Super Mario Advance Series | Mario's Advanced, But Familiar, Adventures

the Game Boy Advance is home to a fantastic library of games even when you just look at Nintendo's output we got great new IP like drill dozer and Golden Sun series that made their localized to debut in great fashion like Advance Wars and Fire Emblem and awesome entries to long-running franchises like Metroid Fusion minish cap Wario Land for so many good games Nintendo treated their properties really well on their new advanced piece of portable hardware except for Mario did you ever notice that despite being the golden child Mario's lineup on the Game Boy advances pretty damn sad superstar saga was awesome the same can be said for Mario vs. Donkey Kong the sports games weren't all that bad party was though oh god pinball and I keep trying to forget that one one of the more interesting things about the gbas life is that we never got an original Mario platformer all these years later despite being as successful as it was that's really weird that being said though obviously we did get a few games that would otherwise fit the bill the Super Mario advance series Super Mario advance one could easily see this and think oh yeah you know just a bunch of Mario ports and somebody else could think oh yeah that time Nintendo was very chronologically confused Mario to then world Yoshi's Island and then three oh no Super Mario advance for Super Mario Brothers 3 is still one of the best titles Nintendo has ever come up with but you may also notice that there's one main Mario game of the era missing from that list the original Super Mario Bros there was a port to the GBA as part of the classic NES series certainly a cool novelty at the time but now squished Mario just comes off as really cursed but in all actuality Super Mario advance was simply following the trend set back on the Gameboy Color with Super Mario Bros deluxe it's not like it's all too special nowadays or anything like that but it is easily a better version of the classic screen crunch is the most notable thing about this so it's definitely not the most ideal way to play the game but it's actually not that bad probably because I've already played these stages like a hundred times over at this point so it's all muscle memory by now you can keep shrinking the screen I'll still find my way to the end the cool thing though is all the extras that got thrown in there's a couple new interface additions like a main menu and even a world map that's pretty cute there's this fancy new challenge mode where levels are now populated by five red coins as well as a hidden Yoshi egg and there's even a bonus challenge to score enough points this really read tools how you approach a Mario stage it's a lot of fun ah you versus boo this mode is so cool this is a series of brand new stages all based around racing and blocking your opponent with these special boxes you can also go through this with another player which is really awesome they brought this game back out of nowhere for one of the Nintendo World Championships and it was genuinely one of the most exciting parts of that night there's a couple of extra goodies too most of which actually use the old Game Boy camera that's kind of neat and even the sequel Lost Levels is here as well under the title for super players which you know more bang for your buck I guess game still sucks though adding new content to classic Mario games like this would presumably be the basis for the games that would soon after hit the Gameboy Advance now I'm assuming that most of you have already played these games at least to the originals on the NES and Super Nintendo so I'm gonna spare you a legitimate review of the core games here because yeah man hot take Super Mario World is pretty good I'm glad I finally got to get that off my chest instead though I think it's interesting to see how these versions differ from their originals they didn't just port these games and call it a day each one includes a handful of differences either due to the console that they were released on or simply being a cool new thing that you can't find anywhere else one of the most notable inclusions is that of a retooled arcade Mario Bros yeah that extra menu option that's also found in superstar saga all four of the Mario Advance games featured this as well all of the box arts boast to this really fancy for player multiplayer and I hate to burst your bubble here I really do but it's just for mario bros and for years even back when I talked about superstar Saga I never knew why they kept including this in so many of their games but leave it to the comments section of all places to let me know why I never realized this but as long as you have multiple GBAS a link cable in at least two of these games then you instantly have access to something you can play multiplayer it seemed like just this weird inside joke for so long but suddenly it makes a ton of sense so hey kudos for keeping portable multiplayer alive even if I had no idea what you were doing for so many years when it comes to main core of these they are the same games that you remember Mario 2 and 3 are more based on their versions that were found in Super Mario all-stars though which is still pretty cool obviously they're more graphically advanced than the NES versions and personally those are the versions that I grew up with so there might prefer versions in the first place however as you've also probably noticed the color palettes are a lot more washed out than those originals they just look kinda odd when put up side by side with their sources well actually this was done to compensate for the darker screen on the early GBAS the brighter colors simply made things pop out more if you've ever played the GBA port of Donkey Kong Country it is very apparent there as well however in between the releases of advance 3 and 4 in early 2003 Nintendo released the GBA SP featuring a backlight a feature that other handhelds were already doing years prior holy cow I'm surprised they really got away with this for so long and well since it wasn't really much of an issue anymore the portable version of Super Mario Brothers 3 more so resembles the original color palette I never minded the more washed out colors but it's still nice to see a more accurate design here as far as the gameplay goes Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island are the most similar to their console counterparts there really isn't that much here that makes these a whole lot more than the Super Nintendo versions on the go there is now an opening cutscene for world showing Mario and Luigi enjoying the island while Peach gets kidnapped along the way basically the same exact thing that happened in New Super Mario Bros 2 once you dive in though this is certainly Super Mario World alright they did manage to fix that one stray pixel in the originals title screen so that's really nice yeah that's that's totally a thing I was cursed with this knowledge so now I'm paying it forward Luigi also plays differently here accompanied by a brand new look in the all-stars version of Mario World he had an original sprite there as well but he still played exactly like Mario here he falls more in line with how he looked in the first Advance game and he also has some of his typical control quirks like a higher jump and works traction hey it's minor but it's still nice being able to play a familiar game in a slightly different way the dragon coins are also more useful now being an actual collectible that works towards 100% completion rather than just being there finding all of them gets you a nifty little cutscene and then all of the coins just return to their original locations but now they have peaches face on them instead oh thank goodness that's what the original game was missing Yoshi's Island has even fewer changes there's a new world total screen that's nice the red coins are harder to distinguish now that's not nice there's a new world select map oh I found this new room in level 1:8 that wasn't there before yeah yeah this is just Yoshi's Island the big new thing that really stands out is six brand new secret levels one in each world they're all much bigger in size than the original stages and they're really fun difficult to fully complete as well I mean damn okay this ends up making the overall level count a nice even 60 and that is just satisfying to see otherwise yeah man this is Yoshi's Island on the go did you ever find it weird how often they kept porting this version of the game and not the Super Nintendo original 3d ambassadors and Wii U owners got the GBA port despite SNES games being a totally viable option on both did the fuzzies make the Super Nintendo version too much of a pipe dream so you had to make an entirely new piece of hardware to finally bring the game back to us ultimately both versions are good but since they're more or less identical the console version offers undoubtedly the more definitive experience aside from those six levels they're pretty cool now I know I'm gonna go out of order here but hell didn't stop Nintendo let's talk about the first Super Mario advance since this one has a few more noticeable differences first and foremost I always loved the opening cutscene the characters emerging from the shadows before things widen up for the main attraction that little window is actually the exact resolution of the original Gameboy and considering this was a launch title for the GBA a console that can also play those older games it is a pretty effective way of showing off the graphical upgrade of the new system now why they chose Super Mario Bros 2 as the game to kick things off I'll never know but here we are some of the changes here are smaller simple bells and whistles they can now stretch and mangle sprites whenever they want to and they never once waste an opportunity to prove it I don't know what this is I don't think anybody's been able to figure this one out there are a bunch of extra-large shy guys that can now be found in random spots and I gotta say kudos on the jiggle physics I'm a big fan you can now tear the ribbon off of Berto rectifying the main complaint everybody had with the original and also nobody shuts up now so that's cool yeah that's that's really cool cool great great awesome glad that's in the game we now have red coins to collect and there's also an extra Yoshi challenge mode hiding a few Yoshi eggs in all of the levels no doubt influenced by Super Mario Bros deluxe before it there's even a brand new boss with Roberto never seen before never seen since it just sort of exists here in this bubble as an interesting piece of Mario trivia and nothing more otherwise yeah this is a modified Super Mario Bros 2 on GBA this was the first game I got for the console and I played it a ton so while it may have been a bit of an odd choice I'd say it was a good one and all that's left is Super Mario Bros 3 and on the surface we have another faithful adaptation of the classic we got another new opening cutscene that's pretty nice any time stories that previously only existed in the game's manual gets thrown into the game itself is always nice in my opinion otherwise though what makes this version interesting isn't in the main game it's in all of the extras allow me to reintroduce the e-reader I've kind of gone over this weird peripheral already in the past but during its short existence mario advance 4 is definitely Nintendo strongest attempt to get people to care even packing in some cards with new copies of the game by linking up a GBA with the game to another GBA with an e-reader what do you mean this didn't take off you're able to put in new content into this game replays of high level gameplay new items for your inventory including the Cape from Super Mario World which is honestly just really surreal and easily the coolest of all brand new stages all accessible in these special world II you got really good level designs enemies from other games grass you can pick up from Mario to all of these years later this is still such a wild inclusion and it really sucks that barely anybody got to experience it I had a few of these cards growing up but man nowadays these things are really not all that easy to come by you can definitely get them by a simple online search but they are nowhere near as prominent as say some random series of amiibo cards and it didn't help that only about a third of all of the cards actually released outside of Japan leaving over 20 levels unavailable to unlock by the intended means and that is such a shame because this is without a doubt the most interesting part of the entire Super Mario advance series and easily the best thing the e-readers ever done yeah it's finally time to dethrone taking NES pinball and splitting it up across five cards the time has finally come that's no longer cool it never was cool but just when you think this story is over well leave it to Nintendo to re-release Super Mario advance 4 on the we use Virtual Console with all of the e-reader levels in tow the content has been accessible via hacking for years already but to have an official way to play these otherwise thoughts of be lost stages is really really cool one of the underappreciated highlights of the Wii U's life and yeah that about sums up the entire Super Mario advance series just pretty cool versions that do go beyond basic simple ports with plenty of interesting changes found throughout them I think the smaller screen size easily disqualifies them from being the definitive way to play these games but if you grew up with the GBA chances are this is how you got to experience them and ultimately they're not bad versions of these games looking back it is forever gonna be weird that we never got an original Mario platformer on the Gameboy Advance but enough effort was done with these titles to still make them Tivoli worthwhile and this mindset would definitely continue on when super mario 64 got a similar treatment on the DS but that's for another time if you consider yourself a bit of a Mario historian then I definitely recommend checking these games out just to be mindful that if you do pick these games up on the Wii U they totally lack multiplayer support so all of those crazy arcade mario bros multiplayer sessions that you were just starting to plan out you're gonna have to do it elsewhere I'm sorry dammit Nintendo you were this close this is why the Wii U failed

Channel: AntDude

Views: 717,218

Keywords: AntDude, Review, Video Review, Game Review, Super Mario Advance, Super Mario Advance series, Super Mario Advance series review, Super Mario Advance review, Super Mario Bros GBA, Super Mario World GBA, Yoshi's Island GBA, Super Mario Bros GBA review, mario game boy advance, Game Boy Advance, Super Mario Advance 2, Super Mario Advance 3, Super Mario Advance 4, Super Mario Bros. 2 gba, Super Mario Bros. 3 gba

Id: byNnjMgTmnk

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020