even in your toolbox for use.

That toolbox is rather deep in some interesting ways too. There are of course baddies to block the way and different types of platforms to place for players to leap across in the obstacle course of their own design, but you also have level themes like forest, ice, clouds, underwater, and castle that can come with new elements or set different tones. What’s more, they all feature night variants where fundamental rules of the game can be altered, like making upside down stages or ones where you swim through the air. In the regular item selection, On/Off switches are particularly useful tool for making more complex and involved mechanisms, a simple hit swapping whether red or blue blocks are present and allowing for players to design things like minigames or unique battles that can be tracked thanks to this feature. Pipes allow you to make secondary areas that can change the level theme entirely, Pink Coins need to be collected to reveal a key and can be made into rewards for deeper level exploration, and you can even set stage goals like requiring the player to defeat certain foes or clear the level without getting hurt to make them engage with more dangerous elements. Super Mario Maker 2 offers a great deal of bosses thanks to Bowser and his son being joined by all seven Koopalings as well as Boom-Boom and in the 3D World format even Pom-Pom joins in, but some clever level design can lead to you making your own bosses so long as you place baddies right for a good fight.

While it is fun to have items available across all creation modes, there are interesting features to set them apart beyond their graphical appearance and minor control differences like Super Mario World allowing for blocks to be destroyed with a spin or New Super Mario Bros. U and Super Mario 3D World letting you perform wall jumps. In some you can hop into giant shoes that let you cross dangerous terrain, others you get to hop on the back of Yoshi the dinosaur who can eat enemies. Super Mario Bros. actually lets you transform into Link from The Legend of Zelda and bring his sword, bombs, and bow so levels can embrace some more involved fights or puzzles. Most formats let you leap into Koopa Clown Cars to fly through the air and even get involved in shooting battles, but you can also find yourself racing around in a Koopa Troopa Car, put on a Goomba Mask to sneak past enemies, swim with ease with the Frog Suit, or even change mechanics to mirror Super Mario Land and Super Mario Bros. 2 with their associated power-ups. There are definitely a few areas that feel a touch lean, there not many aquatic enemies and it would be nice if you could influence the behavior of certain enemies so they can stay in place without you having to trap them, but Super Mario Maker 2 is otherwise quite rich with a range of building options that allow for your imagination to run wild, whether that’s with building simple standard stages focused on platforming or intricate mind-benders that leave players wondering how you even made such stages.

When it comes time to share them online though, Super Mario Maker 2 does allow you to tag your stages to help people find them. Practically a godsend for people searching for stages you can actually play rather than simply watch, people who want to appreciate the craftmanship of stages that play themselves or just use objects to play music can be found by them while others are free to filter them away. However, a stage can only bear two tags, and not every tag feels fit for explaining some common level types like “Kaizo” stages where every action must be perfect and while the level tag “technical” can hint that something might involve advanced understanding of mechanics at play, you might need the description to know what you’re getting into and that isn’t always feasible due to the levels being globally shared and some modes feeding them to you without the descriptions included. It is still much easier to locate quality levels than in Super Mario Maker 2’s predecessor thanks to these steps taken, and popular stages are still easy enough to find and usually have some merit to them to earn wide attention. One thing that had an even greater net positive on shared levels than tags though might be the Super World system. Players are able to arrange their own “Mario games” where people tackle levels in order and navigate small world maps to go through them. Rather than a stage always needing to impress someone who will likely only ever play one of your levels, you can now design a sequence of levels for them to tackle and better consider how they work together to make a broader experience. Not everything needs to be so flashy or gimmicky, but even Super Worlds can be inspired and imaginative as they embrace themes across multiple stages, this format a great nudge to players to be more considerate in how levels are laid out rather than always needing to wow with something off the wall or catering to easy interest through references or boring safe bets.

Even if you don’t want to make levels yourself or play the ones others made online, Super Mario Maker 2 tries to offer a robust set of stages in a Story Mode. Mario and the Toads have just finished building Princess Peach a brand new castle when the story begins, but then Undodog, the very same one you can tap on in course editor to undo your own actions, accidentally stumbles on the Reset Rocket you’d use to wipe away a level entirely. The castle is completely undone by his mistake, but Mario and the Toads won’t let that dishearten them. Getting right back to work, the Toads are willing to handle the grunt work while Mario goes out and accepts jobs to make some coins for materials and labor costs. These jobs all just so happen to involve playing levels made by Nintendo’s own designers, although they are very much “Mario Maker” levels. While the story offers over 100 jobs, in some ways, these are more about showing off the many nifty features of the course editor than designing a true start to finish Super Mario adventure. They do at least generally show a skilled hand for course layouts and how to progress a mechanic over the course of one, something like the Rotten Mushroom that can chase you making for a level that gets more hectic until you finally come through and beat a stage that put up a pretty good fight. Collecting coins in the stages helps to fund the rebuilding efforts as well, giving you more reason to divert from the main path when you spot them, and the jobs can have rather cute descriptions like some clearly designed by Bowser or Bowser Jr. where they have no idea Mario will be taking on their prototypes for stages they hope to one day defeat him with.

Story Mode has a lot of cute touches and solid levels to ensure there are good levels to find before you dive into the online play and Super Worlds encourage players to be more thoughtful in their designs to keep people playing their stages, but beyond just selecting whatever levels look interesting from lists and searches online, there is one more major way to play Super Mario Maker 2. The Endless Challenge will throw random levels at you one by one, the goal being to keep going as long as your lives hold out. Super Mario Maker 2 will reward your activities with costume pieces for your avatar that shows on your Maker profile as well as medals for particularly good creators and players, but mostly the outfits are there for bragging rights so Endless Challenge doesn’t feel too bad to inevitably lose. You can even skip levels by holding down Minus if you think you stumbled across one you don’t understand or simply don’t like, but most important of all, the Endless Challenge comes in different difficulty levels. Easy inevitably contains some of the most barebones levels most likely designed by children while Super Expert will likely present stages most players won’t even understand unless they’ve spent hundreds of hours with the game, but Normal and Hard more reasonably provide stages that can be fairly good and make for the more interesting challenges because they aren’t such exaggerations. You’re at the whims of however good other creators in the world are, but Endless Challenge makes it feel like the point is more about that grab bag style of discovery so taking the good with the bad is almost the point. Multiplayer is available as well, although unfortunately not fit for many stages and also very slow if attempted online, it perhaps the only point where the game feels like it outright failed due to that lag although it at least means you can play as Mario, Toad, Toadette, or Luigi should you so choose. Some people do make dedicated multiplayer levels as well so it’s not a totally failed feature, but it’s definitely a spot you can’t help but look at and think of how it could be fixed in some future follow-up.

THE VERDICT: A wonderful canvas for creativity and traditional platform game design alike, Super Mario Maker 2 provides a wide range of interesting tools for making your own Mario stages and concocting imaginative new uses for items and enemies you’d not otherwise see in an official Nintendo product. Sorting through the chaff can still be a bit of a task despite new modes and features like Story Mode and Super Worlds helping you find some quality entertainment, and the toolbox can still feel a little shallow in some areas when you remember what elements from the featured Mario titles weren’t included for some reason. Super Mario Maker 2 is more of a small step-up in quality from the original than a giant leap for makerkind, the level creation tools excellent and broad but still having room to improve.

And so, I give Super Mario Maker 2 for Nintendo Switch.

A GREAT rating. It’s pretty easy to imagine just slapping a perfect rating on Super Mario Maker 2 because it does have a great deal of improvements over the original Wii U game, but that would be viewing quality like a staircase when it’s often more of a slope. A Super Mario Maker 3 could conceivably make sorting through player made levels easier. It could better cater to underfed elements here like controlling enemy behavior or filling certain level formats with more appropriate enemy types. It could even do very basic things like letting you set if a level description appears when someone plays your level if it is a necessary component of playing it. Super Mario Maker 2 is still a superb experience when it is running at its best though, players truly able to concoct incredible levels like one based on treating Dr. Mario’s patients by entering the body or playing sports using Koopa shells and those ever useful On/Off blocks. Popular doesn’t always equal good, perhaps curated collections might have been an angle for helping people more easily discover the level formats they like, but elements like Super Worlds, filters, and even the more moderate successes of Endless Challenge do mean you can still uncover a great deal of enjoyable stages while contributing your own. The tools available feel vast once you start thinking of how they can interact and Story Mode does a good job of introducing elements to you that might get the cogs in your head turning. Story Mode does feature some unique mechanics like guiding Toads through levels or needing to carry a heavy stone that aren’t available in the creation format though, but I wager they might have been failed concepts that didn’t work well outside of the levels presented so there is merit to keeping certain things unavailable to the player. On the other hand, I see little reason that Rip Van Fish, the sleeping fish who swims towards you rapidly should you wake him in Super Mario World, was left out.

The presence of Rip Van Fish won’t be the deciding factor of whether Super Mario Maker 2 is an incredible game, but it does show there are still little touches that could help flesh out certain corners of the game to further open up level creation opportunities should Nintendo keep plumbing the source material for the five game formats for more options. If you wish to get your hands on a wealth of tools used to make the Mario series as wonderful as it is, it still delights more than it disappoints, the game having plenty of new concepts on top of the classics so that it inspires hundreds upon hundreds of wonderful levels to play.