What It’s Like to Play Super Mario Run After Seven Years

“You’re Still Here?”

Listen, I know it’s late, but I felt bad missing several weeks in a row, so I wanted to get something out before the week’s up. I should be hopefully back to a regular schedule next week, but I’ve been really busy these last many days because of, well, you know, moving to a new country. But I barely had time to prepare this one, so here’s something that I wrote before I left on a camping trip. A camping trip in Sweden. Because that’s where I live now. It’s a weird feeling to say that out loud, it isn’t quite real yet.

But enough about that! What’s up with Super Mario Run? You know, the Mario mobile game that came out in 2016 and was immediately and forever overshadowed by both Pokémon Go and the fact that nobody wanted to pay $10 for a phone game? It’s funny, this Mario game represents two things. First, it’s the first Mario game in over two decades (and so far, the only good one) to come out on a non-Nintendo system, and two, its the only mainline (yes, it’s considered mainline, actually) Mario game that I haven’t spent significant time with. It’s also an auto-runner, where the only control you have over Mario is timing when he jumps. It’s kind of an anomaly in the Mario universe, and also pretty much forgotten at this point. I don’t think anyone’s talked about it since it came out, and for all I know, I’m the last person in the world still playing it. Because I finally bought it last week.

Yeah, I got an iTunes/app store giftcard as a gift for my going-away party (more on that next week), and I don’t really listen to music, so I figured, “well, better late than never.” I remember distinctly when this game first came out, and where I was when I first played it. I don’t know why I remember that. It literally does not matter and had zero impact on my life. But I know it was a Thursday in December of my senior year of high school, I was in my AP environmental science class, sitting on the far left of the classroom one row back from the front, waiting for my teacher (the pigeon puncher) to begin class. I had downloaded the app that morning, opened it up when I had time before class, and was immediately dismayed to see that it cost ten dollars to play past the first three levels. I played those a few times, tried the Toad Rally feature later, and then never touched it again and haven’t thought about it since, except for the taste of disappointment it left behind. And yet, the image is still clear as day. I can’t remember my friends’ names or faces but I can remember that. What the fuck is wrong with me?

Anyway, memories aside, the game is somehow still available. Nintendo has a bit of a recent history of shuttering their less successful games (paging Dr. Mario….), and I figured that they would have given up on this one a while ago. But it’s still kicking, I guess, and people (me) are still paying money for it, so why end a good thing, I suppose? I mean, it was never going to be a big money-maker like Pokémon Go or the Fire Emblem phone game, since Super Mario Run doesn’t have any microtransactions or any way to pay more than $10, really. But I respect that, frankly. I get it. There’s some discourse online about how the worst thing to ever happen to mobile gaming was when Angry Birds priced their game at 99 cents, forever lowering both the cost expectations of mobile games (you’ll never see a game cost more than that on a phone and do well, ever) and partially setting the stage for the eventual free-to-play, pay-to-win model of mobile gaming today. So kudos to Nintendo for sticking to their guns about what their games are worth, I guess (even if they’re wrong most of the time), and then letting Pokémon Go pay for everything.

But what is the game actually like to play? Is it worth the ten dollars? Why am I playing it after seven years? Why am I talking about it on here? What the hell am I doing with my life? I can’t answer all of those questions, but I can answer a few, and the answers tend to boil down to; it’s pretty good, I guess. I play it on the bus when I got to classes, sometimes I play it at night before I go to bed, and I’m surprised that I actually want to keep playing it. I don’t generally care for games on my phone. To me, they’re just something to waste time with while waiting for the train or on a plane or something. But with Super Mario Run, I’ve willingly played a game on my phone instead of a game on my computer, and that’s got to mean something.

Is it the best Mario game? Absolutely not. Is it the worth Mario game? No, not really. Is it memorable or unique, with interesting gameplay mechanics? Uh… sometimes? It does have that interesting Nintendo quality of surprising you with mechanics that compound on each other to make challenges more interesting, but it also has that Nintendo quality of saving all the good stuff until the very end and then not doing anything with it. The most interesting platforming challenges that the game has to offer are all way in the back end of the game, and the most surprising moments are typically just remixes of previous levels. Plus, one mode of the game is literally replaying snippets of previous levels over and over and over again. Forever. If you aren’t hunting down the collectibles, it gets a bit repetitive.

But at the same time, there’s a pretty high level of replayability. There are twenty-four main courses, each shorter than 90 seconds of gameplay, but each course has three variations of coin locations, and some of them are quite challenging to get to. Plus there’s at least twelve special courses that have to be unlocked through gameplay challenges, and they offer a difficulty curve that I wasn’t actually expecting from this game. There’s a lot more going on than I anticipated going in, to be honest. It’s a good example of how you can do a lot with a little from a game design perspective, especially because you only have one control option: jump. Every level has to be an iteration of how you make jumping interesting, and the variety on display compared to what you’re actually doing is impressive. From a design standpoint, it’s pretty damn good. From a fun factor standpoint, yeah, I enjoy it. It’s one of the Mario games of all time.

There are things I don’t like about it, of course. The Remix 10 mode, where you play those tiny segments of levels forever, is a grind and a pain in the ass, but also I want to unlock Daisy so here I am anyway. Toad Rally, where you compete against other players to win the loyalty of Toads in a bid to start a coup d’état against the monarchy, is one of the most frustrating things I have ever experienced. Words do not contain the depth of emotion to explain the sheer disappointment and anger I experience when I think I’m doing really well in a level, only to find out I lost by ten coins, and then have the indignity of losing Toads forced upon me. Yeah, if you screw up in that mode, the game actively penalizes your progress by stealing your primary progression items (the Toads, that is). And since you only get a few when you win, it stings even more, because a series of losses could set you back dozens of Toads in just a few minutes. I do not like it. But I want a bigger castle, so what else am I going to do?

But that’s Super Mario Run, I guess. Honestly, I never thought I’d actually play the game, because I’m too cheap to shill out a whole $10 on a mobile game, but I’m glad that I had the opportunity/excuse to do it now. Was it worth waiting seven years for? No, not really, but it’s not like I was even thinking about it in the interim. It’s easy to play on the public transit to and from school, since the levels are so short, and there’s no ads that pop up ever thirty seconds like other games, so, honestly, it’s a pretty good deal for what it is. We’ll see how long it sticks around on my phone, before its space is inevitably opened up to make room for more photos and those bizarre twerk race games that the pop-up ads love to forcibly download (editor’s note: sure, blame the ads. You weirdo).

Hey, it’s better than Plants vs. Zombies 2, another mobile game exclusive I was incredibly excited for and then immediately disappointed by. EA took one of my favorite childhood games and somehow turned it into an absolute slog. It’s so slow compared to the original, which is funny because they, at the same time, made design changes to speed up the gameplay. How do you mess up that badly? How do you fuck up Plants Vs. Zombies? There are some things in this world I will never understand. And EA, and why I keep playing Super Mario Run, are two of them.