User blog:A, Mori/Super Mario: Canto 34

Hello! Mori here!

This blog post is very different from almost every other blog post I've created, in that it's not at all about Fan-Ball story content, but rather more of a personal post. Something I wanted to talk about and share with friends that I just, didn't quite know where to post anywhere else.

I wanted to share my personal experience with the Super Mario series of games, and about recent experiences that I consider milestones in my history of playing them.

Hi I'm temmori
So, I recently finished a game that took so much out of me. I think I was gone for almost an entire week because I was spending so much time playing three specific games... I'll get to them later. But first, let me explain why I decided to play those three games.

So, the Super Mario franchise. Everyone knows it, it hardly needs any introduction. Mario started out as the playable character in the arcade game Donkey Kong, later appeared in more arcade games that were sequels to that Donkey Kong game, then in his own game, Mario Bros. Then, with Nintendo's creation of one of the very first home consoles, the NES-- an invention that honestly may have singlehandedly saved the video game industry from fading into a confusing obscurity into becoming something that's loved in a mainstream way like sports and parties-- Mario got a new game, Super Mario Bros. This is a legendary title, one that would ensure Mario's role as the mascot of Nintendo for a long time to come. And, of course, even though Nintendo quickly later proved that they could keep customers buying Mario games even if they were almost the same as the first game (Super Mario Bros. 2 JAP, or, as it's known in NA, Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels), or even just reskin an existing game (Doki Doki Panic, which became Super Mario Bros. 2 NA), the producers of Nintendo decided, "no. we're far too creative for that." And then they created even more games, brimming with innovation and originality, redifing the genre they'd created time and time again; with Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario Land, Super Mario World, and Super Mario 64, they just showed how amazing they truly were, outdoing themselves and creating instant classics time and time again. So, of course, myself, being a fine appreciator of video games as a form of media and entertainment, I am just as much invested in liking these games as anyone else is.

And, do to my nature as the determined, overachieving fusspot that I am, I've tasked myself with completing as many games as I possibly can within my mortal lifetime-- not only to achieve maximum enjoyment from the media that is video gaming, but to further my knowledge of the gaming industry as a whole, and perhaps take what I've learned from so many pieces and maybe one day do something spectacular like what has been done before. And I'm not only set on completing every game I can, I want to 100% complete them. I'm no speedrunner, and I'd truly like to get all I can for my money's worth when I'm doing this.

And, of course, no video gamer can truly call themselves an avid appreciator of the media if they're never played a Super Mario game-- there's tonnes of them, they've been around for a long time and new ones keep coming out, and they're all stuffed full of childlike fun and originality.

So, here is the story of my quite recent accomplishment.

All Main Series Super Mario Games, 100% Completed
Now, of course, when wanting to complete as many Mario games as possible, I wanted to do the biggest titles. Bros 1, Bros 3, World, 64, Sunshine, Galaxy 1 & 2, New Sup, 3D Land, 3D World, and Odyssey. But, you see, there's a bit of a thing there. I sort of have an unspoken golden rule for myself, where I almost exclusively play all the games in a series, and also in order of their release. Remakes are allowed, and I myself used the SNES Mario All Stars game to play the first game, the lost levels, the reskin of doki doki panic, SMB3, and World-- in exact that order-- but, unless I'm incredibly hyped about playing a game, or I've been given the recommendation to play it before another game in a series to help understand an earlier installment, I go with my rule of getting the games I can in the series in order of release date. I've broken the rule a bit in my childhood when I just played them willy-nilly, and also recently with Odyssey, which I played before beating... about a half dozen other games, but for the most part that was the rule I stuck with.

I also decided to only do the very main series Mario games. Now, I have played two of the Mario & Luigi series games-- Superstar Saga and Partners in Time, and I do plan to finish that series, along with the Paper Mario series, but I may plan to do that later, because I'm a bit interested in doing the Bowser's Inside Story remake that's coming out soon, but that's also coming out in 2019, so... it might be a while. Also, since Captain Toad Treasure Tracker is coming out for Switch, I'd want to play that, but since that game doesn't even have "Super Mario" in its title, I didn't want it to break the pace of my playing through the series. So, basically, the games I played to officially complete the every "Main" Super Mario game in the series went a little something like this (and I'll denote a * for when I played the game out of sync with the "release date" rule, if i played it before coming up with that rule for myself or for other reasons):

(*) Super Mario Odyssey (2017) ***
 * (*) Super Mario Bros. (1985)
 * Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (1986)
 * Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988)
 * (*) Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988)
 * Super Mario Land (1989)
 * (*) Super Mario World (1990)
 * Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins (1992)
 * (*) Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island (1995)
 * (*) Super Mario 64 (1996) **
 * Super Mario Sunshine (2002)
 * New Super Mario Bros. (2006)
 * (*) Super Mario Galaxy (2007)
 * New Super Mario Bros. Wii (2009)
 * Super Mario Galaxy 2 (2010)
 * Super Mario 3D Land (2011)
 * New Super Mario Bros. 2 (2012)
 * New Super Mario Bros. U (2012)
 * New Super Luigi U (2013)
 * (*) Super Mario 3D World (2013)
 * Super Mario Run (2016)

** : Originally, as a child, I played the Nintendo 64 version. However, I didn't 100% complete that, and for my 100% completion run I played Super Mario 64 DS, the DS remake.

*** : I totally played this one before I completed most of the Wii U and Wii era games.

For Super Mario 3D World, that one is kind of odd. I... sort of played it when it first came out, with one friend. I later tried playing it by myself to its completion... but I just couldn't do it, I lost interest for some reason. So, I decided to remotivate myself by playing with friends. Of course, needing friends to play it with meant that I would have to work with their schedules, thus I disregarded my release date rule so that I could more easily accomplish such a task quickly.

And, in no particular order, partially because it would be a pain to remember what games I did in what order as a child and to also list them in the order I did them to 100% completion, I did full runs of every main series Super Mario game. Just to top it all off, after finishing with Super Mario Run, the new free DLC for Super Mario Odyssey came out, I did every other accomplishment there was to do in that, getting the highest rank in Luigi's Balloon World, getting the updated ending photo, and finally putting the lid on the Super Mario series... for now. Of course, more games will come out, and I haven't completed all the spin-off titles, so that's not something I have bragging rights to quite yet.

But then, after doing all this and checking these accomplishments off my list, I noticed something... there was actually one game I hadn't 100% completed.

The Super Mario Maker Conundrum
Super Mario Maker.

Released in 2015 for the Wii U, Super Mario Maker is a level creator, where players have access to four different styles of Super Mario 2D-sidescroller games, many classics items and enemies from the franchise, and more new bonus features for fun. Now, this... is an odd one to do.

In technical terms, 100% completion means doing everything that you can possibly do in the game. Which, for Super Mario Maker, would mean playing every user-created level to completion, getting every one of those little flag icons to pop up. However... that may very well not be possible.

There are an utterly ridiculous number of Super Mario Maker levels, I believe an estimate of just the first year put it somewhere in the range of over 7 million, and we're now getting close to the third year. Some estimate said that if someone were to play every created level of that game, all over 7 million of them, and complete them all in one minute, they would have to play for over a decade to complete it. And that was just in the first year. Since then, many more levels have been made, obviously most of them going to take over a minute to complete, and many more will continue to be made.

So, I figured, it's obvious that I won't be able to do all those levels. Should I just get all the costumes, do all the staff levels, and play the most famous levels? Maybe, I thought, I would be satisfied with that as a sort of "completion" of that game. It certainly was a difficult task, and one that would take a long time...

But, would it really honor the spirit of the game itself? Doing the bare minimum to say "I did it all" in Super Mario Maker, a game with potentially endless content?

I wasn't sure.

So I decided that, to honor the spirit of Super Mario Maker, the spirit of player-created levels, of ROMhacks... I would play the most famous ROMhacks of all time. To do more 100% completions. To challenge myself. To honor what Mario Maker is all about: cruel unfair death after cruel unfair death.

I would play the Kaizo Mario World series.

Kaizo Mario World
You might be wondering what this is. Well, it's pretty popular, but I'll explain anyway.

ROM hacking is the process of modifying a ROM image of a video game in order to alter the game's content, such as its graphics, dialogue, levels, gameplay, or other elements. ROM hacks are most commonly used for installing "cheats" into a game, such as infinite health or "moon jump." However, ROM hacking can also be done to use the elements a game has within it to design all new content for it, making it into a very different game from what it was before.

Basically, it's a lot like Super Mario Maker, where you can build levels and such using what you have with the game. However, instead of being limited to just making a level, more things can be changed: The world map itself, the number of levels, the color/appearance of sprites and objects, and much more. Basically, a game can be turned into an entirely different game.

Kaizo Mario World, also known simply as "Kaizo Mario," is a ROM hack of Super Mario World, created by one T. Takemoto. The name of the game is a shortening of "Jisaku no Kaizo Mario (Super Mario World) o Yujin ni Play Saseru." That's basically Japanese for "Making my friend play through my Mario hack (Super Mario World)". As the name implies, this ROM hack was created by Takemoto for his friend, R. Kiba. And, I can assure you, the friendship that Takemoto and Kiba has to be the kind that can't be broken through anything. Because, dear Chaos, is Kaizo Mario a game that will just strip you down, shove something in every hole you have, and then kick you when you're sore, cold, and bleeding on the ground.

Kaizo Mario is infamous for being one of the hardest things ever. There are so many death traps, so many precise actions one must perform, so many hidden tricks to mess the player up even if they're good, it's truly a cruel thing. Not only does this game test you to make sure you are a GOD at platformers, it trips you up with tricks such as invisible blocks that will cause you to fail a jump if you do a jump from the wrong position (which is usually the position in which most players would try to do the jump from), enemies that come flying from the top of the screen right onto Mario to punish you for standing in the wrong spot, and tons of confusing designs that will leave you wondering if you're doing what's intended or something incredibly dumb.

Now, since the creation of Kaizo Mario, many people have completed it. It is infamous for being one of the hardest things ever, but now, hundreds of people have done it, many of which doing it entirely without any deaths, and without using save states.

But Kaizo Mario World wasn't the only hack that Takemoto made. No, apparently, after Kiba played the first ROM hack, they stayed friends, but Takemoto must not have wanted to be friends with him any more, so he decided to make a sequel.

Kaizo Mario World 2.

This ROM hack is even more brutally difficult than the last, albeit much less popular (likely due to the even greater difficulty making it less approachable). For a good analogy, imagine that Kaizo Mario World is like playing through an Expert 100 Man in Super Mario Maker. If that's the case, then Kaizo Mario World 2 is like playing through a 100 Man on Super Expert.

To this day, only a handful of people have ever completed the game. I believe only about a dozen or so have beaten the game without using save states, cheats, or glitches of any sort. This truly shows how difficult a game it is, that so few people have ever even beaten it.

But that wasn't the end of Takemoto's works. No. Apparently, Kiba has a problem with not being able to get out of abusive relationships, because after Kaizo Mario World, after Kaizo Mario World 2, he remained TT's friend. And some time had passed since the creation of the previous two ROM hacks, so many people in the community who appreciated Takemoto's works, and probably even Kiba, too, thought that Takemoto wouldn't make any more of the sort.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Everyone was wrong.

Kaizo Mario World was published by Takemoto at the beginning of 2007, and Kaizo Mario World 2 at the tail end of the same year. And then, almost out of nowhere, Kaizo Mario World 3 came out, in 2012, almost half a decade after the original two ROM hacks.

And just like how Super Saiyans increase in power with whatever number they're one, Kaizo Mario World 3 saw Kaizo Mario World and Kaizo Mario World 2 crank up the difficulty to eleven, laughed at them, said "you are like little babies. Watch this." and cranked the difficulty up to 42.

And, innocent at the time, only knowing much about the first Kaizo Mario World and about how at that point so many people had beaten it, decided to play these three games.

Playing the Kaizo Mario World trilogy, AKA how I went through every circle of hell within only half a month
I think I've already hyped up the fact that Kaizo Mario World 3 is the mosty insanely difficult of the 3 ROM hacks, but let me just briefly state my experience with the first two.

Now, I'd seen a playthroug of Super Beard Bros. doing this game a while back, and I found it interesting. I sort of knew I'd wanted to play this ROM hack for a while, and wanting to honor the spirit of Mario Maker was really just an excuse for me to do it. So I told myself to get out there, look up a WikiHow on how I could play the game, and I started. Of course, I knew vaguely about the sequel Kaizo Mario World 2, and even less about Kaizo Mario World 3, but as I played through those games I came to learn more about them and their history.

Kaizo Mario World was... difficult, to say the least. As it turns out, Super Mario Maker isn't a very good indicator of how any of the games actually play. After playing through the other Super Mario games, it seems to me like they just copied how New Super Mario Bros. U played, and made all the different versions-- SMB, SMB3, SMW, and NSMBU-- all play like that. I guess I could understand that, as not only would it be more of a chore to code all the different versions to play differently and just like the original games, it would also lead to the different versions being even more asymmetrical. And, well, I think that might have been especially hard on the SMB and SMW levels, as in Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World, the controls just don't feel as good as they do in Super Mario Bros. 3 and the New Sup games, so it's a fair choice. But, for someone whom was rusty with how Super Mario World played, and constantly got muddied up about the differences between the SMW ROM hack and the levels of Super Mario Maker, it was a tad hard to adjust.

Also, my play style was sort of... not ideal for this type of game. You see, I like to pause and wait at times, so as to gather myself and so that I can see more of what's coming ahead, rather than rushing forward and trying to go off of both a momentum of actual game speed and a momentum of exhiliration through progress. For this particular game, it seemed like my timidness-- although it likely saved me from just rushing headfirst into every obstacle, which might have killed me more if I hadn't figured out what to do for each part of a level-- was now the greatest cause of losses within the game. I would stand still at the beginning of a level, and then within only a few seconds enemies would descend upon me and kill me. After reaching a new platform, I would wait, and then a well-placed Cheep Cheep would fall from the sky right into Mario, draining another life. I would go to the end of a platform and try to see what would come next, only to load the next part, thus either causing more deadly obstacles to appear on screen or causing whatever I needed to progress to go off without me. It was, as all the hype suggested, brutal and difficult.

But not impossible.

And so, through hundreds of deaths, and many hours, through I believe about five different major play sessions, I completed the game.

Now, while doing this, I did some more things to help record my statistics for the playthrough. One, I recorded everything: I used a capture card to record the game itself on the screen it appeared on, and a camera pointed at myself-- with both my face and controller within the frame-- to record everything there was to be seen for this. I knew that the Kaizo Mario playthroughs got much of their appeal from the rage they induced on the player, and, despite whatever embarrassment I was worried it might cause me, I decided to record it for myself so that perhaps one day in the future I could look back at the footage and laugh. (However, I am serious about this, I feel that I am NEVER going to post this footage anywhere publicly. I dislike how I look and the sound of my voice for most of it.)

Another thing I did was I got a setup to help me keep track of how much total time I spent playing the game-- with a timer break for each level-- and a counter for how many deaths I had. This was simple, I just used foot pedal controllers hooked up to my computer-- one for the timer (which would do a "lap" when I pressed the pad with my foot, so that when I touched the goal ring for a level I would also tap it with my foot to get the time it took me to complete that level while also still going), and one for the death counter (which was just a counter that would go up in one increment for every time I pressed the pad, so every time I got a death I would easily press it with my foot and it would go up by one, signalling one death). These numbers would be recorded on my computer, and I would later attach them to the footage I got from the capture card and the camera.

Putting everything together was actually amazingly easy. You see, Super Mario World isn't large enough to cover the whole screen on a computer, so it had space on the left or right that's just empty-- perfect for putting other things next to it. By adjusting my camera footage, the recorded timer, and the recorder death counter to the leftside of the screen just right and putting it all in a layer behind the capture card footage, I was able to make a pretty good-looking setup. Of course, as I said before, I am FAR too embarrassed of the contents of the footage itself, featuring me failing several times and looking like an idiot throughout, not only sounding and looking bad as I normally do but also wailing out even worse than normally due to how upset and flustered I would get, so I'm never going to show this-- and I wouldn't ever do so without editting it to cut out any part of the footage I would think is unnecessary, boring, or repetetive for viewer pleasure, and since the footage is so long and plentiful and I don't have an editor to help me out I wouldn't post the footage purely because by my own standards it's not that great-- but I do think that it's a nice-looking setup, and, perhaps, if I wanted to make Let's Play videos in the future and post those publicly, I would do something similar to this.

Anyway, Kaizo Mario World was done. Then, onto Kaizo Mario World 2. There's not much to say about this, as it's a lot like the original, just less popular and more difficult. There really isn't much more I can add in commnentary here that would be different from the first game; perhaps just things I came to note about ROM hacks as a whole.

You see, I expected this experience to be easier than it turned out to be, but for a reason that I didn't expect. You know, with Super Mario levels, there's a good difficulty curve to things. While I do think that the Super Mario team really perfected this difficulty curve in later games like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, where it always feels challenging yet beatable no matter where you are in the game (as opposed to levels becoming easier or much harder as they went along), even the oldest Mario games had a consistent difficulty curve. The first few levels were just a little playground for you to get to know your abilities and the mechanics of the world, the next sets of levels mixed things up more and threw more things into the mix, the next sets of levels gradually raised slightly in difficulty each time and added a few more unique mechanics (but now, new ones are a bit more few and far between), and then the final sets of levels were the climax of it all. The final sets of levels didn't really throw you anything you haven't already seen before (well, they might, but that's rare), they just show you combinations of things you have seen before in different, more difficult orders, or in succession, or for a long time. The final sets of levels takes all that you've learned about the game, all the skill and familiarity you've built up, and gives you the ultimate test it can give. And while sometimes that ultimate test isn't the hardest (for example, Super Mario Bros. 3's final boss fight was miles easier than the castles beforehand to get to it), it still gives a pretty consistent and predictable curve.

However, ROM hacks are not like this. This is probably because, unlike normal games, they're not made by teams of devoted and skilled developers, who want to ensure things like a good difficulty curve, but rather they are made by a small groups of people or even just a single person. So, the difficulty curve is a bit different. But, from my experience with Kaizo Mario, this is basically what I gather:
 * The first level is probably the easiest, but it's still quite difficult, and just lets you see how difficult the rest of the hack is going to be.
 * Most of the levels are around the same high difficulty. If you played to the second level, that's really about as hard as most of them are going to get.
 * At least one level will have a really obscure and confusing solution at first, that will likely take you a long time to actually figure out, but once you figure out exactly what it is you're supposed to do, it becomes much easier and much quicker to do it in subsequent playthroughs.
 * Throughout the hack, there will be about two or so levels that are notably more difficult than the rest. Probably around the third or fifth level, you'll encounter the hardest level you have so far, and then the levels after that will seem a bit less difficult, and then maybe by the seventh or ninth level you'll get to a level that's even harder than that other level. These levels are the levels that most people who ever quit playing the game because it's too hard for them quit on, and they become infamous for their difficulty. I'll call these levels "herd thinners.'
 * The final level(s) are some of the hardest. They might not be as hard as some of the "herd thinners", but they also might be; but you can definitely bet that they're more difficult than most of the levels in the hack.

This specific difficulty curve confused and surprised me at first, but eventually I understood and got used to it. And, yes, this trend carried into Kaizo Mario World 3.

But now, of course, to the thing I've been hyping up for most of this blog post. Kaizo Mario World 3.

before playing it
Before I played this, I knew so little about it. For Kaizo Mario World, I'd seen playthroughs of it on YouTube, and it was pretty famous, so I knew what to expect. Though Kaizo Mario World was less popular, I still had seen a bit of it in YouTube playthroughs thanks to the Beard Bros., who played it. But for Kaizo Mario World 3? I knew pretty much nothing about it, except that it existed, and was made by the same person who made the other two. However, I got some pointers from a friend of mine who's a bit into speedrunning, and I got to learn more about it.

Takemoto apparently gave a lot of information on this one, writing little stories for each level, about why he created them, what they were based off of, and other related things. There also existed a translated version of the game, so I was able to read the text boxes that Takemoto put in instead of just having to look at the additional notes not included in the game, but both were a great touch.

Though it had taken several sessions troughout a couple of weeks, I was able to beat the first two games without using save states. However, for Kaizo Mario World 3, sources say that only three people are confirmed to have beaten the entire game without cheats, glitches, or save states. If I were to do this, I would be on a list of people that you could count on a single hand. The thought was a bit exciting. But, I had no idea how hard it would truly be to do this.

With my other playthroughs, I was, usually, able to complete more than one level in a single sitting. However, with this, each level (aside from the levels where you only had to do one thing to win, obviously) all got their own sitting because I had to take so much time beating them. Some levels even took SEVERAL different sittings for me to complete... especially... that one level...

Intro
In the very intro, you have the potential to die. You're blocked off from everything to the sides, there's a bottomless pit under you that you're going to fall into, and a Thwomp is coming down.

Now, for the average player, it's easy to get stuck on this perhaps forever, but I'd seen this before. The previous two games had similar death intros. I don't remember which one this was, because the intros to the three were all pretty similar, but I'm pretty sure this one was just, I hugged a wall side and spin jumped, managing to push Mario from under the Thwomp to above it, allowing him to survive long enough for the intro to end and the game to begin. It might've also been that I duck so that the Thwomp could be avoided just long enough, I'm not sure.

Wakayama
Immediately, a Pokio falls down and blocks your path. So you have to start running right out of the gate to avoid it. Then, note blocks that lead you into a bunch of bullets that shoot and kill you. But you have to use the bullets to get over to a platform. And then throw a Koopa shell at a block with a vine in it to get up to a dangerous upper area that hides, a P switch, which is used to progress past a bunch of brown blocks to a midway point. After that, you need to get perfect timing with a mole that jumps out of the ground so that you can reach a platform higher up, then you need to get perfect timing with hitting a ? block to make an unreachable kicked Koopa shell hit a ? block above it, so that said ? block hits another unreachable kicked Koopa shell, so that THAT Koopa shell hits a ? block above it, so that it releases a Yoshi egg, which can then be used to walk on the Munchers blocking the way forward. Then, after jumping off the Yoshi a bit later for height, you need to make a String Bean jump up to a platform, then a few jumps off of note blocks, then, the goal post is above Mario. There's a hallway you need to go down, then at the end of the hallway, there's a surprise when several bullet bills shoot out of the right side of the screen. So, you run back, avoiding the bullet bills, and then you have to jump on one of them to get the height needed to get to the goal tape. To top it all off, there are munchers and pipes all over the level, making moving around a lot harder, and, in especially annoying areas, a few Charging Chucks-- but these Charging Chucks throw baseballs that kill you when they hit you. They're not a common enemy in SMW, and it's obvious why; Just one of them on a bouncy section can make things ridiculously hard, especially with the added RNG of them changing the rate of throwing the baseballs depending on your height reltive to them at the moment. If there's more than one Baseball-throwing Chuck, though, then it stops being Mario and suddenly becomes a Bullet Hell game.

Now, this level certainly wasn't the hardest level of the hack-- not by a longshot-- but it gives some real perspective about the difficulty of the entire hack. This one level is, in my opinion, harder than any level in Super Mario World. Still just my opinion, but it's harder than any level in any Mario game, perhaps, even more difficult than Champion's Road. That is the theme of this game. Great difficulty. Champion's Road-tier difficulty in the beginning of the game. And I don't consider myself some sort of novice in Mario-- I mean, I've beaten the previous ROM hacks, so this truly is no joke. But even future levels in the hack make this one look like a joke in comparison.

THIS IS CURRENTLY A WIP

I want to write about my entire experience through the game in more detail, and, well, it's taken me over an entire week's worth of time to complete it, as well as compile the footage, so I'll have to look back through it so I can not only describe the detials of my experience from memory, but also through observation of what happened through the footage so I can do it more justice.