i was fairly bored with mario vs. donkey kong when i played it at the end of last year, but i knew that its follow-up, mario vs. donkey kong 2: march of the minis, left behind the original mario vs DK conceit and instead expanded on the mini mario toys concepts so i was looking forward to trying it out. here’s a pretty good review from gamespot. i agree that zipping through the game would be easy, but i don’t quite agree that the ranking system makes up for the simplicity of the basic game. the ranking system has several components, one of which is not just navigating the mini marios to the exit, but doing so in an unbroken chain. this turns out to be the most important factor in getting the highest rank for a stage, and collecting the items scattered around the stage and defeating all the enemies turns out to be significantly less important, which makes them feel somewhat superfluous. guiding each mini mario with the sylus feels a bit cumbersome: although there isn’t anything wrong with the controls per se, they do feel a bit fussy. a lot of compelling puzzle elements (many of which make great use of elements of the mario series including fire flowers and piranha plants) are introduced but woefully underused, such as scales you have to balance and magnetic walls, but i suppose if you got really into the design mode you could explore them more fully. the boss fights are repetitive and dull (including the two bonus boss fights), and the puzzles for the most part just aren’t very deep: i easily got a majority of silver ranks and a lot of golds without having to flex my brain muscles very much. as i mentioned in my review of its GBA predecessor, the following two entries (minis march again! for DSiware and mini-land mayhem! for DS) seem to put more emphasis on the puzzle aspects as opposed to the platforming aspects in that you position elements onto the stage and then let the minis loose, which seems like it could be much more interesting.
all in all despite some pluses (including the usual nintendo polish) and minuses, the lack of deep puzzles is what really keeps this from being a winner. i’m glad nintendo abandoned the dull platforming of the first two games in the series (donkey kong GB and mario vs. donkey kong), and hopefully this will prove to be a transition game that leads to better things for the series as a whole. now i just have to get a DSi so i can download the next game …
two mini links for mini marios:
- entry at mariowiki.com
- entry at wikipedia
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