I always found the boss fights in Super Mario
3D world a bit too easy. While the game overall provides a good challenge,
especially in it’s second half, I always had the feeling that the bosses are way too
simple. So whenever I was replaying the game, I decided
to keep crouching while fighting the easier bosses. It just became a habit of mine to defeat the
koopalings, or Kha-Thunk while waddling, half to make them a bit more challenging, and half
because it’s just silly and fun. So far so good, but recently I thought it
would be fun to try to beat the whole game, while permanently crouching. As it turns out, trying to beat Super Mario
3D world, while waddling as much as possible complicates a lot of things, is quite a challenge,
and a ton of fun! So are you ready? Let’s do this! Okay so before we take a look at all the challenges
that await us if we really want to pull this off, let’s talk about the rules. The general idea is that we do a normal playthrough
of the game, but permanently have the ZR button pressed down. We literally use a piece of glue strip, also
known as tape, and glue strip our ZR button down, so that it is always pressed. This makes, mario crouch during the entire
playthrough, and as you can probably imagine this complicates a lot of things that are
normally unproblematic. But there are also a couple of optional modifiers
I decided to doom ourselves with. So I want to really beat the game, like I
normally would. That means, we only play as mario. We don’t use coop to make some sections
easier for us. We never eat the yum yum invincibility leaf,
that would make our lives a lot easier. And we don’t go out of our way to farm power
ups. If we enter a stage with a power up we got
in the previous level, that’s okay, but if we are stuck we don’t go back into previous
levels to farm a certain power up to help us. I’m honestly not sure if we are able to
defeat bowser this way, especially sticking to mario could become problematic, since switching
over to peach definitely would help in some sections. But that’s how I usually play the game,
and that’s how I want to pull this off! Okay, so our ZR button is glue stripped down,
and we are ready to go, but first let’s take a closer look at what our movement options
are, while crouching. So first we are obviously able to waddle around
at an unbearably slow pace. But luckily waddling isn’t our only option,
, since we are also able to roll, and to long jump out of a roll. This allows us to actually move at a fast
pace, and to cross wide gaps, and is our main form of movement for the whole upcoming game. There is only one problem when moving like
this. Once we start a roll or a long jump we are
committed to it, and we have almost no control over our horizontal movement anymore. There is only very little room to correct
errors. Luckily we have a second movement option while
crouching. Normal jumps. Normal jumps out of a crouch state, are sadly
pathetically and useless in comparison to the wide, proud and majestic jumps a non crouching
mario is able to pull off, but they are at least good enough to make it on top of small
ledges, or to defeat a dangerous goomba or two. If those pathetic mini hops were our only
way to jump, then we probably wouldn’t be able to make it out of the first level, but
luckily for us we have one last movement option. The backflip! Now that’s a jump we can work with. When backflipping Mario actually jumps even
higher than usually, which is crucial for us. But the backflip sadly isn’t perfect either. Mario is only able to backflip after about
one second of crouching. So while it’s no problem to jump over a
high ledge, we can’t do multiple high jumps in a row. So that’s our basic modified movement kit. We are able to jump high or in a wide arc,
but we can’t jump high, and far at the same time, and we can’t jump in quick succession. So whenever the game requires us to act fast
we have a problem, but otherwise we should be fine. But there are a couple of other notable things
that make our lives easier. If we jump off of an enemy, like a goomba
for example, then we jump off using a normal jump, even though we still have the ZR button
pressed. This way we are able to easily throw fireballs,
to get a cat dive, which would be locked for us otherwise or to do an easy wall jump. If we carry something, mario completely ignores
that we command him to crouch, and runs normally, which should be helpful in a couple of stages
too. When we are underwater our movement is not
affected by crouching, which should make those stages really easy. There is one problem however. If we ever touch the ground while underwater
we underwater softlock ourselves. Mario starts to crouch on the bed of the lake,
and isn’t able to swim up again. This could possibly become a problem. Finally we have one last trick in our trickbox. Tons of things in Super Mario 3D world can
be interacted with by tapping them. We can pick up red, or green coins by tapping
them, we are able to stun enemies if we tickle them, question blocks spit out their content
when bullied, and lots of other in game obstacles react in useful ways when tapped. Since we aren’t really able to react quickly
with our modified moveset, tapping enemies will be our main way of combat. Okay so that are the movement basics. Next let’s talk about routing. Routing the game is luckily surprisingly simple
for us. Because, we have to do every single stage
up to the final bowser battle. There are actually optional levels and a couple
of secret exits, but we can’t really take any of them for a very simple reason. We need 170 green - stars in order to open
up the final bowser battle. The basic plan is to do all the levels in
their intended order, while we collect only those green stars that are easy to grab, hope
it’s enough by the end, and if not we simply go back and get the missing stars in some
of the easier levels. Since 170 stars are a lot, we are better off
playing each level, so that we don’t miss out on any easy to get stars and have some
margin of error for stars that we aren’t able to collect. Okay so let’s quickly go over the stages
in the game, and identify all the levels that are potentially problematic. Luckily we are able to immediately tick off
a lot of stages. To begin with we can entirely remove all of
the levels in the first three worlds from our list. Those levels are so easy, that it makes no
difference if we attempt the, not so challenging platforming challenges, while crouching or
while playing normal. Furthermore we can single out the levels that
require us to ride nessie, the captain toad houses, and the dash stages where mario runs
on top of the boost pads. Pressing the ZR button in the toad stages
doesn’t change the gameplay, neither does it change the way nessie controls. If mario touches a boost pad, he decides to
ignore our ZR command as well. So all of these stages can be played like
usual, and are completely unproblematic for our scientific cause. Hooray! Next we can remove a lot of stages, that are
built more around exploration, than about tight platforming. Levels like sprawling savanna, that are built
on huge flat surfaces, with very little platforming can be beaten while running, and while waddling,
without many differences. Then there are a couple of levels that are
built around specific gimmicks, like this one, where the challenging part is riding
through pipes. These stages aren’t altered much by our
modifiers, and are easy as well. This leaves us only with a couple of worrisome
stages that stand between us and a crouching victory. The first problematic level is 4-5, where
we have to deal with spikeys, and moving platforms. The fifth world luckily is still pretty straightforward
only 5-2 has one section that has me worried. World 6 features the fuzzy mine, that requires
us to play quickly, which could be a problem. Another thing we haven’t discussed yet are
the various bosses, that bowser hired in order to sabotage our cowering fairy rescue mission,
we need to find a way to defeat all of them as well. World seven is pretty challenging, but there
is nothing hidden in them that really threatens or run, which only leaves us with the last
world. A lot of the levels there are problematic
for various reasons, so let’s take a closer look at all of them. Cool, next we can remove all the levels that
aren’t on this list. By the way there is a link to the raw footage
of me clearing each of those levels while permanently crouching in the description. A couple of those levels feature some tricky
spots, but overall there is nothing too crazy hidden in them, that requires a further investigation. They are basically a good warm up, for the
upcoming challenges, because especially the last world will require perfect waddling skills. Okay so let’s take a closer look at the
levels we are left with! Spike's lost city first. Most people believe that the challenge in
this level comes from all the swinging platforms, and the ouching spiked sticks that roll around,
and those people would be right, but for us, these obstacles aren’t our main concern. Because this level, is the level where our
arch enemy steps out of the shadows, and reveals itself to us for the first time. Ladies and gentlemen may I present to you,
the biggest threat to our run: Slopes. Slopes and stairs are a nightmare. Because when pressing ZR, mari o doesn’t
walk on them, but immediately starts to slide down. That’s a huge problem, because it makes
precise platforming almost impossible. When sliding, we can’t really control mario
in a precise way any more, and if we jump out of a sliding animation, we enter the normal
jump mode. So the only way for us to make it to the top
of a sloped surface, is to slide down a little bit, and then to slowly jump upwards. Normally mario is just able to walk here,
but because of the crouching we aren’t able to ever stop sliding. And spike's lost city is the first level in
the game that features platforming on slippery slopes. But that’s not the only problem we face
here. After a lot of silly upwards slope sliding
we are suddenly confronted with this platforming challenge. Basically we are supposed to jump over moving
platforms, while spiky spike sticks try to poke us. The platforms are timed in a way that requires
us to jump over them with a decent hop. But a decent hop isn’t part of our moveset,
we are either able to do a pathetic hop, or to do a majestic backflip. Pathetic hopping, always hops us straight
into our doom, but majestic backflipping is a reliable way to land on top of some ouching
spikes. This part really had me worried, but we luckily
made it through. It wasn’t pretty to be honest, but after
dozens of trys I finally managed to leave this horrific sloped stage. That was the first time I was really challenged,
and it really leaves me afraid of all the upcoming sloped surfaces in this game. Sloped surfaces, like the ones in the tricky
trapeze theatre for example. The next slippery stage on our list of problematic
levels. The problem here is the following. The tricky trapeze theatre is built, around
seesaw platforms, that are once again inhabited by ouching spiked sticks. I start to see a pattern here. But this time, mario actually begins to slip
down when crouching, and that’s the problem. We need to jump from this platform onto that
one, but the little hop we get when pressing jump while sliding, isn’t potent enough
to land on the other platform. Mainly because we aren’t fast enough before
the seesaw platform tilts, and we once again start to slide down on the other side. This whole part would be super simple if we
only we had a cat power up from a different world, but I really want to prove that the
game can be beaten while crouching but without compensating the difficulties by using power-ups
in a way I wouldn’t, if I did a normal playthrough. And no sane person would go out of it’s
way to farm cat power ups, so that he or she is able to do this, in theory, so simple jump. But after a little bit of testing I luckily
found a simple way to resolve this problem! See, the thing is the following, if we jump
out of a slide, we enter the normal jump mode, and other than a crouched jump, the normal
jump allows us to immediately do a wall jump, after jumping. So all that we have to do here is to wall-jump
out of the slide, which allows us to land on top of the other platform! Hooray! Another problematic spot off of our list! Luckily for us we can immediately remove the
next level on our list as well. The fuzzy mine, is way easier to do while
crouching than I first thought. I expected this stage to be a dangerous race
between life and death against the horrific fuzzy horde that tries to hunt us down, but
as it turns out we have more than enough time, to make it through this level. It actually only took me a couple of tries,
which makes this level easier than a lot of the stages we already cleared! So let’s take a look at the boss fights. Super Mario 3D world features lots of neat
little boss battles. In a normal playthrough all of these fights,
are more on the easier side of things. They really aren’t that challenging. But since we refuse to arise, things become
a lot more complicated here. A couple of those bosses are free, while crouching. The koopaling fights only become a little
bit more challenging, if we decide to fight waddling. I actually got each one of them first try,
so those aren’t really a huge problem. Then there are the bowser in a car fights. Those would be super annoying if we had to
long jump into each bomb ball he throws. But luckily we can once again make heavy use
of our tapping skills to immediately throw him his dangerous balls back into his car. This makes those fights easy as well. Then we have the fight against Hisstocrat. This one is a little bit challenging, since
we aren’t as mobile as usual, but there is nothing too complicated going on there
either. Kha-tunk is so ridiculously easy, that I have
been doing my fights against him crouching since my second playthrough. That’s where I got the idea for this whole
madness. So as you can probably guess our run won’t
die here with Kha-tunk either, which leaves us with two bosses. And it’s these two bosses that are huge
problems. Namely Bolder Brockade, and *sigh* and the
clown. So let’s discuss the clown first. I hate the clown. But not only do I hate the clown, I also hate,
that I hate the clown. I have never died during the battle against
the clown. I consider the clown to be one of the easiest
bosses of all mario games. I made fun of how easy the clown is in the
past. And I believe the clown noticed this. I believe the clown heard that I made fun
about him. And I believe the clown decided to take revenge
on me. Holy fuzzy. The clown. We face two major clown problems. Clown problem 1: While we are fast enough
to dodge his belly-flops in theory, we aren’t really. Because we roll and jump faster than he lands,
but we aren’t able to change our direction fast enough. So the arena is too small for us to dodge
all attacks while rolling in a single direction, and we aren’t fast enough to change direction. This means that we are basically forced to
take a hit in the third phase, and are very likely to get hit during the second one. The best way to solve this I found, was to
try to split our crouching cherry clone marios in different directions, and to hope that
we only lose one of them, but not both. Clown Problem 2: We aren’t fast enough to
attack. The clown just runs away from us faster, than
we run towards him. There are two ways to solve this. The one, and honestly better option, is to
be close to the clown when he splits, and to land on top of him with a backflip as soon
as it becomes possible to damage him. The other option is to long jump on one of
the liquid clown bubbles in such a way that we bounce on top of the stupid clowns head. So the clown is beatable. But the clown ended up being the toughest
boss I ever faced in a mario game. I almost switched over to luigi so that we
are able to crouch a little bit faster out of pure clown frustration. But I didn’t. I faced my clown destiny, and after about
80 failed attempts I overcame the clown. So why am I telling you all of this. Well, because today I learned an important
lesson about life. Never make fun about clowns in video games,
they will hear you, they will remember it and they will take revenge. Sigh ... so Bolder Brockade is the other problematic
boss. When I first encountered one of the boulder
minibosses I was pretty sure that our run would die here, unaccomplished. If we jump on top of one of those angry boulders,
then they magically transform into a normal boulder that mario is able to pick up. In a normal playthrough. Sadly we can’t pick them up. Because mario refuses to pick up one of those
gigantic stone monsters while waddling on the ground. But those stone monsters, are how we damage
the Bolder Brockade boss, so we need to find a way to pick them up. Luckily there is a way, but doing this is
pretty precise and makes the boss fight insanely challenging. So if we are on the ground mario refuses to
pick up the stones. If we jump on top of them, mario bounces off,
and refuses to pick them up as well. But … if we hit this area, while holding
the pick up button, then mario isn’t on the ground, and isn’t high enough on top
of the stone to bump off. So mario becomes confused and decides to pick
the stone up for a lack of better options. That’s not really hard to do, but it is
slow, and a little bit tight. And it’s the reason the boss fight becomes
so hard. I died here almost as often as when fighting
against the clown, and I’m pretty sure I would still sit in my chair grinding the third
phase of the fight, slowly going insane if it wasn’t for a little trick that allows
us to skip a phase. After taking a hit, the boss madly throws
rocks around, which destroy all the rocks mario could use to damage him. But if we are fast, we are actually able to
pick up one of those rocks, before they become destroyed, which makes it possible to immediately
land a second hit once the boss calms down. Because of this trick we are able to make
it past the boulder brocade fights. And now, now we are suddenly in the final
world, and we still refuse to arise! Hooray. Now, the waddling skills we acquire up to
this point, are really put to the test. There are nine stages left, and a lot of them
are problematic in some way. First we have to do a little bit of relaxing
platforming over ouching spikes as a warm up, then we face the cookie cogworks. At the beginning of this run, this stage would
have probably made me throw the controller against the wall in agony. Tons, of moving cookie cogs, each one a sloped
surface, and each one forces mario to slide off. But beating this stage was surprisingly simple! It was really chaotic, and it took me a couple
of tries, but I was never afraid that our run could die to those cookie cogs. The upcoming train stage is really challenging
as well. But once again in a good sense. Here we have to fight tons of enemies, and
we have to jump over dangerous swinging sticks. The train is a ton of fun, and definitely
not going to stop us as well. Neither is deepwater dungeon, since the whole
stage is built around swimming. Footlight Lane however is problematic. Not only do the dry bones here move faster
than we do, but we aren’t able to see where to jump most of the time. I had to find a setup to get rid of all the
dry bones in the first part of the stage, so that we are able to reach the second half
without dozens of dead skeletons chasing us. But not only were we able to find such a setup,
as it turns out, that’s also an infinite one up trick I didn’t know about! Fed by the power of hundreds of 1-ups in our
pocket this stage isn’t stopping us either. All that’s left now are two stages. The ghost house is surprisingly easy, and
the last regular level, is a last test, that forces us to prove that we are capable of
facing the final bowser level. A last challenge on top of a sloped cube,
over dangerous hot lava. A last challenge that we take with ease. World 8 turned out to be far easier than I
expected it to be. Ladies and gentlemen, we almost did it. We almost proved that it is possible to beat
super mario 3D world without ever letting go of our beloved ZR button. All that we have left to do, is to climb the
final tower, and to hit the game winning pow block three times in a row. We are so close. But there is one last problem. One final problem. In a literal sense, because we can’t make
it past the last obstacle in the game. The problem isn’t bowser. The problem is this staircase. No matter what we try, this staircase won’t
let us finish our run. We always slide back down, into our doom. This evil, dumb staircase. This stupid staircase won’t allow us to
reach the top of the tower. We simply aren’t fast enough to compensate
the time we lose because we slide down. That’s so ridiculously unfortunate. We’ve come so far! We survived every sloped surface up until
this point. Every single one of those dumb slopes. We found a way to throw boulders, without
arising. We learned to waddle like a pro, we flipped
over tons of obstacles, we rolled past each and every enemy. And we did all of this without ever standing
up. We didn’t do it because we had to. We did it because we wanted to. The whole game screamed at us. Stand up, stand up it said, but we, we proudly
stayed on our knees. We refused to take orders, if we want to waddle
we waddle, if every staircase becomes a deadly slope, then so be it. We do we. The clown was laughing in our face cause we
were waddling like idiots, but we showed him who's the boss. And now the literally last obstacle in the
game prevents us from completing this run. So I grinded this stair for hours. For every step I overcame I immediately made
two steps back, but slowly, very slowly, I was climbing upwards. After over an hour I made it through the first
part, after another hour I saw the run winning pow block for the first time, and after many
many many more tries we finally made it up there. We were finally waddling towards the proof,
that Super Mario 3D world can be beaten, without ever letting go of the crouch button. Ladies and gentlemen, we did it! Hooray! Super Mario 3D world can be beaten while permanently
crouching! That was quite a journey! I highly recommend everyone to give this run
a try the next time you play 3d world. It’s really really fun to do the game crouching,
and it adds a much needed challenge to the first half of the game! And there’s another thing I want to highly
recommend! Gamechamp actually tried to beat 3D world
without jumping once, and documented the crazy journey in a video. And our brother in spirit, Maryo is currently
in the middle of the process of routing 3D world without collecting a single coin. It’s really interesting to see how different
people, tackle different challenges in the game, and how stuff that was trivial for the
run we just did, becomes incredibly difficult when playing the game with different modifiers. I highlestly recommend everyone to check those
out, the links are in the description. So with that being said, thanks for watching
this little video, I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, don’t forget to leave me a thumbs
up, and maybe you feel especially, like no one is able to force you to stand up today,
and want to hit the subscribe button as well. I hope all of you have a wonderful day, and
to see you soon. Goodbye!
HOO-ray
TL,DW: yes. it's more of a fun challenge, but it's possible. the final level is highly problematic though.
I love this man so much, hoo-ray
I had a playthrough with a few friends and one of the Wii remotes had my friend constantly crouching, it was hilarious. We used him as a weapon or treated it like an escort mission
Loved this video. One of my favorite YouTubers.
Is it possible to learn this power?
the chaotic good of gaming youtube
This guy and Gamechamp3000 give me life.
Unpopular(?) opinion: Super Mario 3D World was better than Super Mario Odyssey. I had so many fun memories of playing this game cooperatively with my brother, seeing the Miiverse notes that people left on the world map... So many epic moments, especially Champion's Road. It's one of the few really strong and memorable gameplay moments I've experienced in the past 5~10 years. Stuff like that's rare to come by and I don't expect I'll experience anything similar anytime soon...