Mario has been the heart and soul of Nintendo’s franchises since the portly plumber debuted in Donkey Kong in 1981. His many adventures inspired generations of gamers to go into game design themselves, and create new ideas. In 2015 Nintendo gave the masses the chance to make their own levels with Super Mario Maker, one of the biggest steps forward for the series. It was a breath of fresh air and something that made lapsed fans take notice, especially during the Wii U era. Nintendo has now brought that same ability to the Nintendo Switch with Super Mario Maker 2, and the result is more creative goodness.
Super Mario Maker 2 has brought back most of the features of the first game, minus some ( and the mystery mushrooms are missed), and introduces many more. While creating levels is easy in handheld mode, Nintendo has brought in new menus to allow for level creation when playing in docked mode that work surprisingly well. Designing levels is intuitive and the new features such as the long requested slopes really allow for new ideas not possible in the first game.
More notable is the addition of the new 3D world theme and story mode for the game. The 3D World set actually has a different playstyle than the other 4 worldsets we have, and as such its levels are not compatible with other worldsets. The tradeoff however, is a means of creating more unique levels that simply cannot be done otherwise.
The story mode sees Mario rebuilding Peach’s castle and going through multiple premade levels to raise funds for a bigger and better castle. This mode is great for seeing some inventive levels from the devs, while also throwing in some twists. Among these twists is the inclusion of jobs, or specific tasks to do in levels. As you progress through the story mode, you will unlock new features to use in your levels, but I will not give spoilers here.
Now onto the levels. Super Mario Maker 2 has some of the most inventive levels I have ever seen, even when factoring in Rom Hacks. Recreations of levels from other games like TMNT on NES and Ocarina of Time stand out as amazing to me. Equally amazing are levels that put the game into a different genre, like a table tennis game or shoot em up levels, and even puzzle levels. There are levels that are sequels to ones made for the original Super Mario Maker, and recreations of 3D Mario levels.
There is really no end to what can be done here, from playing as Mario or Luigi robbing a bank, to local and online play with others ( random online only for now, but playing online with friends is coming later). This is the complete package for Mario fans and one that should be in every Switch owner’s library. I highly recommend getting this!