Super Mario 3d World is a game that I loved on the Wii U, and I’m glad it’s finally getting a chance again on the Nintendo Switch. And they were generous enough to make some new content for the game. Does the inclusion of Bowser’s Fury justify the $60 asking price? Is 3d world a good game? Was Bowser’s Fury Super Mario Odyssey DLC? Will Xenoblade Chronicles X ever get a Switch port?
Find out in this review of Super Mario 3d World + Bowser’s Fury…
Transcript:
Super Mario 3d World is one of the best modern platformers. It’s in the same league as games like Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and Rayman Legends. In fact, it’s kind of crazy just how many great platformers the Wii U had.
And with Super Mario 3d World + Bowser’s Fury on the Switch, you can finally shove your Wii U in a box under your bed for good. Well, maybe wait until Xenoblade Chronicles X gets a port, then hide it away.
I don’t want to spend too much of this review talking about the game as it was on the Wii U, because it’s a known quantity. People know what 3d World is all about, so I’m not going to spend 10 minutes reiterating how good it is.
Eh, maybe I’ll just spend a few minutes on it. I’ll get to what this port adds in a bit.
Super Mario 3d World is the philosophy of 2d Mario games implemented into a 3d Mario game. The focus is about experiencing a level through an intended path laid out for you, compared to a game like Super Mario Odyssey, where you’re just plopped in a walled garden and given free reign to gather whatever moons you want.
That might sound like a bad thing to some of you, but it’s one of the things I really enjoy about the game. You have one path to your objective. There’s no cheesing it or straight up skipping the challenge. You have to master the movement to do exactly what the developers imagined.
Unfortunately, I feel the movement isn’t all that it could be. I don’t even know if I can list this as a “negative” for the game, I’m not even sure how to frame this. It bums me out that there’s so little options compared to Sunshine or Odyssey. Doing a double cap throw jump in Odyssey is one of the most satisfying things in the series, up there with sliding at the speed of sound in Sunshine. Both of those made the simple act of progressing from point A to B fun.
I can’t really say moving from point A to B is “fun” in 3d World. It’s just… nothing. You just hold a direction and Y. It’s functional.
I guess that’s how I’d describe the movement in 3d World. Functional. Functional in a series where I expect exceptional movement.
But lackluster movement doesn’t matter too much when the level design is where the game shines. Concepts are introduced, drawn out to their logical conclusion, then ditched for a new concept. Each level and world feels fresh. It boggles my mind how they come up with so many concepts for a game like this and it doesn’t feel tiring to play in long sessions.
So what’s new in the Switch port?
Bowser’s Fury of course, but what else is there?
They did add Online Multiplayer. Which is cool I guess, for people that have friends. Ehh, that’s not fair, online multiplayer is a big addition. Especially considering the situation the world is in. This game definitely shines when you’re playing with multiple people, trying to throw each other off the course and steal the high-score crown. Allowing people to have that experience in a time of social distancing is a big plus. Sans a global pandemic, it’s still a great addition.
That’s about it. I heard they changed the movement speed slightly, but I haven’t compared it to the original and I don’t really care to. Oh they added a Photo mode. Do people still care about that? You can use the stamps that they had for Miiverse in the original game in photo mode. It’s a shame Miiverse died, this game had great implementation on the Wii U.
Alright, main event, Bowser’s Fury. What’s it about?
I said earlier that 3d world is the philosophy of 2d Mario games put in a 3d Mario game. If this is a scale of the two different philosophies, this side being the “goal-post” game design of 2d Mario games and this side being the collect-a-thon game design of 3d Mario games, I’d put Super Mario 3d World here. You are Mario running around in a 3d space, but for all intents and purposes, it’s designed like a 2d Mario platformer.
As for Bowser’s Fury, it fits right about here. It definitely maintains the “goal-post” design of the base game, but it tilts the balance slightly towards the collect-a-thon designs of games like Odyssey.
But don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t feel like Super Mario Odyssey. I’ve seen a lot of speculation that this could have been DLC for Odyssey that they reworked for this port, but this is still 3d World at it’s core.
There’s a couple of regions in this mode, and once you collect enough shines, you can grab the Giga-Bell and challenge Bowser. Once you whittle his health down, he goes back into hiding. At that point, a new region will open and you collect more shines to fight him again.
Each region is divided into small sub-regions that are pretty much just 3d World levels. They don’t really interact with each other in any meaningful way. Each sub-region is clearly cut off from the others, it feels like they just cut and pasted levels from the main game into this open area. Instead of a world map to choose your levels, you just walk over or ride Plessie to a “level”
And you’ll be doing a lot of traveling. There’s no fast travel until you beat the final boss. The only methods of quick movement are riding Plessie or getting on top of one of these lighthouses and launching yourself as not quite as far as you’d wish. I didn’t know about fast travel unlocking later, so I did a lot of riding back and forth through the empty waters. Hopefully now that you know, you can just focus on what’s in front of you in the moment instead of trying to 100% before doing the last boss.
Speaking of bosses, every 5-10 minutes, Bowser will awaken and start to attack you. It creates an interesting dynamic in how you play. His main attack in this mode is charging up and beaming fire at you.
Some shines are hidden behind blocks that can only be destroyed by this fire breath. Which leads to an interesting dilemma. What do you do when you notice these blocks and Bowser isn’t out yet? For me, it usually resulted in me collecting other shines until he came out, then I’d go back. But what about when it’s the last shine in the area? You can either decide to just sit and wait for Bowser to decide to come up or just move on and potentially forget about it altogether.
And if you go too far, you’ll have to run back there yourself. So you have to quickly locate a Plessie to ride and hope he doesn’t blast you in the open waters. And I was playing without the knowledge that I’d have fast travel later. If I had known this would have been available, I would have felt less obligated to get them right then and there.
I dunno, it’s not that big of a deal, but it kinda peeved me off when I felt like the smartest option was to just idle in place for the next 5 minutes.
Going back to the controls, they don’t feel wholly suited to this new level design. You can freely rotate the camera 360 degrees around Mario, just like in Odyssey. But the level design is still that of 3d World. In the base game, the camera could only lock to a few positions. So in an area like this, you could switch the camera to be directly behind or to the side of Mario so you can just hold Up or Right because it’s a perfect angle for you to just hold and not make micro adjustments. Because of the freeform camera in Bowser’s Fury, it’s harder to get a straight on camera.
In the main game, if I was presented with a challenge like this, they would have one of the camera angles be directly behind or to the side of mario so you could just hold a direction and go. But here, you have to stop, spend a few seconds lining it up PERFECTLY, then you have to speed through. You can’t stop or you’ll get hit. Kind of nitpicky, I know, but it’s worth pointing out.
Despite all that, Bowser’s Fury was an overall enjoyable experience for me.
It’s a distinct change of pace from the main game. While I did say it felt like the open world was just a substitute for a world map in that the challenges didn’t really interact with each other, it was still fun to physically walk over to the challenges instead of sitting through a loading screen.
Each time you run through one of the gauntlets, it’ll get more difficult or you’ll get a completely new objective and you can run through it again for another shine. I was kind of surprised at how difficult some of these shines got, the difficulty curve ramps up really quickly considering how short this mode is. But I’ll save talk about length for later.
One of the complaints I saw about Super Mario Odyssey is that you got a moon for doing almost anything, to the point where they felt meaningless. I didn’t really feel that way, but it’s something I can understand. The shines in Bowser’s Fury comparatively feel meaningful. It’s like they took a world from Odyssey and removed all the moons not related to platforming. If this was DLC for that game instead of a mode for 3d World, the shine count probably would have been doubled with shines like ground pound this glowing spot, talk to this hidden NPC, or play jump rope for a bit. There’s no fat like that, it’s all platforming goodness.
Bowser Jr. Is an interesting addition. He follows you around like Navi in Ocarina of Time, but he’ll occasionally attack enemies and grab coins for you. There’s even an option in the settings to adjust how often he’ll do stuff on his own, so if you want to kill all the enemies yourself, you can just set him to not do anything.
If you press the R button, a cursor will appear on the screen, and you can tilt your controller and tell him where to go and what to attack. It’s kind of awesome, it makes me wish all Mario games have a system like this going forward. There’s a few shines in the game that require you to collect a bunch of blue coins before a timer goes off, and you can use him to collect coins that you missed. It allows players that aren’t as good at platforming to complete some of the harder challenges.
Nintendo has always struggled with making games accessible to people who aren’t as good at platformers, and I think this is a great step. It doesn’t treat you like an idiot for using Bowser Jr. to reach a red coin you’re having a problem get, it’s a perfectly valid strategy. And it raises the skill ceiling for hardcore gamers and speedrunners, so it’s an A+ addition in my book.
With all that said, I guess we’re left with the question you came to this video for. Is Super Mario 3d World + Bowser’s Fury worth the full $60 price? Or you’re probably rather asking, is it worth paying the $60 JUST for Bowser’s Fury?
It took me about 3 hours or so to reach the final boss, and to get to that point, you have to collect half of all the shines in the mode. So if you wanted to 100% this, you could probably get 4-5 hours out of it.
Judging whether art is worth the cost always felt weird to me. I’m sure there’s some people out there who feel $60 is worth upwards of 5 hours of brand-new content, assuming they already played 3d World, but they’re probably in the minority.
If you already have Super Mario 3d World on the Wii U, and you just want to play Bowser’s Fury, you’ll only get 5 hours of new content. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good content. It’s great content. But is it worth $60? That’s something for you to decide.
But of course, you aren’t buying just Bowser’s Fury. It’s a side mode to Super Mario 3d World. If you’ve never played 3d World before, this is an amazing value. I would recommend the game even without Bowser’s Fury for $60. It’s among the best Mario games of all time. And Bowser’s Fury is just the cherry on top.
It does kinda suck that Nintendo has fallen into a slump of re-releasing Wii U games at full price, with side modes or small additions to try and justify that price. But whether or not you like it, Super Mario 3d World + Bowser’s Fury is $60. And if I’m being honest, that’s a great value. Even if the game is 7 years old.
Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this, I’d appreciate if you subscribed. At this point, literally any engagement at all helps. This is kind of a different video than I usually put out, but I really do like 3d World and wanted to put together a quick review on it and Bowser’s Fury. I’m currently working on another video that’s also kinda different from my usual content, so stay tuned for that. Again, thanks for watching, and see you on the flip.