You don't need a sprawling environment to have a bigger and more agile platforming moveset, though. All of the extreme ninja skills in 64/Sunshine, and Galaxy to a lesser extent, came out of the tight platforming levels. Players took the movesets and used them in ways other than the norm to make a mockery of the levels (especially with precise spin jumps in Sunshine) and it was glorious.
True and it's one of the best parts about those games too. That kind of design works when you're creating the more organic and surreal worlds that adventure 3D Mario is known for that don't rely on intricate straightforward platforming alone for their appeal. Super Mario 64 is where it's most evident, because the sheer number of traversal skills made for interesting worlds that could be navigated with creativity and precise skill but at the same time the actual platforming itself was often pretty uneven, or simple, or sometimes unintuitive (in retrospect at least). Nintendo tackled the challenge of making Mario something new entirely with aplomb though, creating these large playgrounds where issues that simply came with the territory - big platforms, sparser spacing of enemies and obstacles, platforming challenges that don't flow as organically into one another (from a platforming-oriented design standpoint) - were compensated for
beautifully by giving players a gamut of methods with which (and routes through which) to blaze their own unique platforming paths through worlds where even when you think you know what to expect there's something new to discover just around the corner (alongside the sheer newness of being able to do that). Sunshine took things a lot further by seriously making Mario agile and designing an entire game worth of challenging themed stage gimmicks and segments to offset the game's key gameplay difference from 64 being the equivalent of the 3D platforming easy button. So Sunshine was jam packed with skill based platforming sections but part of the skill that comes with playing Sunshine well is understanding its camera and control faults and learning to compensate for it. Ninja skills were achievable but they weren't that intuitive. Which I absolutely appreciate for the satisfaction that comes with mastering them and it's a standout Mario game in my book for it.
3D World's format plays with the pacing and momentum of a 2D Mario game, which has some great benefits IMO that allow it to compensate for characters having a smaller moveset than in the other 3D games. The more rigid map design and the timer both emphasize near-constant platforming while the level design retains the 2D series' quality of being so damn
exploitable, with enemies and obstacles placed
just so, creating challenges with both simple solutions and more complex applications that allow for combinations of basic moves to amount to ninja skills (like discovering that enemies on a given map are placed just right so that they pose a threat navigating the stage on ground level but with a Tanooki suit and some clever timing and momentum you can
use them to never once touch the ground, to use an example from 3D Land). In addition, persistent powerups balanced for the level design and vice versa (and therefore powerups not relegated to stage gimmicks mostly) bolster traversal and survival options and allow for interesting new ways to tackle seemingly familiar 3D Mario obstacles. When you're designing levels that are supposed to last for like three minutes at a time it's a lot easier to take this sort of approach to level design. And when a lot of that sort of design philosophy makes up the game the expanded moveset is less necessary because everything is designed to be achievable and intuitive with the basic gamut of moves that makes up a fairly balanced repertoire - with varying levels of challenge and outside-the-box thinking required. 3D map design lends itself well to this because it allowed EAD to tap into an absolute bevy of gameplay concepts exclusive to the 3D series and still give players a much wider sense of control over their character while wrapping it in a familiar and accessible format where the satisfaction of playing stems from simply overcoming the last crazy thing the game had you do, immediately getting thrust into the next crazy thing (in maps that last three minutes but are often actually pretty damn huge, just linear), and gaining a more absolute and immediate understanding for your character's abilities and movement capabilities relative to the more rigid but more intuitively measurable map designs and challenges as you go. That's not to say there aren't caveats to this design and it's totally understandable why people prefer the more expansive 3D Marios for Mario's range of movement but 3D World's design is spot on for what it set out to accomplish.
