Review: Super Mario Maker 2 Joyously Puts Creation in Your Hands

From the second you power on the game, its entire toy chest is open to you, no strings attached.

Super Mario Maker 2
Photo: Nintendo

Like its predecessor, Nintendo’s Super Mario Maker 2 is predominantly what it announces itself to be: an extremely versatile creation engine allowing players to make their own side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. levels, using the mechanics, assets, and aesthetics of the series’s best games. The 2015 original for the Wii U had some strangely arbitrary limits and omitted elements, things that the creator community delighted in finding patchwork ways of recreating. Those creators will find that Mario Maker 2 has matched their ambitions. For one, you can now make slopes that Mario can slide down. And that terrifying evil sun from Super Mario Bros. 3 is now in the mix. Also, auto-scroll levels can be finetuned to change direction and speed at will. Whatever barriers to the player’s imagination existed in the first iteration of this game, Nintendo has torn many of them down.

That goes hand in hand with Mario Maker 2 opening up creative pathways left unexplored by the first game. You’re allowed to create levels that take place in a wide assortment of weather environments, with new chiptunes accompanying the creation of levels from the series’s 8-bit titles. Super Mario 3D World has been added as a visual/mechanical option, which allows for multi-level backgrounds and hazards, along with all the unique and delightfully adorable cat-costume shenanigans from that game. The conditions for clearing a stage can be changed to where just making it to the flag is far from enough. More ambitious is the option to switch any stage to a nighttime mode, which changes its physics. Ice stages are more slippery, and ghost houses have less visibility. Airship levels, in particular, are particularly awe-inspiring for their unique mood and texture, with rain, thunder, and lightning—conditions that allow for sea-based elements to float through the air—now standing in your way throughout.

The most blessed thing about the experience, though, is that aside from a couple of buried secrets, all these tools are all available to the player upfront. From the second you power on the game, its entire toy chest is open to you, no strings attached. Now, the only real barrier to immediate entry is that Course Mode’s user interface is still so heavily designed for a touchscreen. Using the analog sticks or a Pro controller isn’t impossible, but it’s drastically less intuitive than using the Switch’s touchscreen, while undocked, to build levels.

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For those less inclined to just jump right in and start creating levels, not only is there an in-depth and endlessly amusing tutorial, where you’re taught by a woman and her talking pigeon companion, but a full-fledged Story Mode. Surprisingly, there isn’t even a Bowser-kidnaps-Princess conceit this time around: As a result of a complete accident, the hilarious particulars of which won’t be spoiled here, Princess Toadstool’s castle gets completely erased, and a small crew of Toads and Toadettes is tasked with rebuilding. The project costs money, though, and it’s up to Mario to go freelance, running through over 100 custom levels—explained here as “odd jobs”—to collect all the coins he can in order to fund the construction project. Somewhere in there is a sharp commentary on the dangers of gig economy, but more than anything else, Story Mode is a brilliantly tactile and immersive extension of the tutorial on how the myriad assets given to you in Course Mode can be utilized. You’ll leave more than a few courses with devious ideas, and that certainly seems intentional.

The possibilities are endless, and even a cursory glance at the game’s online community shows that those possibilities are being explored to their fullest, and that the limits of what this toolbox is capable of are being pushed. Indeed, some of the best stages currently out there shift Super Mario Bros. as a series of platformers into the far reaches of other genres, form spins on Pong to 2D versions of Mario Kart to elaborate facsimiles of Metroid.

Mario Maker 2’s sole problem is that it’s a fundamentally lonely game. You can share course codes, and follow your friends through their Maker IDs, and, of course, you can experience the worlds and challenges that others have created. However, the only substantive way to collaborate, compete, or build with other players is if they’re next to you on the couch. Designer and developer Shigeru Miyamoto may be a genius, but if there’s any one thing he’s been generous enough to hammer home over the years, it’s that given the option, he wouldn’t work alone. Right now, more often than not, players don’t have that option at all.

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It’s still heartening to see Nintendo show the ultimate in respect to the poor, neglected Wii U by giving its best games new life on the vastly more successful Switch. Seeing Super Mario Maker enhanced to the point of becoming a straight-up sequel is magnificent, even as a few stray three-steps-forward-one-step-back decisions keep the game from true perfection.

This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Golin.

Score: 
 Developer: Nintendo  Publisher: Nintendo  Platform: Switch  Release Date: June 28, 2019  ESRB: E  ESRB Descriptions: Mild Cartoon Violence  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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