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An impressive effort, but rather arduous

As a note, this is a review I originally wrote and posted on my personal blog, which is typically read by exactly one online friend and involves brief reviews of the games I've been playing lately. The review was written in terms of the broad range of games available in the commercial market, but the star-score I'm giving it on here is in context of the type of games posted on rpgmaker.net.

*****

I went into this Super Mario Bros. X game expecting another deliriously fun romp like Super Talking Time Bros., aaaaand...didn't quite get that. c.c It's still a game that's sort of worth playing, probably even well toward the high-quality end as fan projects go...but there are a lot of aspects to it that aren't great design.

First and foremost, the stages are waaaaaay too long, and slow-paced. Each stage feels like a marathon slog, often repeating a concept with only slight variations several times in a row before moving on to something else. This is compounded by the difficulty level. For a Mario veteran, the individual challenges in this game could be considered "moderately tough", often requiring careful execution, but rarely rushing you and never featuring the insane make-one-wrong-move-and-you're-dead obstacle courses which the Mario modding community is infamous for. When you have such long stages of such challenges, though, a slip on one of them means you'll have to slog through a whole bunch of them over again. It's especially bad in the underwater stages, which inherently move even slower. x.x

Although the game isn't masocore-style, the designer does seem to have a bit of a sadistic streak. One of his favorite tricks is to set up a koopa to kick a shell at the player's likely location as they traverse the stage, or worse, fire shells from innocuous-looking pipes. I found this especially irksome on a couple of occasions when the shells were aimed to fly just over another enemy. XP An expert Mario player will leap at an enemy to take defeating it in stride, but in this instance gets a shell in the face as their reward for a successful attack. This sort of design flaw -- punishing the player for taking the apparent best path -- is something the game industry should've learned to avoid from the early Sonic games, and definitely doesn't belong in a Mario game.

Finally, the bosses in this game are convoluted exercises in shoehorning Mario mechanics into alternative gameplay systems. Some of them aren't too exotic, mainly involving tossing bombs at a boss that is otherwise unreachable while various hazards assail you. One of the boss fights actually delivers the bombs for you via a sort of conveyor belt system without you ever touching them, and you simply have to survive long enough for the boss to be finished off. The really weird ones are the Koopa Kids. Somehow the designer managed to turn off their vulnerability to being bopped, so you're forced to damage them via fireballs or some other unusual means. All of the boss fights feed you a steady supply of power-ups via pipes, so you can usually avoid even being immediately vulnerable to death if you play it smart...the downside being, you need that advantage to stay alive in the often-chaotic shower of hazards. -.- It feels like somebody's attempt to make RPG bosses in a Mario game (and not just Mario-themed, actual Mario mechanics). In fact, a lot of the background music selections in the game sound like they come from RPGs, so I have to wonder whether the designer prefers RPGs to Mario despite the fact they made a Mario game. I'm guilty of doing the vice-versa, after all. X)

Bottom line? Can't say I recommend this nearly as much as Super Talking Time Bros., but if you really want some more Mario to chew through, this provides a huge chunk.