Talk:Health Meter

Create this article?

Should we create this article? I can't seem to find an article that covers health meters in games such as Super Mario 64, Super Mario Galaxy, and Yoshi's Story. The only article we have that comes close is Heart Point, which really only deals with health in the RPGs. Redstar 05:15, 21 December 2009 (EST)

Wouldn't it be best to just put this info into the gameplay section of the respective game? I don't think a whole article about something as trivial as a health meter would be necessary. - Gabumon^(talk) 05:18, 21 December 2009 (EST)

Ok, I just realized that this would also make the Heart Point article kind of superfluous... - Gabumon^(talk) 05:23, 21 December 2009 (EST)

Well we already have an article on Heart Points, as mentioned above, so it's only consistent. While your suggestion may be best, the idea came to me because we have a Smile Meter article (where I just noticed this same idea was brought up before, with you discussing it as well) and it made sense to group it with the health meters in other games. As it stands now, they're simply not represented. I can go either way. (Also, edit conflict. This was written before/during your comment) Redstar 05:25, 21 December 2009 (EST)

It would also probably be best to add the breath meter here as well. I haven't been able to find an article covering that, either, so if this article were to be made it makes sense to group them together. I recall in Super Mario 64 that if you went underwater and let your breath go down one bubble, when you came up both your breath and your health would be replenished, so the two are tied together. Redstar 15:42, 21 December 2009 (EST)

Yoshi's Universal Gravitation

It's also appeared in Yoshi's Universal Gravitation (GBA game with moton sensors), who can add stuff into article? SWFlash

SSB series

It's more like a Heart Points than Health. Should we move it? SWFlash

Donkey Kong Jungle Beat

Should we include the health topic for Donkey Kong Jungle Beat and its New Play Control! version? Juju1995 (talk) 13:59, July 22, 2023 (EDT)

Well if it fits the description, yeah, we should cover it. It's me, Mario! (Talk / Stalk) 04:03, July 23, 2023 (EDT)

Split Air (Underwater timer) from this page.

Title. I think my reason parameter is pretty good here, so I'm going to block quote with additons

Health Meters and "air meters" are on the same page mostly because Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine have air meters share the UI element of Health Meters and also link the mechanics of both together. In Super Mario 64, they are outright the same mechanic, where the Power Meter's health is also air. (and allowing for very immersion breaking maneuvers where you can swim just to recover your health.) In Super Mario Sunshine, health and air are instead a pair of mostly mutually exclusive mechanics, which ties them together. While you're underwater, the player is mostly under the jurisdiction of air instead of health (you lose the ability to restore health underwater because all your attempts restore air instead) and their user interface for air is an alternate version of the user interface for health. The even are displayed in the same location, so the player is supposed to think of air as an alternate form of health.

More or less every game since has made air and health entirely separate mechanics. Super Mario Galaxy, the Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Super Mario Odyssey have new designs distinguishing air from health, and further they stop being mutually exclusive. In fact, the air meter in Galaxy actually pulls from other fuel meters like Bee Mario and Blimp Yoshi, rather than being an alternate version of the health UI. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze's take on an air meter is entirely separate from the game's health. If you squint really really hard, it looks like the Kong POW meter. In all of these games, the only remaining connection between health and air is being the player loses health when they are out of air. Which is basically makes the air meter a source of damage, and we should not use "can inflict damage" as a cause for merging anything with Health Meter.

(Sink or Swim does represent an air supply as a heart, but it's not health in any way so I don't think it counts as a link. And hearts have an existing correlation with stamina in swimming contexts, through Mario & Sonic takes on 100m Freestyle and other swimming events, without being representative of health.)

So, what happpens to Power Meter in this case? Simple, the Super Mario 64 section stays as is on "Health Meter", and the air article has a truncated version of that section with just the parts about water. They are explicitly the same mechanic, after all!

Oh, and why am I picking "air (underwater timer)"? Odyssey is probably unnamed and Prima strategy page 78 uses "air" and refers to a generic "circular meter" for the air. So it's an article about the invisible force that fills a meter instead of an article about a meter. This doesn't meaningfully change the article's contents, so I'm cool with that. (You could use Tropical Freeze's explicit "air meter" from it's manual, section 9, but this is Super Mario Wiki and we apparently do put the Super Mario series first in article intros to the point of placing a property only applicable to that series in the intro, as with Ring (projectile), so I personally think broad mechanics should be named and mostly defined by their Super Mario series takes. Salmancer (talk) 17:57, August 11, 2025 (EDT)