User:Nintendo101



Casual Nintendo historian. Otherwise an artist and a field ecologist. Bio degree. I've had an account here since 2012.

I wrote the character sections for Super Mario 64, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Super Mario Odyssey. I contributed much of the article for Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Sunshine.

I have been a fan of Nintendo since a very young age. My first Mario games (and three of the first video games I ever owned) were Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2, Super Mario 64 DS, and Mario Kart DS. These games were good company for a young kid who moved around a lot and had difficulty keeping long-lasting friends.

During the, I sequentially played some of my favorite games in the Super Mario series to 100% completion. This includes, in order, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, and Super Mario Odyssey. It's been really fun! These are great games, and I always wanted to marathon a series like this before but never had the time. It has been interesting to see where the series began and where it has ended up. The design philosophies, the characters, the art directions, world building, level design, narrative, etc. All good stuff. It might be fun to write something about it some day.

My favorite video game character is Yoshi.

Setting
Super Mario 64 takes place within the walls of Princess Peach's castle in the Mushroom Kingdom. It is the first Super Mario game to explicitly include the Mushroom Kingdom as a location since Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988). The game's levels, called "courses", are not naturally occurring places on Mario's world. They were created by Bowser using the Power Stars he stole from Peach. Most of them are accessed through paintings that hang in the castle's walls, but some are more cryptically hidden or require the player to accomplish a task in the castle before becoming accessible. Some paratextual material and subsequent titles present the courses introduced in this game as real, visitable places outside of the paintings.

Generally, a course is a sprawling location with interactive environmental elements and several levels of elevation. Course often have subareas and collectibles obscured in the landscape that passively encourage the player to explore and rotate the camera. Most courses feature prominent landmarks, such as the mountain in Bob-omb Battlefield or the volcano in Lethal Lava Land, that provides the player with a consistent point of reference that mitigates the chance of getting lost. Like its more immediate predecessors, courses are themed after real-life s (i.e. deserts, mountains, coastlines) and more fantastical settings (i.e. a haunted house, clockworks, rainbow roads in the sky). The theme informs the type of objects that can be interacted with in the level, the types of enemies that can be encountered, and the non-playable characters that can be spoken to. For example, cactus enemies, a condor, and quicksand are in the desert-themed Shifting Sand Land. Penguins, slippery ice, and deep snow appear in Cool, Cool Mountain and Snowman's Land. Most courses contain switches and strikable objects that modify elements of the course, such as Crystal Taps in Wet-Dry World.

Unlike the levels of prior two-dimensional entries, the courses in this game are open-ended and mostly do not narrow the player's focus towards one goal. This was an intentional departure from the level design principals of prior games because the development team did not believe they could be replicated for a fun experience in a three-dimensional environment. Director and series creator Shigeru Miyamoto wanted Super Mario 64 to be a game where players "create their own vision", a decision partially influenced by the technical difficulty of making a precise jump in a 3D environment. This mindset manifested in levels where players were largely free to interact with the world in ways they wanted to, with larger platforms and sprawling spaces that encouraged exploration rather than carryout precise actions to reach a goal. The courses themselves were created using hakoniwa or "box garden" design principals. A hakoniwa is a intricately-arranged miniature garden within an enclosed space, with layers of depth and detail that become apparent to an onlooker when carefully examined. Applying these principals allowed the development team to create intricate levels that surprised players, another important tenet during development. In, where creating miniature gardens is not as culturally prevalent, these types of levels are most often likened to.

Courses

 * Most courses are accessed through paintings that are found throughout the castle -
 * Prior games had world maps - this was the first to depart from that set up to 1.) to would be due technically challenging to develop a 3D space with conventional worlds. 2.) the hub allows a space with no objectives where the player can familiarize themselves with Mario's complex control scheme, learn to have fun with it
 * The arrangement where several levels are accessed from a hub would become the standard for the next few 3D Mario games as well as typify the genre

The player usually completes a level when they collect a Power Star, a token resembling the Super Star power-up of prior entries. It is framed as an energy source that powers the castle. In the normal courses, multiple Power Stars often appear and making contact with any of them completes the level and adds it to the player's total, something the game tracks and communicates to the player on the in the upper right corner of the screen. Accumulating Power Stars progressively grants Mario access to new courses. The amount of Stars required is communicated on ★ doors that seal off rooms containing paintings. The amount of Stars required to open a ★ door increases the higher Mario is in the castle. There are only two instances where touching a Power Star does not complete the course: in Bowser and Cap Switch courses, where the intended

There are three different types of levels:
 * "Normal courses" that contain six dedicated missions and a 100-coin mission. Most of the dedicated missions build off of each other environmentally or narratively. (i.e. The events that transpire in the completion of one mission are reflected in the events of the subsequent mission.) However, some Power Stars can be encountered before the mission-dedicated one can be collected, resulting in some instances where the Stars are collected out of "order". These courses are the most intricate levels in the game. Most include objects that can enable quick traversal between areas, such as cannons and Warp Points. Some courses include accessible subareas, such as the volcano in Lethal Lava Land or pyramid in Shifting Sand Land. There are 15 normal courses in the game, and they are the only levels explicitly numbered and listed on the pause menu for reference.
 * "Bowser courses" that lead to an arena where Mario must defeat Bowser. Unlike normal courses, these ones are narrow obstacle courses that emphasize precise platforming. Each Bowser course features a Power Star obtained by collecting all of the Red Coins, but this does not complete the level. In the first two courses, defeating Bowser allows Mario to collect a Big Key, a different kind of token that completes the level when touched. The Big Key can be used to permanently unlock the door to another floor in the castle. In Bowser in the Sky, the final course, defeating Bowser releases a Jumbo Star. Collecting it does not contribute to the player’s Power Star total and instead frees Princess Peach. There are 3 in the whole game, one for each floor.
 * Secret Courses that are hidden throughout the castle. There are 3.
 * "Cap Switch courses" an analog to the Switch Palaces from Super Mario World. There are 3.

- Though NPCs have been an element of the Super Mario series since the first game and some appear within levels in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (1992), Super Mario 64 is the first entry in the series to feature NPCs that can be spoken to and are framed as having realized lives within the courses themselves.

Mushroom Castle

 * Offers a space for the player to familiarize themselves with controls; devs noted it was important to make Mario fun to simply move around, so having a space for the player to make their own fun was important