Super Mario 3D Land Catch-All

Damn sales but I bought this and Mario Kart because of toys r us, my buddy is borrowing my 3DS but i hope to play some mario kart with everyone.

Special 4-5 is a Female Doggo.

So what's it take to five-star this game? I've gotten every star coin up through the beginning of Special World 6, and I still only have two stars on my profile. What gives?

Spoiler:

I've also gotten all the star coins in the special zones using Luigi, if that makes a difference.

Okay, so I finished the main run through this game and my opinion has changed a bit. I still hate the 3D. That's not going to change and it's something I'll fight with on the 3DS forever, I imagine. I still really hate how the 3DS feels. My thumb hates me for playing the game and probably won't forgive me trying to 100% the game. But it's a good game overall. Some things I really liked.

Spoiler:

- Bowser throwing a barrel made me happy.

- The ending which felt like the ending to a Pixar movie with the baddy brought back at the end during the credits was a nice touch.

- I loved the "Zelda" room

- Saving your brother is much better than saving Princess Peach for the zillionth time.

Finally picked this game up today. So far it's everything I've wanted a 3D Mario game to be for like 10 years. It feels sort of like a more fleshed out version of those bonus mini-levels in Sunshine.

MechaSlinky wrote:

Finally picked this game up today. So far it's everything I've wanted a 3D Mario game to be for like 10 years. It feels sort of like a more fleshed out version of those bonus mini-levels in Sunshine.

Especially when you have the Tanooki suit. It's fun to get from A to B and find all the ways you can get there quicker and skipping parts. It feels like Assassin's Creed should have felt.

I finished this game last night, and have mixed feelings. I love that it's a Mario game, but I really dislike how short and easy most of the levels are.

Through the first 8 worlds I rarely lost a life and almost never had to replay a stage to get all three special coins. During the 8 special worlds I died a little bit more often - but replaying a level for the special coins was almost never required. There were only a few levels near the end where I died repeatedly, but none took me more than twenty minutes to finally master. I guess I'm looking for more of the old school difficulty in my Mario games.... and harder puzzles trying to acquire all of the collectables. Also, the complete lack of hidden special items or secrets was a huge letdown.

The 3D effect was phenomenal - there was a real difference when playing a level with the 3D on versus having it off. I actually don't like many 3D platformers (Mario 64 sucked IMO, for example) but this one kept me hooked all the way through despite my disagreement with the difficulty level and I attribute a lot of that to the 3D.

AndrewA wrote:

Through the first 8 worlds I rarely lost a life and almost never had to replay a stage to get all three special coins. During the 8 special worlds I died a little bit more often - but replaying a level for the special coins was almost never required.

Out of curiosity, what's your death count? I ended up at 361 after getting all the coins in all the special zones, and I felt like the game was challenging enough. (This isn't an epeen thing. Just genuine curiosity.)

I agree that this game was on the easy side for a Mario game (I definitely died much less here than I did for New Super Mario Bros. or either Galaxy game) but I loved it anyway. I feel that this game has a more "classic" feel than any Mario game since 64, even moreso than the New games which are meant to be throwbacks. Something about the simplicity, perhaps...

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Out of curiosity, what's your death count? I ended up at 361 after getting all the coins in all the special zones, and I felt like the game was challenging enough. (This isn't an epeen thing. Just genuine curiosity.)

Hmmm... I didn't see a death count recorded anywhere..... can you point me in the correct direction, and I'll let you know when I get home tonight?

AndrewA wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

Out of curiosity, what's your death count? I ended up at 361 after getting all the coins in all the special zones, and I felt like the game was challenging enough. (This isn't an epeen thing. Just genuine curiosity.)

Hmmm... I didn't see a death count recorded anywhere..... can you point me in the correct direction, and I'll let you know when I get home tonight?

I'm trying to do this from memory, but I think that on the screen where you can pick your save slot, if you tap the little icon next to it that looks a bit like a scroll it'll take you to a page with your death count and some other info.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Out of curiosity, what's your death count? I ended up at 361 after getting all the coins in all the special zones, and I felt like the game was challenging enough. (This isn't an epeen thing. Just genuine curiosity.)

346 lives lost. 100% special coins in all zones, and beat the final castle (i.e. after beating S8-6, you have to do the last castle in 8 again).

Interesting that I'm saying "too easy" while you're saying "challenging enough" with such close numbers.

I think that the lack of any lengthy levels might contribute to my views on the toughness..... you could blow through most levels extremely quickly, and dying was never much of a time-loss (relative to earlier Mario games).

I really don't think death count has much to do with perceived challenge level. You're trying to make a subjective comparison with objective data.

I don't think it's an unfair observation to make. Objectively, we died almost the same number of times, but subjectively we had very different impressions of the difficulty. I think this really is at the heart of it:

AndrewA wrote:

I think that the lack of any lengthy levels might contribute to my views on the toughness..... you could blow through most levels extremely quickly, and dying was never much of a time-loss (relative to earlier Mario games).

The game was challenging for me moment-to-moment in terms of the skills it took to find and collect all the gold stars while staying alive. But I would say it's easier to progress in the game as compared to an earlier game like Mario 3 because I never had to start the whole game over, I was never locked out of replaying a level, I didn't have to get every star coin in a level without dying, and so forth. I think the individual courses were pretty challenging, especially when you aim to get the star coins, but I can certainly see how the game as a whole is easier than past iterations.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I don't think it's an unfair observation to make. Objectively, we died almost the same number of times, but subjectively we had very different impressions of the difficulty.

I think I was reading too much into his statement about similar death counts and having different feelings about the difficulty. I completely agree that two people can have similar metrics for their games and walk away with entirely different experiences. So maybe it's not that the death count factors into it, but I don't think you can use the number of times you died as a raw indicator of difficulty. Perception of difficulty is a lot more subjective than that, and people are going to struggle at different points in any game (assuming the game isn't a complete pushover or unfairly punishing the player).

I completely agree that two people can have similar metrics for their games and walk away with entirely different experiences. So maybe it's not that the death count factors into it, but I don't think you can use the number of times you died as a raw indicator of difficulty.

Yeah - this is what I was getting at.

Another point is that I think I probably lost 200-250 of those lives on a small handful of levels. There were a few of the special levels that I literally died 20-30 times on. These were a huge exception, not the rule. In fact, I'd say that there were more special levels that I completed in a single life without needing a replay to get all of the coins than levels where I was roadblocked for 20 minutes and lost buckets of lives.

On another topic: I really enjoyed the levels where you were given an artificially low starting timer and were forced to play fast and collect extra +time items. Some of those were among my favorite in the entire game.

Late to the party (as usual), but this game is good. Really good. Really, really, really good. Really, really, really, really, really, really good.

I do hope the post-world-8 levels ramp up in difficulty, though. I'm sitting on over 150 lives already at the beginning of world 8.

They do, absolutely. It hits a great sweet spot through most of the post-game, especially if you shoot for all the coins in each run.

Really, game? We're really doing the "long, multi-part boss fight with no checkpoints" thing? Really? Man, Nintendo, why do you do crap like this? Makes me want to scream. This reminds me a lot of Luigi's Mansion, where the game is a bunch of fun right up until you hit a boss.

I can't say I like being offered permanent invincibility as a "you suck" prize either.

I have no idea what fight you're talking about!

Boss at the end of standard world 8. It's a pretty long sequence that was giving me fits, and there were no checkpoints. True to personal form, I put it down for an hour or so, then got through it in one or two attempts.

I'm liking the second half of the game a lot more than the first half. Don't think I'm going to go to the trouble of going back and picking up the star coins that I missed though, unless there's a compelling reason to.

You might need Star Coins to unlock the last set of levels, but I don't remember. I might be confusing this with New Super Mario Bros. 2.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I might be confusing this with New Super Mario Bros. 2.

That needed Moon Coins to unlock the last few levels I think.

Nah, a big bucket of Star Coins to unlock the last world (120 coins, I think?) and then you collected Moon Coins in those levels.

I just can't remember if there are Star Coin locks on any of the S worlds in Mario 3D Land.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Nah, a big bucket of Star Coins to unlock the last world (120 coins, I think?) and then you collected Moon Coins in those levels.

Ah right, wasn't sure which set of levels you were referencing.

I usually come out of most levels with all 3 coins, but I'll miss one here and there. So far, I've had more than enough to unlock any gated level I've come across, so it hasn't been a problem yet.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

You might need Star Coins to unlock the last set of levels, but I don't remember. I might be confusing this with New Super Mario Bros. 2.

This is correct. I'm on S-8-2 and it requires a lot of coins. If you've been playing for a while and get Streetpasses from people you'll often get coins that way via those purple box levels. I'd encourage anyone playing this game to check their Streetpasses frequently and make sure to grab those when they come up. The more frequently you nab them, the more frequently they'll repopulate. That's a good way to get coins and skip some levels.

That said, I went back through and collected all of the coins on the first half of the game.

Side note, now that I'm so close to the end I obviously like this game a lot. It won me over after my initial frustration with the camera angles. But what I don't like is how brutal some of these levels are at this point. No checkpoints...

Spoiler:

Evil Mario, evil Big Mario, ugh...

... 30 second time limits. It's clever design but it does feel a bit unfair at times.

I'm somewhere in world S5 now, and while I really like the challenge level (mostly) at this point, I hate the lives mechanic. I came into the S worlds with about 75 lives, and now I'm down under 40. It's not like I'm hitting a wall, and it's very possible there'll be some kind of soft landing when I run out of lives completely, but the fact that I have to watch that thing count down after each death is frustrating.

I was thinking "why don't they just eliminate lives", but I'm not sure the Mario games can. The entire point of collecting coins is to get extra lives, and a lot of their side rewards are 1-ups. Removes lives completely, and you have to have something to fill that gap, and I'm not sure what that is.

Holy hell, the levels with the spinning block platforms are the worst. I had flashbacks to those levels from Mario Sunshine. I can never seem to find a raccoon suit when I need one for those.

I think the S Levels are sufficiently hard that lives are pretty silly. Not sure what the replacement would be, but it does seem arbitrary and silly. Kind of shocked that you got there with 75 lives. After I'd picked over all of the mushroom houses and run back through ever level to get all of the coins I'm up to 290 lives. So I don't worry so much about that.