Beat Bowser. Of course I don't have all the Star Coins yet and there's quite a few levels left to play and exits to find...
But I can safely say that this doesn't reach the heights of NSMB Wii. Not even close. It's an improvement over the first game in the series, but the level design is either too straightforward or too annoyingly open and loose in those levels that have lots of secrets. It's largely unmemorable too. Also striking is how much worse the ghost houses are. Instead of focusing on light puzzles and hidden nooks and crannies, they mostly rely on large numbers of increasingly randomly placed doors. Figuring out how they all connect isn't much fun. It's representative of the level design in general. New ideas are scarce and executed with considerably less inventiveness than when they're lifted from the earlier entries. As a whole the design is strongly derivative of the first two games, level ideas mostly taken from the Wii one but executed on a smaller scale and more conservatively, akin to the design in the original DS game.
The coin collecting leads absolutely nowhere as far as I'm concerned, unless you care about what amounts to little more than another High Score counter. This is certainly a missed opportunity and a puzzling "new" gimmick for a series of games that is reaching the point of *requiring* a more unique hook to distuingish itself from previous entries.
That said, I thought the game looked pretty, and I quite liked the 3d effect in theory, but the stong blur and bloom filter added to the background with the 3d slider all the way turned up ruined many of the quite detailed and intricately designed backgrounds with multiple parallax layers. I assume this was added because players got distracted focusing on the busy 3d backgrounds? Either way, it resulted in me playing with the 3d setting at about 30%. In hindsight I'd recommend either turning it up to 100% to get the full 3d effect or just turning off the 3d completely. At full blast the 3d is pleasing, but the background is extremely blurred, which actually ends up being less distracting than constantly looking at a slightly blurry preview of the sharp background art (the case if you're playing at 20 - 50%). The game itself arguably looks best with the 3d off though, the backgrounds sharp, colorful and bright.
The music is pretty much lifted wholesale from NSMB Wii, which is certainly a gigantic improvement over the DS one. But the lack of original compositions is a big disappointment. And the music team's grand achievement this time consists of adding an extra layer of those insufferable synth voices, successfully ruining the game's few stand-out tracks.
The game also probably has the worst designed Bowser end fight in Mario history. Certainly they've been a lot more bare bones in the early days, but this one has the distinction of being uncharacteristically clumsy and unelegant. On top of that it's also somewhat anticlimactic.
And isn't it about time we think up new, better rewards than 1-Ups? The life system is hopelessly outdated considering how easy these games are, but especially here, where the excessive coin collecting will net you an average of 5 lives per level. Hell, I finished the game with close to THREE HUNDRED lives!
So, I'd say it's definitely somewhere in between NSMB Wii and NSMB DS in terms of level design, although much closer to the DS one, sadly. Which means that this is very good, tight 2d platforming, lots of fun, but more forgettable than I'd expected and really lacking in new ideas or that one unique new gimmick to make it stand out. I think with the third entry we've reached the point where we can no longer dismiss this type of criticism. Though this is clearly the most derivative of the bunch, even if it's an improvement over the first one.
