Koizumi on Mario 3D Land Taking the 3D Series “Back to Basics”

We posted a snippet from Official Nintendo Magazine‘s August issue interview with Yoshiaki Koizumi about Super Mario 3D Land that talked about introducing more familiar suits besides the Tanooki Suit, but now we’ve got a lot more of the interview to dissect. Apparently Mario‘s taking a leaf out of Zelda‘s book and going “back to basics” with its next installment. With Skyward Sword, this means a more active focus on combat and exploration, and judging by Koizumi’s description Mario‘s going to focus on creating a more streamlined 3D experience that focuses on the traditional mechanics.

I would say that Mario at its core has a very simple, very pop aesthetic and a very functional notion informing it and we may have started to drift from that in some of the Mario console games which are very large and occasionally very complex.

The portable Mario gives us the chance to get back to the very simple basics of the Mario universe.

Of course, returning Mario to his roots involves more than just the core mechanics and traditional Mushroom Kingdom aesthetic – it extends all the way to the way the story is presented.

The story of Mario games is, of course, very simple. At its core, the princess has been kidnapped and you have to rescue her. What we strive to do is to find a good balance of presenting a certain amount of narrative in the game without hindering the gameplay experiences.

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In Super Mario 3D Land we feel that the game does a very good job of presenting all that you really need to know about the world so there is not quite as much of a deep story as you’d find in other games like Super Mario Galaxy where we needed to justify the reason for Mario being in space.

We had to introduce new characters just to explain that sort of thing. So this time around we believe it is much simpler. The world is telling the story rather than a narrative that we have layered on top.

Koizuki also suggested that this will make Super Mario 3D Land feel smaller than previous 3D Mario titles, but that the return to classic Mario philosophies means that this doesn’t necessarily harm the game.

Well I guess we didn’t set out to create less storyline, less power-ups and fewer stages but some of those may well be the end result of this idea of going back to basics.

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As for the number of levels and things like that, our main goal is to create levels that you can enjoy playing many times, and that may have an influence on the perception of how many levels there actually are in the game.

Even given the increased focus on core Mario mechanics, that doesn’t mean you can forget about everything you’ve grown used to from 3D Mario outings like Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy. This is still very much a game that 3D Mario fans will appreciate, understand, and enjoy. He talks about ways in which they’re using what they’ve learned from those games to help enhance their “back to basics” approach, as well as how leftover ideas from the Galaxy games served as a kind of starting point for some of what we see in 3D Land:

ONM: Miyamoto-san called Super Mario 3D Land a cross between Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy. Is that the best way to describe it?

Yoshiaki Koizumi: I’m not sure that mix is the right term, but what I can say for sure is that with Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy, the development staff worked on all of these games with me as the lead. They carried forward that same know-how on how to create 3D Mario environments and 3D Mario gameplay.

On the surface there might be some visual similarities to some of the worlds you’ve seen, for example in Super Mario 64, but I would say that the technology draws more from Super Mario Galaxy in terms of how we present 3D worlds visually.

So maybe that’s why Mr Miyamoto called it a mix but I guess I have a slightly different perspective having come through the entire progression of the game.

ONM: Has 3D changed the design process?

YK: It certainly is an exciting new hardware platform! This being the first Mario 3D world designed exclusively for the system means that we haven’t been able to draw as much from experience on previous portable Mario games.

I guess you’ll remember Super Mario 64 on the DS. Mario’s movements were controlled by the D-Pad in a 3D world so we couldn’t take any direct comparisons there in terms of how it controlled, but I think the Circle Pad movement in Super Mario 3D Land feels much better and we are very proud of it.

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ONM: Where do you start when given a new Mario project?

YK: It really depends on the title in terms of how we begin. This time around it was very easy. Having worked on Super Mario 64, Sunshine and Galaxy 1 and 2, we tried a lot of different new ideas for Mario games in those projects and we felt that there were lots of interesting ideas left over.

This time around it was very easy because we said ‘we have a 3DS and that means that we should create a Mario game in a 3D world with a 3D display’ and that was something that both Mr. Miyamoto and I really wanted to come to fruition.

So I guess I’d have to say this project had a slightly different start from the other in that regard.

And while the direction was very clear in this case, I would have to say that most of the time, Mario is a topic that’s always on my mind. I’m constantly thinking of new ideas that might be able to be used in Mario games. It’s just a matter of finding ideas which fit together and making them work.

It seems like this game was very easy to develop in comparison with previous 3D Mario projects, which certainly explains why they were able to put it together so quickly after the release of Super Mario Galaxy 2. With this basic framework already in place, future 3D Mario titles that take after this style should follow pretty quickly as well.

If you’d like to see the full interview in its original context, check it out at Official Nintendo Magazine‘s website.

Source: Official Nintendo Magazine via GoNintendo