As one of the world’s most invasive species, it was only a matter of time before cats would find their way to the inhabitants of the Mushroom Kingdom.
And when they arrived in the Super Mario 3D world in 2013, cats, just like when they came to new worlds as shelters on boats, immediately confirmed their dominance among the locals. Of course, it is fitting that these cruel beasts – cats, according to recent studies, are responsible for more than 1 billion bird deaths a year in America – will not only be subservient to Mario, Luigi, Peach and other stars of the ‘Super’. Mario Bros. ” games.
No, cats would want to bend the game to their liking, making it one of the greatest but least played “Super Mario” games ever. To date, Nintendo reports that ‘Super Mario 3D World’ has sold 5.86 million copies, a hefty amount for a normal video game, but disappointing for a major Nintendo brand, especially one starring Mario and Luigi. By comparison, the Nintendo Switch exhibit ‘Super Mario Odyssey’ has garnered more than 20 million sales.
Cat details abound in this everyday cute addition to the “Super Mario Bros.” franchise. Mario villains are again represented with upright, triangular ears, and the levels are meant to be climbed and stored. It has a design that is as vertical as it is horizontal and also peppered with very cat friendly corners. While it’s nice to see Mario and Peach dress up in a cat suit – yes, they do make cat noises – the game has always worked as well as it did, as its levels are designed as if they were extended cat trees.
Climb up, go right, down now – ooh, look, a hiding place! Mario games have over the years become more and more just exploration than running and jumping, and ‘3D World’ celebrates the player’s tendency to ask questions: Can I show up here? Can I swat it? Can I go behind it? The answer here is almost always yes.
When ‘Super Mario 3D World’ was released, it worked a lot against it. First, it came on Nintendo’s poorly received and poorly sold Wi U console. Second, it came out about the same time as Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One, no matter how:meowz-ing (sorry) this ‘Super Mario’ episode was, it was destined to be overlooked and underestimated.
Fortunately, the booming re-entry market, which Nintendo strategically used with ‘Mario’, ‘Zelda’ and ‘Pikmin’, has once again restored one of the nine lives of ‘Super Mario 3D Worlds’ (the cat game is almost out of my system, I promise) .
And now, in 2021, it’s exclusively coming to the Switch with even more to think about, complete with a new, free-running kibble-sized game in “Bowser’s Fury,” in which a giant, Godzilla-like Bowser lava rains on Mario and his unlikely partner, Bowser Jr. The latter is upset about the existential anger that suddenly flows through his father and asks Mario for help.
Bowser is in the midst of an existential, anger-driven crisis in ‘Bowser’s Fury’.
(Nintendo)
When you think about it for a moment, it starts to get a little dark.
Little Bowser Jr. is clearly upset about the fact that pops have made full-scale insults. Anger is easy to bring about in 2021, and the fight against a crippling emotion feels more of the moment than probably anything in any previous Mario game so far. Mario immediately gains sympathy, and it serves as a reminder that as Nintendo games got longer, looked better, and got smarter, we also began to look at the philosophy of the “Super Mario Bros.” games.
‘Super Mario 3D World’ has long been my second favorite in the 35-year-old series, for reasons I will continue to unpack, behind only the Switch’s masterpiece ‘Super Mario Odyssey’ in 2017. ‘Through a magic hat,’ Odyssey ‘ Mario allowed himself to become other characters and objects, and eventually he began to see himself as something more than an over-performing plumber locked in endless battles with Bowser.
Bowser, of course, has never really been a so-called ‘good’ nemesis – his creepy fascination with Princess Peach promoted sexist, girl-in-need stereotypes. In recent years, however, he has been more of a troll. In ‘Super Mario 3D World’, Bowser sets things in motion by kidnapping a bunch of colorful fairy princess creatures called Sprixies, apparently just because. (I can almost hear him shout, “If you think one princess kidnapping is offensive, wait until I kidnap an entire group of them!”)
To become academic for a moment, I have long regarded ‘Super Mario 3D World’ as inspired by and an answer on the internet, specifically how it affects our reactions to the world around us. Take, for example, the use of online cultures meme-beloved cats, or the plethora of tubes, which Mario and friends send from deserts to grasslands to haunted houses to icy cliffs faster than a Google search. While Mario has long been able to transform through powerful suits into other animals, the raccoon-like tanooki suit has never felt born out of a trend in the same way.
Then there’s Bowser, back with his castle and his unpleasant vintage car, a grotesque thing that is all purple and nails and looks like an ice cream cone with exhaust pipes and sweet corn. No one will manage it, but it looks neat on an Instagram photo. Bowser is basically just an online bully harassing Mario and Co because he just lives differently. It’s easy to think he’s spending his non-kidnapping time reading Reddit, that’s at least my explanation for his irrational anger over everything in ‘Bowser’s Fury’.
In fact, ‘Bowser’s Fury’ is a Mario game that seems to be fit for our world of social media chaos that is receiving brief attention, where Mario and Bowser Jr. in towers can rise and with grassy slopes slide bunch of pink, blue and green cats, only to be interrupted from the not by Bower’s silly tantrums. Bowser will eventually disappear – he will return at random intervals – but ignore him all we may do and he will direct fireball after fireball at us until we are forced to respond.
The bulk of the game is essentially Mario and Bowser Jr. trying to clear Lake Lapcat (yes, that’s what the world is called), when Bowser suddenly arrives to track everything down with fireballs to ruin everyone’s day. But collect some upgrades and faster than Mario can tweet ‘send me cute pet photos’, he will become a giant cat.
Cuteness abounds in ‘Super Mario 3D World’.
(Nintendo)
While not just turning Mario into a complete internet cat maximalism, it will allow him to fight back with some good time jumps against the great Bowser, while freeing more of this cat paradise from Bowser’s grip. (Apart from that: Nintendo’s attention to detail in Lake Lapcat is lovely, as there are catechism throughout to mark an ancient cat civilization).
Compared to the core game of ‘Super Mario 3D World’ which, although on track, manages to feel relatively free in its depiction of sociable running, paw and punching, ‘Bowser’s Fury’ is wide open noise and action, ‘ an experiment in which we move arbitrarily between rooms, rather than entering levels inside and outside. Collectively, however, they show us that there is one thing a bully and a troll cannot stand: worship.
Cuteness wins, yes, but with “Bower’s Fury” taking the franchise into more emotional areas, let’s hope that some vulnerability, if not complete therapy, is next for the ever-growing world of ‘Super Mario’ Brittle.’