Quick Look: Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury

I admittedly love SSJB4 Mario, but the idea of mapping 3D World's control scheme to the open world is weird. Hope they hang onto some of these ideas for Mario: Valhalla, the obvious follow-up to Odyssey

Who is the person on the dev team that has the unhealthy obsession with cats? It's weird.

I didn't really enjoy Bowser's Fury at all. I found traversal between the islands tedious and more often than not the Bowser mechanic impeded fun instead of enhancing it. A rare Mario misfire for me, the likes of which hasn't been seen since Sunshine.

3D World is still great, though.

I'm disappointed that they didn't show the online multiplayer. I'm wondering if it works well. It was really bad on Mario Maker 2's release.

A kaiju is a strange beast. Cat Mario is definitely a strange beast.

Bowser's health bar refreshes twice before you hit 50 shines. and 50 shines is the minimum to beat the game.

@slinkdickens: i've seen varying reports. depends on each players internet set up and the level chosen. some seem to run fine and some are just constant buffer/slow down fests

#BradGoesForChampionsRoad #TeamBrad

For reference: you need to get all three green stars per level, every stamp, and hit the top of every flag pole at the end of levels (if I'm not mistaken.) It's not too hard to unlock, but you have to actively try as you're progressing through the game (you going past the green stars in 2-1 for the sake of speeding thru the level made me gasp a bit lol.)

A handful of this stuff is harder to get later in the game and you may need to look up a guide to get one of the three stars or something, but for the most part it isn't too difficult to get done. It's also satisfying to have every star up that point in the game and crush a level with a star requirement by like 30, 40, or even almost 50 stars.

The Champions Road/World Crown is surprisingly hard - I recall having more trouble with it than Darker Side from Mario Odyssey. Maybe Mario Galaxy 1 or 2's fuck-you late game levels might been a bit harder? Not sure, but maybe I had the easiest time with Odyssey of them all because that game plays the best out of all of the 3D Marios for my money. Though of course out there you will hear a Mario speedrunner saying none of them were all that.

P.S. speaking on the greatness of Captain Toad, Jammin' Toad from Odyssey should get his own game somehow...I'd like a Nintendo take on a rhythm/music game.

Ooh, Brad SHOULD do the final challenge of 3D World. That's such a fun level, I went and did it with all five characters. Hard as hell, but worth it. If nothing else, the secret worlds leading up to it are a lot of fun to play, and as an added incentive, the final Captain Toad level is up there alongside it.

Nintendo so weirdly awesome

I only watched the 3D World bit, but I didn't hear Brad mention that Nintendo sped up the character movement significantly in the Switch version. It's worth checking out if you thought the original Wii U game felt sluggish. The Captain Toad levels also now support co-op.

Champion's Road sounds like a fine subject for a new Breaking Brad

Coming the day after Skyward Sword HD announcement, and owning all of Nintendo's previous consoles, it's getting pretty disappointing so many (a majority?) of the bigger Nintendo games have been full priced re-releases. At this point I think I've spent more on games i've already owned and I think I'm done. Wish I could check out Bowsers Fury on its own at a reduced price.

The Pikmin 3 Switch release featured new content with Captain Olimar, I believe. So there is some precedent for Nintendo adding stuff for Switch re-releases, but nothing on the level of Bowser's Fury until now.

I want to play through this but I've very mixed about buying this package at full price since I already played a lot of 3D World on Wii U. But I also can't really guarantee it will drop in price because so far Nintendo has not revived their Player's Choice / Nintendo Selects discount branding for legacy titles on Switch.

Correction: The Wii U was not a good console.

Also Breaking Brad: Champion‘s Road edition is something I didn’t know I needed. Do it, Brad.

I'm glad they ported this game. This is an underrated Mario game. It's nice to give this game a chance for a larger audience.

@slinkdickens: It's not good. I've spent a few hours with it and it varied wildly in stability. Sometimes it would be totally fine for 30-40 minutes and then would be almost unplayable for another 30 minutes. Tons of stuttery lag.

I 100% agree on the Champion's Road for Breaking Brad. Count me in!

Bowser's Fury is fun enough but I vastly prefer Odyssey and seeing people talk about this being some mind blowing revelation with the "open world" aspect has been confounding to me, it mostly feels like a larger but more empty Odyssey level in some ways. It doesn't work particularly well at all when it comes to having to go back to the same gate to trigger the new level permutation and even that is inconsistent and clunky. The need to return to the exact same spot to trigger a "new level" kind of flys in the face of the purpose of an open world to begin with. There are great elements here but as a whole I think if you just made a Mario Odyssey style game with a larger more interconnected world I'd much prefer that as Odyssey is plenty open to begin with. I find the density in Odyssey much more satisfying, not to mention the incredible move set.

UMINEKO sea gull in japanese.

umi- sea, neko-cat.

This is generally how I felt after seeing them talk about Bowser's Fury on the recent UPF and this Quick Look. Like yeah, Bowser's Fury is a fun addition, but is the GB staff having some mass amnesia where they're forgetting how open world Odyssey already was? Odyssey has a few "mainline" moons they make you get to resolve the "storyline" for each world, but the other 90% of the time in each world is you just fucking around as you poke and prod at everything looking for moons. Odyssey also wouldn't bump you back to a level select when you get a moon, it was just like "yo you got a moon, here's a jingle, now keep walking."

It's strange to see this be treated as some open world revelation for Mario games when Odyssey is pretty much the same implementation.

@bisonhero: Yeah. This just feels like one of the larger kingdoms in Odyssey, like the Sand Kingdom or something