I miss the classic Nintendo feel. You know, the one where you and a group of friends get together during the hot summer days, crowd into a buddy’s air-conditioned basement, and compete for hours in a game that never loses its luster. The Mario Tennis series used to do that for me. I could sit with a group of close friends for hours to enjoy Mario Power Tennis on the GameCube, content, with nothing but a Kool-Aid and a Cube controller.
The same can’t be said for many of Nintendo’s games that released over the past year, and Mario Tennis Ultra Smash, the latest entry in the series for consoles, epitomizes this new Nintendo—the Nintendo that I hope dies off once the NX releases. Perhaps I am just a jaded 90s kid who has grown up to expect more, but I believe that Nintendo has lost much of its magic. The unique touches and attention to solid gameplay across multiple modes, especially during the GameCube era, made for an environment where games didn’t feel like quick cash grabs.
Mario Power Tennis opens with a creative cutscene that has the gang of Nintendo heroes and foes duking it out in a crazy tennis battle with Bob-ombs. The introduction is unique, fun, and most of all, precedent-setting. A sequence like this one coats the game with a thick Nintendo feel; it foreshadows the quality of what is to come. The same can’t be said for Mario Tennis Ultra Smash, which contains no opening sequence whatsoever.
Surely a cheeky opening is not what makes a game, but the fact that Mario’s latest tennis outing is completely devoid of one sets the stage for what follows: a game with little inspiration, short-lived fun, and an experience that is more typical of a downloadable tennis title than a full-fledged Nintendo game. There are only a few modes, and most of them are just variations of the same core tennis game without any wild differences. I enjoyed the frantic, silly minigames in Mario Power Tennis. Painting walls with gunk-covered balls won’t exactly occupy you for hours, but it did add a little something extra to the overall package. Small additions like that would break up the main experience of the game, sprinkling little side games that tested your lobbing skills in untraditional ways. I do want to eat the gooey dough of a fresh donut, but, damn, that doughnut is no good without a few coloured sprinkles caked into the sugary glaze.
I don’t want to bewail the game for not being up to snuff when it comes to core tennis mechanics. If Mario Tennis Ultra Smash were a tennis player, it would have power—power, but no style. Seriously, the graphics in the Wii U tennis game are vibrant, clean, and very much on par with Nintendo’s usual attention to detail. The core game is good, fantastic even, but don’t expect any frills. There is no actual tournament mode, a mode that kept me busy for hours in Mario Power Tennis. I’d sit there and play again and again until I possessed all of the trophies the game had to offer. Instead, Mario Tennis Ultra Smash includes the sorry Knockout Challenge—a sequence of single-player tennis matches that give no sense of progression. What’s more is that when the game does try to introduce something novel, it falls flat.
The latest gimmick in the Mario Tennis franchise is the Mega Mushroom power-up. The random spawning of these shrooms and their interruption of the flow of the tennis game is outright annoying. Not only does collecting the item briefly pause the game, but it forces your character into a gargantuan state that obscures your view of the court. Worse still, you cannot opt to turn off the feature when playing Knockout Challenge. It’s no surprise that the gimmick courts in Mario Power Tennis agitated me, but never to the same degree as the Mega Mushroom.
In Mario Power Tennis, gimmick courts used little traps and disturbances from a specific Nintendo franchise that related to the theme of the court. The courts in Mario Tennis Ultra Smash are simple and unimaginative, mostly derived from different surface types: clay, grass, mushroom, sand, and ice, to name a few. I felt an affinity for courts in the GameCube entry because they were inspired by some of my favourite games and franchises of that era: Luigi’s Mansion, Super Mario Sunshine, and Donkey Kong. I remember playing through the tournament mode dedicated solely to the gimmick courts just to unlock the normal variation of each court. I did that because I was drawn in by their intricate designs and nods toward my favourite franchises, so I wanted to unlock their variants to play with friends—Mario Tennis Ultra Smash just has pretty graphics, but nothing exciting to devote those graphics to. Imagine a Super Smash Bros. game where each stage is made from a different material instead of drawing its appeal from your favourite Mario, Zelda, or Metroid franchises. Good thing your imagination isn’t real.
I want that childhood happiness back– I want it bad. I want the Nintendo that I remember, and I think it can be done—Super Smash Bros. Wii U and Mario Kart 8 have both proved it. Mario sports games have always been a fun, competitive journey away from the typical tent-pole Nintendo games, and I am afraid that they are perhaps becoming more of a means to generate a quick dollar between main-series games than wholehearted efforts to establish themselves as worthy standalone titles. The Nintendo sheen is there. The graphics and superb gameplay in Mario Tennis Ultra Smash confirm it, but that Nintendo fun just isn’t apparent in this latest tennis entry or several of Nintendo’s most recent games. Save the simplistic and generic games for mobile devices, but when I sit down to play a game on a home console, I expect a more robust experience—I demand a Nintendo game.
