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 Welcome to Grass Land |  Fortress of rivets? |  Doom Ship |
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 The King is Saved! |  Coin Heaven |  Map Screen |
Bowser has once again invaded the Mushroom Kingdom, enlisting the aid of his 7 children to steal the magic wand from each regional king. Once again, it's up to our heroes from Brooklyn to save the world... and, of course, the Princess.
After a sort of strange outing to the imaginary world of Sub-Con in Super Mario Bros. 2 (don't get me started on Famicom/NES naming conventions or we'd be here all day), Super Mario Bros. 3 returns to the familiar formula of the original game. Hit boxes to expose secrets, stomp on enemies, and go down pipes. SMB3 was the first game in the franchise to establish that, while king of the Koopa clan, Bowser has 7, shall we say, nobles. The Koopalings were originally described as Bowser's children, but Shigeru Miyamoto axed this particular bit of canon to make room for Bowser, Jr., in 2012. I guess he didn't want Bowser to look like he was playing favourites... or insinuate that he was sleeping around. Whichever.
It also established that the Koopa clan get about on Doomships and that the Mushroom Kingdom is actually 8 kingdoms. It introduced enduring characters, such as the aforementioned Koopalings, Boom-Boom, Thwomp, and Dry Bones to the series, and also proved highly-adaptible for Saturday morning cartoons. I think that's what I wrote on the 15 Essentials page.
My first encounter with Super Mario Bros. 3 was on a Nintendo-built arcade machine at the far end of the corridor at a motel in the late '90s. There was a selection of NES games built into this cabinet, though I can't remember the rest or what it was called (I'm not going to look it up right now because I'll just get lost in Wikipedia like I always do). I was aware that it had been released on the NES before Super Mario All-Stars, but I had never played it myself until the arcade machine. Anyway, I died pretty soon after putting the quarters in and I couldn't have played for more than 90 seconds all told. I wouldn't play it again until the emulator in 2011. However, The Super Mario Bros. Super Show and The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 were experiencing something of a renaissance on home video when I was in summer day care in the mid-'90s, and certainly it had its own fansites on the old web, so I was peripherally aware of the game through the cartoon. I even had an episode on tape myself—something about the Mario Bros. coming out of the wrong pipe, ending up in some lady's kitchen, and being mistaken for babysitters. There were bits of the tape I always liked to pause on because I liked the artwork or something, so the tape stretched pretty badly as a result and I had to throw it away.
One thing I remember about the game above everything else: my best friend from daycare, a girl named Alanna, had an elder brother whose claim to fame was he had copied the possible answers to the Memory Match game from a player's guide, made copies at Kinko's of his hand-drawn chart, and sold it to kids on the playground for 50 cents each. He claimed to have made $25 in loose change doing that over the entire 1994 school year. Later, after I started playing it on the emulator, I made my own list in Word 2010 based on a diagram I found on Google Images in 2017. Anyway, if we're talking about that, we must be done with the review. Well, almost.
10/10, would recommend. It's a bigger, more impressive game than Super Mario Bros. and makes more sense than Super Mario Bros. 2. I'm going to stop short of comparing it to its high-def SNES remake, because I feel very strongly that these are separate games. As in, you can have parallel games on the NES original and Super Mario All-Stars, and you'll get a different experience both times. Essentially, it doesn't feel like it is the same game. Eventually, we'll get All-Stars onto the gamelog and I'll talk about it then.
