games simulate the passage of time. who wouldn't want to get into a videogame to simulate and examine the passage of time? think of goblin grotto, magic wand, 78641, marios, etc... the player is searching for a deeper answers from the videogame, looking under every nook and cranny for possible acheological artifacts and hints for the secret of life and thus oneself... the enigmatic monkey level in 64, the mysterious winds that billow within that level for no reason, the giant leap of faith onto a gigantic murhsroom (a subtle nod to the early yonder days of psychedelics use and silicon valley days, no doubt from miyamoto's part...).
i felt like magic wand reminded me most of marios than jrpgs
mario 1 is a fever dream of KILNG PILIGN KLOONG KLANG TRHROMKHROOM etc, with hysterical strange-but-realized soundtrack, all this against either eye-watering sepia blue, orange or black. truly the simple design beauty-amalgam of nes arcade days (ninja jajamarukun...) and the expansion and ambitions of a larger narrative
kinda mysterious how mario 2 is so subdued compared to mario 3 and 1... there is just the heart-signifier, but apart from that everything is left for other cues = most immersive and mysterious of the trilogy. that's something to think about.
then again, mario 3 comes almost like a total dream, in how completely systemized, rule-bound and detached the whole game is. all the props and environment in first world is almost by rule a strange patchwork of clearly-defined geometric shapes, similar to a children's playbook. even your running and running speed is being estimated by a meter at the bottom of the screen!! and it doesn't help that when flying (that occurs by running at full speed), the parallex scrolling doesn't perfectly and smootly match the scrolling at different occasions, further emphasizing the strange dream-like feeling where you get a feeling you are running against props and backdrop and then probably see who is puling the string behind...
it's probably most closest to a catamites game, in both esthetics and mechanics and narrative. there are also the strange reminders, like how every map ends to a black curtain/background and thematic, almost empty warehouse-like set of simple signifiers - all dreams and journeys must come to an end... sometimes player desperately ascends the very top corner of that map to find SOMETHING else than the melancholic end to every "experience" but alas. doesn't help that the colours scheme has become washed-out from the prior instalments - the player sees mario bigger, and curiouslu mario has non-descript mysterious dot-eyes and hard-to-explain look in the face. why am i playing... why did i start playing? why am i here?, asks the player staring at this lonesome wandering stranger at the ends of the world. ending of mario 2 would had been extremely apt in mario 3 (especially fitting to the Monster Party - esque insane final world of mario 3. who the fuck also thoughts that the battleship levels were somehow appropriate to the settings??? maybe this was the same splitted group who designed ff7, i love it. it's almost like a kafkaian pressure/narrative, of the everlooming threat of SOMETHING violent and life-like is threatening the dream and peace of the dreamer's world). oh and it's pretty great how after every level ending you are thrusted into the stylized boardgame - perspective of the world you are examining, with occasional hints of depth with the items and secrets you find (hammer, flute, sleep box). then you are thrusted into lullaby-like choose a chest - minigame, or the gambling minigames with toad or match a pair - cardgame.
so weird how all of them come of so dream/nightmare-like in structure despite the varing levels of rules and tasks it throws the player in. i originally started writing these thoughts because I realized the feeling I got when I first saw super mario sunshine or galaxy, i felt something had clearly gone off course. this is not the psychedelic fever dreams or even the continuation to the existential exploration of mario 64 (it's a miracle that game even exists at the time, in the black hole called 3d and lifelike-ism (HEH. GUNS DONT KILL PEOPLE-PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE.)) - you outright see it the way mario is forced to talk and interract with the cartoony NPC's and story characters of the world. cue in glass-breaks - sound - the npc's look out of place, because in mario's the world was not based on cutesy cartoons, cartoon logic, narratives, but on dreams, folk tradition esque pictures (middle-age european stiff pictures), of vague signifiers, of a world not really akin to a world. mario doesn't talk to characters, maro talks to the world. it doesn't feel too bad then that everything in mario world is either hostile or an observer or a relic with some vague meaning.
anyways im not complaining, cos we've talked lot about this elsewhere and whops looks like it took me too long to get to point. the solution is get back to existentialism and dreams... i can't say the creators knew what they were doing, or if they are somehow holy eg theres giana sisters and other weirdo canon of stuff, but i do think they sort of hit this curious balance of otherness and accesibility somehow. i can see why it would get popular at the time-
ahhaha
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