Recently, Nintendo fans have been in kind of a funk over the recent revelation that Super Mario Marker will take 9 full days to totally unlock. Instead of simply giving you all the tools you need from the get go in order to make all the cool Mario stages you want , Super Mario Maker requires you to spend a certain amount of time in its maker mode in order to unlock a new set of tools. However, these tools don’t become unlocked automatically. You have to wait until the next day for these unlocks to come into effect.
You won’t even be able to use a fire flower until day two, a Thwomp until day 4, or a Yoshi until day 7. Heck, a cosmetic arrow isn’t even unlocked until the end of day 7. So we won’t see any stages made with every tool available until well after the game releases. We likely won’t see good complex stages until the end of the first month.
This is surprising and disheartening for most fans that want to jump right in, but if you think back on Nintendo’s behavior in the past, it’s not surprising. Nintendo doesn’t have a lot of faith in its fans. Nintendo, in short, thinks you are a stupid and sometimes petulant child.
Think back to friend codes, which some Nintendo titles still use. Instead of the simple friend lists that we have been using for ages on the PC, and for years on Sony and Microsoft titles, Nintendo makes you exchange a code with someone to be their friend. Why? Well it’s supposed to make it harder to friend people you don’t know, except the major method of exchanging friend codes is the internet, so most of us have a ton of people we don’t know on our lists. Nintendo tried to keep us safe by making their product user unfriendly, and we outsmarted them because we preferred function to safety. They designed the system for children and were outsmarted by adults.
Super Mario Maker is less a function of safety and more a function of intelligence. Nintendo thinks that having the full suite of Mario Maker tools will be overwhelming. Instead of including comprehensive tutorials, or allowing the community to crowdsource their own lessons, they approached the situation like a parent scolding a child.
“Mommy! I want to try playing with the fire flower!”
“Now honey you haven’t even played with your question blocks for 5 minutes yet. No new toys until you play with your old one.”
Once five minutes passes…
“There Mommy! I played for five minutes! Can I play with the fire flower now???”
“Ok honey, we will go to the store tomorrow and pick up a fire flower.”
“Tomorrow! But I want it nooooow!”
“I’m sorry honey, you will just have to wait.”
And so on…
This will severely hinder Nintendo in the short run. Remember, game journalists are going to have to review this game, but we likely won’t have a full 10 days to get every single tool unlocked. This means all the launch day reviews will be based on only a fraction of what the game is capable of. This could lead to more negative reviews, which will hold the game back.
But this is Nintendo’s story in this generation. They have honestly good ideas but their tendency to treat gamers as children holds them back. Think of how great Splatoon would have been with online voice chat. Think of how great Miiverse would be if it didn’t have such limited social functionality. Think of how great the eShop would be if the Wii U had a hard drive that could handle downloaded games. As it stands, the Wii U is a toy for children, which is a step below a fully fleshed out game console.