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A Complete Analysis of the Super Mario Maker 2 Trailer

A Mario Maker Sequel is Coming too Switch! Here's literally everything we learned from the Nintendo Direct's trailer.
Super Mario Maker 2

One of the most noteworthy games of Yesterdays Direct was Super Mario Maker 2, the sequel to one of the Wii U’s best games. Nintendo packed a ton of information into the short, minute-long trailer, so we’re going through and dissecting the video for every juicy UI details and new feature. Join us!

Starting from the Beginning…

After Mario attempts to jump over a hill of spinies, we get our first glimpse of the user interface.

  • Left Panel:
    • A Super Mario World logo indicating that it will allow swapping between game styles, like with the first game.
    • An icon for changing the theme from grass to underground to castle, etc.
    • A camera button. This is used to control the position of the side-scrolling camera and can be changed into a bird. We’ll come back to that later.
    • A button for changing the level’s time limit.
    • An icon with two friends standing next to each other. Possible local level sharing option? Perhaps two people can work on the same level at once.
    • An icon of Mario moving at a rapid pace. This should be used to view Mario’s trail up to his current position
    • There are also two greyed-out icons. One appears to be in the shape of a boat, while the other has a certain feather shape. Most likely, the boat icon is for creating water levels, as we’ll see later in the video. The feather icon is used to control the trajectory of the camera, as we’ll see a bit later.
  • Right Panel:
    • There’s a menu icon that will most likely take you to the level sharing tools and main menu. Press “+” to access.
    • The handy-dandy course-bot allows you to quickly save your game.
    • There’s an eraser tool that’s also mapped to the left shoulder button.
    • The rocket at the bottom acts as a complete restart after being held down for 3 seconds.
    • There’s a slightly blurred icon of a grocery cart with a “1” on it, signifying has a single item or notification, or something along those lines. Will there be microtransactions here? Surely not. There might be a single-player campaign where you unlock new tools and items.
  • Top Panel:
    • There’s a long row of various enemies and terrain types. They all seem to come from the same subset of “regular” items, similar to how the first game was layed out.
    • On the far left, there’s an icon of a brick block and a frog. This might be a pulldown menu for the various item “kinds,” similar to the first game. We’re not sure though; on Wii U, the icon for accessing the lists of items was a drop-down arrow. This might be something totally different.
    • There’s a search button on the far right that can be accessed by the “Y” button. That comes to play in just a couple seconds.

Item Wheels

 width=The user presses “Y” to access a circular list of enemies, presumably navigated by circling the analog stick, weapon wheel-style.

  • We can see up top that these items are sorted and color coded by type, with green representing enemies (the current page) yellow representing key items, pink representing regular items, and blue representing terrain.
  • The current category (enemies) actually has 4 wheels, as shown by the 4-page dots underneath the “Enemies” title. We only catch a glimpse of two of these wheels, and they all seem to be familiar enemies from the first game.
  • Presumably, you’ll be able to move from one wheel to the next by either using the D-pad, right joystick or touch controls. It’s hard to say for sure.

 width=The user navigates to the next wheel, the items.

  • This one is very similar to the enemy wheel, but with things like coins and fire-flowers. One new items we can catch a glimpse of is the coin with a “10” in the center on the upper right sector of the wheel. We think it’s safe to assume this special coin is equivalent to ten regular coins.

Super Mario Maker 2

The user goes left once more to the terrain category, which we can tell has two wheels associated with it.

  • The highlight of this wheel is, of course, the two different kinds of sloped terrain, which come in steep and (assumedly) shallow. More on these in a minute.
  • We can catch a glimpse of the key items list to the left since the list of categories apparently wraps all the way around. The three newcomers to the pack are the on/off switch, the red blocks they activate, and the green snake block. Again, more on these in a minute.

Slopes

Super Mario Maker 2

The user places a steep slope into the scene and sets it down right under Mario’s spot.

  • The steep slop slopes downward at a 1/3 incline on the grid in the background. This means that steep slopes go down one space for every three spaces over. From this, we can assume that shallow slopes will have a ¼ incline or lower.
  • The adorable undo dog, which allows you to undo your previous actions can be seen in this scene too.

The user drags the slope out and places it down, creating a nice hill for Mario to slide down.

  • Slopes, if you weren’t aware, were never in the Wii U version of Mario Maker despite many, many suggestions from the community. Many of the original Mario games, including Mario 3 and World, had the ability to slide into enemies on steep inclines. It felt like a notable absence from the Wii U version, so it’s awesome they’ve finally addressed it in the sequel.

View Mode

Super Mario Maker 2

The user presses in on one of the analog sticks to activate “view mode”, which zooms out to show a wider view of the whole level. This ought to be extremely helpful for large, multi-layered courses

Mario slides down three hills in a row, slaughtering every enemy in his path, before he hits a question block and the Super Mario Maker 2 logo appears. It’s glorious.

New enemies/items

Super Mario Maker 2

We can see what appears to be a new type of item here. These little clouds shoot bursts of air upwards, propelling Mario into the air. They may or may not be enemies. Mario doesn’t take any damage from them, but then again, he never actually comes into contact with their bodies, either.

Super Mario Maker 2

And here, we can see the infamous angry sun from Super Mario Bros 3! The sun swoops down from the heavens, nearly taking out Mario as he nimbly jumps over the ball of fire.

  • The Sun makes its first appearance in what appears to be a brand new desert-themed world, complete with palm trees and pink sunset.
  • What will the sun look like in other game styles? Who knows!

The snake block, first appearing in Super Mario World, has a customizable trajectory that Mario has to stay on his toes to keep up with. From the looks of it, this snake black will run in every which direction, so long as it doesn’t loop on itself, and doesn’t pass through other objects.

  • Important to note in this scene is a new winter theme, with evergreen trees topped with snow.

Partial Water Levels

Super Mario Maker 2

There are two important details to note here. First and most obviously, this is a partially underwater stage. Mario and Yoshi hop in and out of the water, which rises up and down with the tide. Second, this is also a forest stage, a level style that wasn’t available in the first Mario Maker.

Switch blocks

Super Mario Maker 2

With this scene, we see the first use of the switch blocks, which turn transparent and can be walked through when Mario hits a Switch. Blue blocks become transparent when the switch is off, and red becomes transparent when on.

Changing the Camera Directions

A couple of things:

  • This is the first time we can see that feature from earlier in action. By tapping the camera icon, it has turned into a bird, and “custom scroll” mode is activated. This lets you control the trajectory and speed of the camera throughout the level. We can see in this scene that the user takes the camera diagonally up and left, before shifting it downwards and upping the speed at the same time.
  • We also get a second look at that mysterious flag icon from earlier (down in the bottom left). What is that? We think we have it figured out: it’s an objective creator. In this case, the user made it so that Mario cannot complete the level without collecting at least fifty gold coins. We can then see a “4/50” in the upper right when Mario starts playing again, signifying he’s only collected 4 of the required 50.

Super Mario Not-S0 3D World

Super Mario Maker 2

Holy cow! It’s Super Mario 3D World… er, we mean, Super Mario 2D World!

  • From this shot alone, we can see 3D World’s first level, Super Bell Hill, in the background. You can also see that all the enemies and items have been reskinned to look like their appearances in 3D World.
  • There are a few new items in the corner, including a cat bell and an ant trooper
  • The grid cells are proportionally a lot bigger than the other game styles. Why’s that?

Enemies Exclusive to 3D World

Super Mario Maker 2

There are a few item wheels here, but most of the new stuff is shown in the “enemies” category:

  • The Ant Trooper (purple bug), Porcupopper (purple fish), Bully (guy with horns), Hop-Chop (spring with eyes), Stingby (bee), Skipsqueak (mouse), and Piranha Creeper (pink Piranha Plant) are all new enemies that are exclusive to Mario 3D World.

Enemy Customization

From this brief moment, we can see a menu pops up when the user lays down piranha plant, letting piranha plant be altered in various ways. It can grow with a mushroom, turn into a fire piranha plant, gain wings, or a mysterious last item that looks strangely like pincer claws.

Snake Block Sizes

Super Mario Maker 2

Notice how big the snake block here is; each block takes up four grid cells. Can you increase the size in other Mario styles?

Bell Tree

This scene shows the bell-tree item, which can be used not only as a climbing-off point, but can contain hidden items and power-ups as well. Speaking of powerups…

The Cat Suit

Super Mario Maker 2

The cat-bell power-up! Just like in Mario 3D World, this item lets Mario climb up walls and other steep surfaces. From what we see here, he scales to the top of the short peak easily, but if the wall is higher, our guess is that the climbing distance will run out before he reaches the top.

Piranha Creepers

One of the enemies we saw earlier: the Piranha Creeper. This one stretches out its long stalk in whatever direction you tell it to, but Mario can easily jump on the head to take it out.

A variant on the regular question block, this bigger block with an exclamation point appears to push out a trail of blocks for the user to use as a platform. Just like the piranha creeper and snake blocks, we’re betting that this block’s path can be customized.

Mario 3D World Pipes

The pipes that the user lays out in this level function identically to 3D World’s clear pipes. Mario can warp through them to travel quickly from one portion of the stage to another. The same goes for the fireballs that he throws and (presumably) enemies.

Bonzai Bill

This 3D World variant of the airship features massive Bonzai Bills shooting from the level’s background. After Mario dodges the deadly missile, you can briefly see him climb the grate next to it for some extra height. Super Mario World’s castle levels had grates like these that Mario could climb both in front of and behind; might we see that option in the Mario World theme?

Super Mario Maker 2

We can see Mario here carefully teetering on a weight-sensitive platform that leans back and forth depending on his positioning. Sidenote: the 10-coin from earlier can be seen towards the bottom.

Super Mario Maker 2

The buzzy beetles coming out of the red pipe in this scene float to the ground like little reptilian dive-bombers. It’s unclear if they automatically float when the spawn pipe is in mid-air, or if you’ll have to equip the parachute manually.

Yoshi has power-ups! Or rather, Yoshi has at least one power-up. We can see him spewing fireballs at Bowser and his henchmen in this scene. He’s also colored red. Is it possible we’ll see a blue Yoshi that inflates, Mario Galaxy 2-style?

We can’t tell if this is a forest stage, or possibly an entirely new jungle stage. More definitely, we get a peek at the Bonzai Bills firing from the left. As if their smaller brothers weren’t scary enough!

The most important detail: Super Mario Maker 2 is coming out really soon! Considering that some games get delayed for years and years before release, June is not all that far away.

There you have it! That is every single minute detail we could catch in Super Maker 2’s trailer. Did we miss anything? Let us know! And for everything on Nintendo, Super Mario Maker, and everything else video games, stay tuned to Culture of Gaming.

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