3D World

I originally played this game on Wii U and couldn’t bring myself to finish it. However, this month, I played through it on the Switch version (where the characters move much faster) and just barely had the motivation to play through it. Overall? It’s so painfully boring – it has the design philosophy of New Super Mario Bros (which is the equivalent of AI slop). I had a few coherent thoughts during this (why do some levels have extra challenges for reaching the top of the flag if the cat powerup automatically climbs up to the top and can be held as an inventory item at all times? Why is the hub world so useless? Why do all the boss battles essentially amount to standing around for a while?), but the game doesn’t want you to think about it all that much, it’s just meaningless gratification over and over again. “It’s fun with friends!”, you might argue, but so is literally anything. The people are fun, not the game. The score might seem harsh, but this game is so deeply, profoundly artless. 

Bowser’s Fury

“You hate every Mario game!”, you might be saying after reading my Wonder and 3D World reviews. This definitely isn’t true, I just happened to have played two I don’t like this month – in fact, I love this series and want it to reach its true potential. And that’s precisely the reason why I really enjoyed my time with Bowser’s Fury. First off, the entire open world is interconnected – no loading times moving between zones. Second, the game allows you to store all the powerups you find to use later – this makes the powerups far more useful than they usually are in these games. Third, there’s no filler – most games are far, far too long and I really appreciate Bowser’s Fury for not wasting my time, unlike some other game it happens to be packaged with. Is it a perfect game? Obviously not – many of the Cat Shines rely on getting Bowser to destroy certain blocks, but the titular “Bowser’s Fury” only happens once every few minutes; the movement is very underdeveloped – no triple jumps or long jumps or any of the other sick tricks that Mario can usually do, and the final Bowser fight is as overwhelmingly stupid as ever. But even with all that being considered, Bowser’s Fury has more than any other Mario game in the past decade made me excited about the future of the franchise.