The Patreon Letter - 29th June 2019 (catchup)

Hi everyone, Em here! If you've been following along for the past month you'll know that this month has been one where I was sick for half of it and still recovering from the bomb that went off in my schedule for the rest. I didn't mean for these letters to be the last thing I got to in getting back on the podcast network horse, but here we are. This is the horse. 

Mario Maker 2 came out since I last wrote about anything, and it's the one game I've been enjoying in these stressful weeks. The first game was a cool experiment, more thoughtfully put together than you'd expect from Nintendo, and I was concerned they'd not understand what made the first game great when it came time to make a sequel. Thankfully, that's not the case, and Mario Maker 2 is (to me) single-handedly the best 2D Mario product that's ever been made. 

Mario Maker is a toolset to build your own Mario levels, but it's also a statement about what a Mario level is and should be by the inclusion and exclusion of items and concepts. The first Mario Maker had glaring omissions on this front (Mario HAS to have slopes, for example, if you ask me) but the second game has rounded out all of that nicely with a bunch of more esoteric inclusions. Slopes are great, On/Off switches literally change the fundamental possibility space of the game, and all the other random bits and bobs really flesh out the possibility space. I'm personally so taken with the clear pipes from Super Mario 3D World, a game I thought was mostly just solid but has been transformed into maybe the best version of 2D Mario through MM2's adaptation of its mechanics. 

By more fully rounding out the toolset in MM2, the idea of what a Mario level can be has expanded a lot from MM1, and refocused on the ways in which Mario navigates obstacles, enemies, and puzzles. I think that third one, puzzles, is a key point. There were certainly puzzle levels in Mario Maker 1, but the base game didn't even have checkpoints until a patch added them in. MM2 comes with all the tools and all the direction in the single player (more on this later) to create sprawling, multi-part puzzles that, for once, aren't tied to the nightmare of a ghost house. It's a new day in the mushroom kingdom!

This is all helped along by the single player, which has detangled itself from the format of worlds and bosses to provide you examples of the many ways in which the tool set can be deployed in single challenges. These levels are nothing short of a revelation, thoughtful and funny and interesting beyond what Nintendo has done in 2D Mario since actual ass Mario World 28 years ago! (Again, you don't have to make a puzzle a ghost house! You can, of course, but why would you???) One of the biggest fan asks in the first game was the ability to chain levels together into worlds, but Nintendo went the other direction in MM2, removing from themselves the concept of worlds in favor of single experiences. I think this is, in some ways, the biggest leap Mario has taken since going 3D.

What this does, in a holistic sense, is turn the level into the fundamental expression of intent. Mario games have always been about themed worlds and escalation along a path of 10 or so levels and then 8 worlds, a sort of ascending sawtooth of difficulty towards the final goal. By removing all that, you instead create a baseline intent of idea and theme, more than a slope of challenge. This level? Grab all the coins, a thing that has otherwise be de-emphasized in Mario. This level? You have to end holding a shell. The next? A course built out of a car. The difficult of any individual stage can be sorted by the clear rate algorithm, but the ideas are what matter here, a sense of expression that arises wholly from the mechanics in play through the marriage of pieces and tileset/moves. This reasserts, more than anything, that Mario is a game about the movement and interaction than it is any world building or story or half-baked idea of multiplayer nostalgic fun. Leave that to the other games, this is about the jump man. 

This hasn't come without costs, of course. I lament to this day the lack of the amiibo costumes, because my experience with Mario Maker 1 was entirely making small easy themed levels around the characters you could be that weren't Mario. But also, playing a lot of MM2, those things feel more and more like they aren't what MM2 is for. There's a much more focused idea of what Mario is now, and the weirder edge cases have been trimmed away, and for once I think the end result is actually much better than the messier early concept. 

This is the most rare accomplishment in games, and as much as I'll miss that weird stuff, I still think it's worth how much it detangles aesthetics from the state of play. MM1 might have been about picking SMB1 to get a costume and do a cool level, but MM2 is about picking the right tile set for the level you want to build, and while as a visually expressive framework you lose a lot I think the gains in mechanical maturity are evident across the board. 

And it's not as if what comes out the other end isn't still art, it's just the focus of art through level design more than art through visual expression, which married with something as known and staid as Mario really brings the capabilities of the level designer's imagination to the fore. As it should be, since Mario Maker 1 AND 2 are absolutely the best commercially produced level design tools I've ever seen. 

However, if Nintendo wanted to give us a new Mario Paint, that'd be pretttttty cool, too.

Until next time,

Em