Mario Maker II

The original Mario Maker was an interesting construction toolkit with an interface well suited to its exclusive platform, the WiiU.  I found making my own Mario levels to be intuitive, and I was quite pleased with the results of my endeavors.  I even shared a couple of level codes on this blog although I'm sure they have long since been auto-deleted from the online servers.  It's an unfortunate policy at the root of the one big problem I have with Mario Maker.

At that time, creation and curation seemed to be completely dominated by gimmicky levels in which the designers really just wanted to show off their engineering skills...or alternately/conjunctively make levels so brutally difficult that Super Mario Brothers: The Lost Levels seemed like a cakewalk by comparison.  Now, I'm sure there are fans of those kinds of Mario Maker levels, but for me the enjoyment of playing Nintendo's flagship series has always come from a more traditional design philosophy.  Thankfully, Mario Maker 2 addresses this issue to some degree by having a large collection of Nintendo-made levels already baked in.  While not traditional in the purest sense, they do an excellent job of showing how to utilize every feature while being fun to play at the same time.  Because of this integrated tutorial of sorts, I feel like the user-made levels available online are a bit better in terms of overall quality this time around.  Of course some users might also be drawing on experience gained from their time spent with the first game...regardless, here's a couple of new levels I made for Mario Maker 2.

"Going Up and Down (among other things)"
RQD-2X3-CWF

"CAVES"
Q3M-6XR-B0G

"Koopa Forest"
SXW-XN8-H8G

"Climb Time"
X0B-W29-G8G