Good. But nothing special.
Super Mario Land was a launch title for the Game Boy back in 1989, and it's the first Mario game to not have the involvement of Shigeru Miyamoto. It shows. Though Land is still a fun game, it's marred by slightly spotty controls and a host of other niggling problems that prevent it from achieving the brilliance of its big NES brothers.
Land's plot is obvious and minimal. Kidnapped princess, go save her, yadda yadda yadda. Still, it's interesting to note the few ways the game diverges from Super Mario's usual formula: the princess is Daisy instead of Peach, the country is Sarasaland instead of the Mushroom Kingdom, and the bad guy is Tatanga, "The Mysterious Spaceman", instead of Bowser. Daisy showed up many times over the years in the Mario Kart, Mario Sports,and Mario Party games, but Tatanga never appeared again after Land 2. Why not? He's pretty cool. And Mario went to space two separate times. Where was that little purple guy?
Anyway, on to the gameplay. It's the usual Super Mario stuff, so I won't insult your intelligence by assuming you don't know how it works- and if you don't, the game actually does a really great job of showing you how. In the Super Mario Land's very first stage, it already introduces you to Super Mushrooms, Fire Flowers, warp pipes, coins, Goombas, Koopas, and Hearts (which take the place of the usual 1-up Mushrooms, since they'd look the same as Supers on a Game Boy screen). World 1-1's got a great atmosphere, with a catchy background tune, and it's very easy, perfect for the very first level of any game.
Unfortunately... the difficulty never really rises above the challenge of that first level. Each following stage has a similarly basic design, with easily-avoided enemies and secrets that aren't well hidden at all. Most of the Hearts aren't found in invisible blocks or on hard-to-reach high spots, but in regular item blocks! And the other methods of getting 1-ups are just as basic. There's an overabundance of easily found secret passageways, mostly located in pipes that you literally cannot miss, and the end of every non-boss level has two exits: a regular one, and one that leads to a bonus game that gives you either a 1-up, a 2-up, a 3-up, or a Fire Flower. The game basically stays this easy until the final World- the 4th World mind you. Yeah, Super Mario Land is also really really short. Even in that 4th world, the difficulty is not challenging, but cheap. Overly large pits, falling blocks, and overshielded enemies, ahoy!
Though the designs of the levels are far too easy, the game does make up for it by giving it a different kind of challenge... and not a good kind of challenge. The controls, far from the utter perfection of the NES games, feel slightly slippery and awkward. Obviously, a game should be judged on its own merits, not on how it lives up to its peers or predecessors, but comparisons to Bros. are inevitable- and even a SM newbie would probably stumble with Land's control. Mario is hard to control once he's in the air. You can't move backwards, so if you make a bad jump, there's no correcting your mistake- bye bye, plumber! And be sure to JUMP off of every single ledge. Do NOT simply walk off of them. Mario, for some dumb reason, freefalls at a speed far greater than he drops when jumping, and he barely moves while in this state, so walking off the wrong ledge is a recipe for a lost life. Also inexplicably, the fireballs from SMB are now "Superballs", which can collect coins (a minor pro) but which bounce all over the place, can have only one onscreen at a time, and almost never hit the intended target (a major con).
Now, I'll concede, the game does have a Hard Mode, unlocked after beating the game once. It's a good challenge, but it's still only moderately difficult, and feels basically the way that the first playthrough should have felt- and since the game doesn't have a battery for saving, you have to beat Easy Mode all over again once you turn off the system!
And yet, for all my griping, there's one thing that Super Mario Land still has going for it. It's fun! It's really fun! For such a short game, I always find myself having a blast every single time I play it, and whenever I beat it, I just want to play it over again. The Super Mario formula is just so perfect that even overly easy level design and mismanaged programming can't manage to make a game bad or boring. By far the best stages in the game are 2-3 and 4-3, which has Mario piloting a vehicle. These levels are just as easy as any other, but they know the primal secret of mankind: shooting things is really, really fun. And in Land's shooting stages, it is really, really fun to shoot down the bad guys in your cute little plane/submarine.
Super Mario Land really isn't a masterpiece, by any stretch, but it's still quite entertaining. And hey- there are more than 20 million Game Boy paks out there, and it's also available on 3DS. You can find it for dirt cheap, so why not pick it up?
