Nintendo
Honestly, I’m just happy Toad finally has his own game.
Of all of Mario’s companions, has anyone had to take as much crap as Toad? Ever since the first time he let you know that the Princess was in another castle, Toad has became synonymous with disappointment. His super power in Super Mario Bros. 2 was pulling up weeds, and he was the worst at everything else. And while every other Super Mario supporting character—Yoshi, Luigi, Princess Peach, even freaking Wario—ended up getting their own starring role in a later series, Toad was always the bridesmaid, never the bride.
That all changes with this week’s release of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, to round out the Wii U’s 2014 lineup. If you played Super Mario 3D World, you’ll remember some bonus levels in which Captain Toad—unable to jump because of the heavy burden of his backpack full of treasure—makes his way around tiny cubic levels. You’ve got to figure out how to climb up and down them gathering treasures and avoiding enemies, since you can’t jump on their heads. These levels were interesting, often challenging, little puzzles that made for nice little mental breaks from the fast-action Mario levels.
Captain Toad attempts to flesh these bonus features out into a full-fledged game of their own. Sometimes, it struggles with that task.
The courses in Captain Toad don’t differ much from the formula in 3D World: Miniature, compact, cubic, and usually hovering inexplicably in space. The captain waddles slowly—you can hold down the A button to run, but this simply causes him to waddle slightly faster—and can’t get vertical without assistance. Simple Mario-series enemies like the hapless Little Goombas are thus transformed into serious threats on your life, and you need to carefully consider how you’re going to avoid each one of them.
Nintendo
Insofar as Toad’s last brush with stardom was as part of the ensemble cast of Super Mario Bros. 2, the core element of that black sheep of the Mario family is included here, too: Toad can pluck up turnips out of the ground and throw them at Shy Guys et al to defeat them. (This is not the Super Mario Bros. 2 sequel we deserve, but it is all we have.)
The other key element of Captain Toad‘s design is a gameplay mechanic that the Mario team usually attempts to erase: The camera. The cubic design of the levels deliberately works to obscure three-fourths of the level at a time: Toad himself, enemy characters, pathways, treasures. This is on purpose; part of the challenge is carefully observing everything in the level, then deliberately moving Captain Toad safely through it.
The briefer and trickier these challenges are, the better. Some levels turn out to be so simple that they’re likely to provoke a “Oh, that’s it?” when you make it to the goal and pick up the Power Star. Along the way, you can pick up three gems that are hidden (sometimes barely, occasionally very well) inside each level. These are ostensibly optional, but eventually, you’ll need to use these gems to start unlocking later levels.
Captain Toad was made in a hurry, using a gameplay conceit and assets from the main Mario series. As such, there’s not a great many levels to play. Captain Toad wants you to get as much gameplay time per level as possible, and it’s in attempting to stretch a small game out into a long one that it doesn’t quite get it right.
Besides collecting the three gems and the Power Star, there’s one extra challenge that you can complete in each level. You could technically do this on your first run through, but 1) the game doesn’t tell you what the extra challenge is until you’ve cleared the level once, and 2) the extra challenge is often some random unrelated task that is either unlikely or impossible to perform on your first run. To name a common example, you might be asked to “find the hidden Gold Mushroom,” which is under an invisible turnip leaf in some corner of the world you’d never go poking around in but for the fact that the game just told you that there is a hidden Gold Mushroom.
Nintendo
At their best, these extra challenges put a new spin on a level you’d thought you’d already mastered; often they are just some ticky-tacky chore that pads out your gameplay time.
At their worst, the challenges turn a level into a monotonous slog. The fact that Captain Toad can’t jump or run makes some of these marathons far less interesting than a comparable Super Mario challenge. There’s no way of jumping and leaping and gamboling and generally shaving time and distance off of each attempt you make at the level. You’re just waddling, and you can only waddle so efficiently.
Captain Toad is advertised as having 75 levels, and boy does it stretch every little stubby limb it has to get to that number. Some of these levels (which are flagged as “bonus content” in order to lower your expectations) are boring death marches taken straight from Super Mario 3D World; not designed for this slow-ass character and about as feature-rich as walking across a desert.
Past all of these levels is a tantalizing, hidden prize for unlocking all of the gems and completing all of the challenges. The prize, at least the part of it that I can currently access, is the unfun marathon slog to beat all unfun marathon slogs, having little to do with the parts of Captain Toad that were fun in the first place.
Captain Toad is great when the level is fresh, the challenges are hidden and the gems are uncollected. But in attempting to turn what could have been a brief, small game into a full-fledged retail release that it could sell for $40, Nintendo slices this mushroom a little too thin.
No comments:
Post a Comment