Happy MAR10! Well, almost. Mario Day is on March 10, so we’re republishing our list of the best mainline games starring a plumber.
Which is the best Mario game ever? Where do you even begin to rank all the Mario games?
Let’s face it, anyone in the top 10 could legitimately take the top spot. Any of them could easy and understandably being someone’s ‘best game of all time’, and there will always be someone who believes the series peaked with The Lost Levels. That’s an opinion and you have the right to it!
So get the definitive ‘Best Mario Game’, we asked you dear Nintendo Life readers to rate the top Mario games you’ve played and the result is the ranked list you see below. Remember: the order below is updated in real time according to the user rating of each game on Nintendo Life. You can influence the order of this list at any time! Feel free to rate the ones you’ve played with a score out of ten by clicking on the ‘star’ button. And, if you’re interested in the personal views of the Nintendo Life team, check out our video at the very end of the article, but the list below is based on the opinions of your wonderful group. To enjoy!
You can check out our picks for the best Zelda games and the best Pokémon games elsewhere, but without further ado, here’s our list of the best Super Mario games — as rated by you, dear readers…
Note. We’ve included all the major Super Mario platformers (both 2D and 3D), plus Mario Run (hey, it’s an official Super Mario platformer!), but you won’t see any spin-offs or sports titles here. We’ve excluded Yoshi’s Island, despite its official name, for the same reason that Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 isn’t — both games are spin-offs that, names aside, are sorely lacking in the Super Mario department.
We’ve also taken the liberty of excluding compilations and certain ports to avoid repetition (eg the GBA ‘Advance’ ports), plus switching to Switch versions of New Super Mario Bros. In and Super Mario 3D World.
Super Mario Run served as Nintendo’s first foray into mobile gaming (unless you count the ill-fated Miitomo). On its own terms, it’s a solid effort with smart compromises to allow for a one-touch control scheme and an excellent translation of plumbing 2D opus into the smartphone space. Mario runs automatically, jumping over enemies and small obstacles, and you perform tricks by tapping at the right moment, jumping high or low depending on how long you hold your finger on the screen. The fact that it looks so much like an entry in the ‘New’ branch of 2D Marios may have set expectations higher than they might have been for the first Mario game to appear on non-Nintendo hardware (at least in a very long time), but this is a classy example of the transition your favorite character and series to a completely different platform while embracing the differences of that platform with a tailor-made experience.
In the Mario canon, Super Mario Run could also run, but it’s a slick little experience that’s enjoyable without microtransactions, currencies, and cooldown timers. This game was never meant to get in the way of Mario World in the plumber platformer pantheon, but it never should have been; offers short bursts of fun perfect for situations where breaking your Switch isn’t an option. Super Mario Run does what it sets out to do, and well — and that’s why we admire it.
‘correctly’ Super Mario Bros. 2 in Japan, this direct sequel was once the ‘grail’ for players in the West who had completely exhausted the first Super Mario Bros and wanted more of a challenge. The Lost Levels certainly delivers. In fact, Nintendo of America found it too difficult to release, and to an extent you can see where they were coming from. It is a continuation in the true sense of the word; In terms of difficulty, it picks up where World 8-4 left off in the original game and is definitely best enjoyed by seasoned SMB veterans. Players new to the world of Mario (yes, they exist) will likely find it confusingly, hilariously difficult.
Until Super Mario All-Stars on the SNES, the world didn’t get to experience this game (that’s where it picked up its nickname ‘Lost Levels’). It’s not bad anyway, but it’s something that would be a New Game+ mod in a modern game. It’s incredibly unforgiving and lacks the careful, thoughtful balance of risk and reward associated with Mario platformers. It’s available on Switch for anyone with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, so test your mettle there if you dare.
A rare numbered Mario sequel, this is one of a series that still divides players to this day. New Super Mario Bros. 2 doubled down on – of all things – the coin collection to create an oddly compulsive platformer in a familiar mold. While hardly revolutionary, the autostereoscopic 3D was a nice touch and if you can embrace the banality of its obsession with gold, it’s a very solid, very enjoyable 2D Mario.
Super Mario Land was an impressive achievement when it was released for the Game Boy in 1989. A sequel might make this original attempt at translating a plumber’s platformer to an overburdened, underpowered handheld seem odd by comparison, but it’s still a very fun Super Mario experience. albeit briefly. Created by Gunpei Yokoi R&D1, not Shigeru Miyamoto’s team, it’s a surreal yet compelling take on a template that needs a little tweaking for the present day. And just when things are really starting to get better, the credits arrive.
If you haven’t played Super Mario Land before, you owe it to yourself — it’s worth playing at least once to see where Mario’s portable adventures began. Blasting music, too.
New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is an impressive package that offers insane multiplayer and a glimpse of the outrageous invention that was to come in Super Mario Odyssey. It’s a superb 2D entry and arguably the best of the ‘New’ branch whether you’re playing on Wii U or Switch, albeit with dated visuals and the irritation of returning to the world map after each deaths stand out as things that could have been improved in this Deluxe version. Still, with New Super Luigi U included, this is a very good 2D Mario (and Luigi) package, even if Wonder makes everything that came before look a little staid and static.
Super Mario Bros. 2 (or Super Mario USA when this famously coated, water-informed form Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic returned to Japan), was a sequel to Super Mario Bros., with platforming mechanics quite different from the original. It introduced the ability to pick up and throw objects and a screen that moves left and right and up and down.
The verticality of the levels and the ability to play as different characters was a profound change from the first game, but despite being strange in its homeland, Super Mario Bros. 2 ended up having a huge impact on the iconography of the series. The game is definitely worth revisiting — Nintendo Switch Online is the easiest to find these days — if only to remind yourself how different it is from what came before and after.
If you’ve never played Super Mario 64, you’ll probably want to start as nature intended with the home console version due to its vastly superior control system. This remake runs too clumsily on the original DS hardware to compare to the first N64 title. Still, Super Mario 64 DS takes the cool classic and fills it with new characters, mini-games, and tweaks that make it more than worthwhile, especially if you’ve played the original to death.
The DS’s controls may not be optimal, but we’d argue that the 3DS’s analog nub changes the way you play this game, putting many closer to the feel of the classic N64. If you’re going to play Super Mario 64 DS — how else are you going to play as Luigi and Yoshi and Wario in the official edition of Mario 64? — we highly recommend playing on the biggest 3DS or 2DS you can find. It’s an intriguing twist on a genre-defining classic.
Billed as a stepping stone between 2D and 3D games, Super Mario 3D Land reduced the large courses of major titles into smaller courses that worked better on a handheld screen. Apart from a handful of obvious and jokey perspective puzzles, this platformer showed off the console’s stereoscopic 3D by subtly signaling distance and perspective to the player – you weren’t relying so much on Mario’s shadow (a fact we appreciated more when we first played this ‘big brother’ game, excellent Super Mario 3D World on Wii U).
It was games like this and The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds which really showed how the 3DS-ai’s namesake feature can enhance the gaming experience without taking your eye out. Comfortably placed and superbly matched to the hardware, this should already be in your collection.
