But it's wrong, and I'd even say some Mario games have levels beyond the Lost Levels in terms of difficulty. Yes really. And if you think said game is harder than Kaizo Mario World or I Wanna Be the Guy, you are in for one heck of a rude awakening when you try either game (and don't even think about Pit of Death unless you're willing to give up the next ten years of your life attempting it without tool assistance and save states). So here are the five Mario games which I consider as possibly comparing to the Lost Levels in part difficulty wise.
Yoshi's Island DS
Possibly the one Mario game people can legitimately call Platform ***, this game's difficulty level was like a sheer cliff, and only went up far more when the secret and extra levels rolled around.
True, this did have one big difference from the Lost Levels... the game was probably more poorly designed and it's likely (give Artoon's lack of quality testing) that much of the difficulty may have well have been unintentional and due to them not giving a ***, but as a result, the secret and extra levels ranged from merely Nintendo Hard to a difficulty level resembling a badly done Youtube ROM hack of the original.
[There should be a picture here, but no one's taken one]
For the people that haven't played the game (or really, really despise it and think it's a horrible game, aka Artemendo), here's a quick summary of the secret levels. For the bored people out there, note that these levels are probably longer than most other levels in the game, and that just one death is likely going to send you back about three rooms.
Welcome to Yoshi Tower is the first level here. It's not the most difficult one, but it's pretty easy to destroy your only path upwards and leave our poor hero trapped as the rising lava burns him alive in an instant kill causing piece of trauma. It's also one where the last red coin comes down via Fly Guy just near the goal ring, catching out hasty players and causing much anger when the player realises they have to play the whole level over again.
Yikes! Boiling Hot! is the next level. Of note should be that Artoon is having way more fun with the level names than the level design, and that this is probably the only level in video game history where every single room could theoretically end with you forcd to make Yoshi commit suicide. Whether it's being too slow in the first room, killing the enemies in the second, being stuck between an approaching ball and chain and lava in the third or having the Crusher Blargg destroy all the platforms in the final one, it's pretty much a good guide in how best to aggravate people playing your video game.
There's also a great example of the kind of 'traps' Artoon thinks are fun, quality level design in one of the rooms. You see, you have to knock down floating rocks with eggs to make platforms over a lava pit at one point, and for about two or three of these rocks, it's just normal. Knock it down with an egg, cross over immediately and you're perfectly safe. Not the next one though, because in a move clearly designed to catch out hasty Yoshi's Island DS players, the next rock is basically a trap. You knock down the rock, cross over immediately... then hear a rumbling sound as a huge waterfall of lava crashes down and kills Yoshi in one hit. Then you start losing it as you realise the last checkpoint was about two rooms back and that you've got to go through about half an hour of platforming all over again.
The Japanese name is hilariously blunt though: On top of the Boiling Lava
But A Light in the Dark is where it really starts to get obvious that this would be a much better game with save states and rewinds. As the name suggests, the whole level is nearly entirely in the dark, lit with a few candles and torches. What the name doesn't suggest is that about a third takes place in what can only be described as an enormous warehouse filled with instant death spikes, multiple paths, tons of collectible objects you could easily miss, a jump with about half a pixel of error and arrow *** that have to be rode around. Escaping this *** has to finish the level, right? Right? Oh, bad sign.
Part 1. An easy bit of part 1. The hard bit involves skiing. Guess where the name of the level comes from...
As
you may have also guessed, it's not the end of the level. No, you end
up outside, in the dark, in an ice level. If you think this can't get
any worse, it then dawns on you it's a skiing section. You know, the
Yoshi skiing sections with very awkward controls, no way to stop and
very difficult to judge jumps. Except here, the jumps are blind and
half the section comes down to trial and error, and about fifty lives
lost after realising the margin of error allowed is literally non
existant.
Unfortunately, it still doesn't end. Nope, now some
platforming, some annoying crabs to dodge, some more spikes and
bottomless pits and some narrow passageways. When you do finish, I hope
for the sake of your sanity you got all the items, otherwise you'll
have to start the whole level over.
Hurry up and Throw is next,
and it's not actually too bad. Auto scrolling, the level technically
loops if you don't get in the door in time, and a bit of jumping around
cement blocks in the sky. I guess they threw it together the day before
the game's release.
Finally, you've got what many consider
Platform ***, Yoshi's Island Easter Eggs. It's not really a problem
checkpoint wise, but it's practically a collection of gimmicks too cruel
to use in normal levels. The first is getting through a maze of narrow
passageways with spikes on all sides while riding a Lakitu cloud (and
getting a key to a door), and some of the others involve:
Room 1. That's the harshest first room of a level I've seen in my life.
1.
Really fast darkness area. You activate the light switch for less than
ten seconds every time you hit a switch, so much of it is navigating a
gigantic room in basically pitch blackness.
2. Appearing and
vanishing platforms, via a Woozy Guy jumping on and off the switch.
It's very easy to *** up here, by falling through the floor and the
platform appearing. slamming Yoshi into the deadly spikes. As you may
have guessed, you need to get a key, and the door is located on a
platform right above the start, so not entering in time sends you back
to the beginning of the room.
3. Egg platforms on a line guide.
Throwing eggs at the platform speeds it up, so to go fast, you have to
rapid fire shoot eggs, and to slow down, you have to shoot them slowly.
As you may have realised, this isn't exactly a well thought out
gimmick, as you can very easily run out of eggs, hence dooming poor
Yoshi to death, run out of steam and get stuck in the middle of a pit of
spikes with about two feet of ground to stand on, or go too fast and
slam into something, sending Yoshi back to his death via spikes. Again.
4.
Finally, you've got a cruel room involving really, really fast arrow
*** (about triple speed at minimum), keys, a locked door and lots of
dangerous spikes lining every possible part of the wall. All part of a
perfect recipe for dead dinosaurs.
All in all though, Yoshi's
Island DS is definitely a harder game than the Lost Levels in some
aspects, and is certainly nearer what can be considered Kaizo.
Wario Land 4's Super Hard Mode
Yes,
Wario Land 4. While the normal mode of the game is better described as
'easy mode', and the hard mode as normal difficulty, the Super Hard
mode is freaking insane in some levels.
The first thing you'll
notice if you played it, is that the developer's method of increasing
difficulty is simply the good old 'throw more enemies in the levels and
statistically up the aggravation' method Sakurai and co were so fond of
in Super Smash Bros Brawl. Literally, they tripled the number of
enemies in the game, so wherever you'd usually fight one, you see a trio
of them walking towards you. Unfortunately, that's not a
particularly... fair way of making the game harder, especially
considering by default you've got just one heart in the healthbar and
not a great deal of room to dodge enemy attacks.
This gets rather apparent in certain levels, but some notable aggravating ones are:
40
Below Fridge, where you have to climb those *** climbing nets. Having
to dodge those Yetis sending Wario off the nets in Frozen form as well
as icicles falling on his head makes the level far harder than it needs
to be, because the knock back is ridiculous. I've had to do the final
climbing area a few times myself on this difficulty level, because if
you fall, you get send basically two rooms back, all with the timer
ticking down.
Other problematic levels just don't give enough
time on the clock when escaping. Like Pinball Zone, which is entirely
possible to beat... with maybe seconds left on the clock. *** those two
puzzle rooms after the frog switch! It's very easy to run out of time
in them, especially if you miss throwing the pinballs into those weird
machines or get hit by a spark. It's also very easy to panic, which for
someone like myself (who panics at every possible opportunity) is...
annoying.
Some other examples include some quite... unfair enemy
placement (come on, at least two levels have enemies that'll kill if you
don't move fairly quickly at the start of the level, like Crescent Moon
Village), and any areas where progress is marked by slow, somewhat
clunky and random number generator based game mechanics (like the Big
Board or Doodle Woods) are absolutely awful to play through on Super
Hard.
The Big Board in a nut shell is pretty much one of the
worst level design ideas I've ever come across, simply because it
requires a fairly accurate player with good eye sight to hit the blocks
at the right time to get a favourable result. If you're not someone who
has lightning fast reflexes, the dice blocks practically come to luck.
God help you if you don't have 20/20 vision. And even more so when the
timer's ticking down, you have to land on the Keyser space, and the
world's most adrenaline pumping alarm clock theme is going off in the
background (talking of which, they really should put the 'Get Out' theme
as the sound for an alarm clock. You'd never sleep in again. Or maybe
either the Rambi Rumble or Haunted Hall music from Donkey Kong Country
2).
There's also coin collecting, which pushes the difficulty
beyond even the worst of the coin collecting in Mario 64. You know how
so many people talk about how hard it is to get that last coin in Lethal
Lava Land to get the world record? You haven't seen nothing yet,
Beating a single Wario Land 4 level 100% on Super Hard requires
memorising the level, getting all the hearts first, keeping your health
at max while killing everything that moves and hoping a certain Pirate
Ghost doesn't take your money away before you reach it. It makes those
whining about how hard it is to collect all the coins in 3D Mario games
look like a bunch of complete wusses.
On the bright side, you
have to give Nintendo some real credit here, the amount of work put into
the harder difficulties in the game is outright incredible. Really,
Hard Mode for example even has certain new enemies you won't find in
easy mode with different graphics and attack patterns, Super Hard
changes up the mini games to have new strategies and graphics and the
ending has new pictures for Super Hard mode which hardly anyone will
ever see.
Trial Galaxies and Purple Coins
Also
known as the two things in Mario Galaxy most likely to give people
grief bar the trash destroying missions. It's debatable how hard they
are, or whether they're harder than the Lost Levels (well, I'd say
they're harder than the first six or so worlds of said game)
For
the Trial Galaxies, it's best said that none are more difficult than the
others. They're all roughly at a level of 'difficult', but too many
flame wars have come up about which one of them is toughest. Truth be
told, my guess is that everyone has at least one motion control scheme
they find unbearably difficult, one they find extremely easy and one
that they find just average.
It's just different to each
individual. Some players can ace the Loopdeeswoop Galaxy and the Manta
Ray riding without any effort but find the Rolling Gizmo Galaxy and Star
Ball a complete nightmare, while others the opposite, and yet others
still will find the whole bubble aspect of the Bubble Blast Galaxy a
pain.
But everyone will hate one of the levels at least and
there's no denying these are still somewhat of a challenge, even for
proper Mario pros.
The purple coin missions are the other hated
aspect of the game, and the other hard element. More precisely, most
people find two missions will mess them up most, Luigi's Purple Coins,
and Dreadnought Purple Coins. Not to say others aren't hard (I've seen
people have severe trouble with the Ghostly Galaxy and Battlerock
missions as well), but those two mentioned above get the most complaints
on message boards.
It's easy to see why. The former has just so
much of the ground being unstable that it's a challenge to not cross
your own path, and those without much planning (although I've gotten
through it nearly every time completely without any thought whatsoever)
tend to trap themselves in a corner and have poor Mario plummet to his
death.
The Dreadnought Galaxy however, is a very different kind
of mission. To put it simply, it's tricky because it's the nearest
thing to an interface *** the game has. Normal gravity is tricky, but
fine. Upside down gravity and lots of cannonballs and explosives? Very
easy to mess up and fly to your death in the sky. Considering the
platform is also 3D, and you can miss the coins, this means many will
have to restart the level over and over. When the platform has sideways
gravity on the other hand, that's just a little ridiculous.
But nothing in Super Mario Galaxy lived up to the toughest part of the sequel.
The Perfect Run in Super Mario Galaxy 2
Also
known as the hardest level in Mario history (again, that Nintendo
themselves made), the Perfect Run is exactly what it says on the tin.
Get through the entirety of the Grandmaster Galaxy (already difficult in
itself) with only one health. And start straight back at the beginning
of the level when you die.
A short description of the sections, if anyone for some reason hadn't played the level:
1. A room with lots of floating mines, Bullet Bill cannons and Yoshi swinging between floating flowers with his tongue.
2. Some flip switches and laser shooters. Very easy room.
3.
A maze of deadly electricity with wind sending you to the right. You
have to get through as cloud Mario, making your own platforms as you go.
4.
Some platforms which go from red to blue and vice versa when you shake
the remote/spin, lots of laser shooters, grey octopus things as enemies
and disappearing green floor tiles from Luigi's Purple Coins.
5. A
level involving jumping across giant blocks from the Supermassive Galaxy
while avoiding moving laser beams/electricity, and then going through a
maze of moving lasers and Paragoombas with pull stars.
6. Lots and lots of Hammer Bros. Three Boomerang Bros at the end. Kill the latter, avoid or kill the former.
7. Finally, the gate planet with Rosalina and a star.
The
above all has to be done with no checkpoints and one health. And oh
dear God is it difficult. People have lost 50 lives here. Others 100s,
and others thousands of lives. It varies, the rare few have been
either skilled or lucky enough to beat it on their third, or even first
try, but in general, many people have trouble with this level.
Forget
the 'You are a Super Player' message from the Super Mario World Special
World, they really needed to put it at the end of this level. The
level in general makes the Lost Levels look like a piece of cake, and it
has some of the nicest music around. However, some thought this wasn't
hard enough:
The Rosalina text is hilarious too:
Luigi,
you are truly extraordinary to have managed to reach this place... And a
little insane... However, you have truly earned the star you see here.
May MrBean35000vr die painfully.
And some took Yoshi to the end of it with Infinite Flutter Jumping.
New Super Mario Bros Wii Secret Levels
Yes,
this is kinda underwhelming after having already mentioned Yoshi's
Island DS, Super Mario Galaxy 2's Perfect Run and the insane hack of the
latter shown above. But it's still difficult, so I think it honestly
merits a place on this list.
When people heard this game would be
debuting the Super Guide, they immediately panicked and thought Mario
games would never be difficult again. However, as the special world
shows, boy were they wrong. World S was absolute ***, and while the
difficulty varied level to level, at least two in my opinion stood out
as hard enough to cause serious grief.
First of all, was the
easier one, 9-3. You know, Homing Bullet Bills and Banzai Bills, in
great numbers (and with more intelligence than those in Mario hacks).
Never a good combination is it, especially when about four were on
screen at once and Mario was small at the time.
The second one I remember is 9-7. As does TV Tropes apparently, it's the page image for ThatOneLevel, Platform Game.
Above: TV Tropes says Mario is screwed right now.
It
lives up to the hype. Frozen blocks, Munchers (considering the Mario
hacks, this has to be deliberate, them being brought back solely for
this level) and fire being shot by both Fire Mario and the Venus Fire
Traps. It's easy to melt away all the blocks, making the level
completely unwinnable, getting the star coins is nearly suicide, and
avoiding being hit by fire and plants is pretty much *** as it is.
So
those are my thoughts on Mario games with levels harder than the
Japanese Super Mario Bros 2. Heck, while I'm at it, I think I've
figured out why said game gets so much hype 'difficulty' wise, not as
much because of how hard the gameplay is as much as because the game
wasn't released outside of Japan for a long time and because the reason
many publications give was due to the high level of difficulty. So I
bet a lot of people talk about how hard it is purely based on the
rumours and gossip about the game.
It's certainly not as hard as any proper platform *** game or ROM hack.
If you think Mario games are always easy, you've got another think coming.
