Super Mario Maker 2: Building Levels, Destroying Friendships

By Brian Altano

Super Mario Maker 2 is the giant new sequel to Nintendo’s “build your own Mario” game that launched in 2015, allowing players to create and share original Super Mario levels instead of waiting for Nintendo to make some for them. For Super Mario Maker 2 on Nintendo Switch, Nintendo is adding loads of new single player, multiplayer, and building options.

So how does it all come together?

While the first Super Mario Maker relied entirely on the Wii U’s touch screen, Nintendo Switch lacks an included stylus and can be played entirely on your TV with a traditional controller, so Super Mario Maker 2 presents you with a few choices to work around that. You can build stages on your Nintendo Switch touch screen in handheld mode or the slightly more cumbersome controller button presses in TV mode. I focused on the latter, since that was the one I had the most questions about, and what started as a frustrating experience gradually improved as I got the hang of it. It takes nearly every Switch controller button input to create a Mario Maker 2 level, including the d-pad, shoulder buttons, and clicking the right stick to zoom in and out. Some things need to be selected manually while others appear when you hover over an icon for a second. Then there are also pop-up windows and wheels to swap sprites, adjust case-sensitive item designations, and more.

Thwomps, ninjas, and castles at night. These are the kind of unique and bizarre stages you can build in Super Mario Maker 2. I suspect the variety of stages after launch will be staggering.

What feels instinctual with a touch screen or stylus is instead a bit overwhelming and unwieldy with button controls. I found myself misplacing blocks while trying to draw out platforms for Mario to run on, only to have to erase them and redo them. It’s kind of a lot, and sort of feels like playing MS Paint with a Pro Controller at first until it slowly starts to click. Eventually, I began memorizing what each input did and started to get better at building and testing stages in TV mode. While totally doable, building Mario Maker 2 stages with a controller takes a lot of getting used to and I suspect many players might just forgo that option after fumbling for a few minutes, opting to build levels entirely in touch-screen handheld mode.

See that bar up top? You can pin your favorite and most used parts to it to make building stages quicker and snappier than ever. Oh, and you can create slopes now!

Luckily, there are some nice quality of life additions that help. For instance, the item bar up top is customizable with pinnable parts, or you can populate it with your most recent and frequently used parts. And unlike the last game, every part is unlocked from the start, so you can jump right in and start building everything immediately. I imagine most players will decide to build stages in handheld mode and play stages in TV mode. That’s not as instantly intuitive as the Wii U was (I never thought I would say that…) with the original Mario Maker’s dual-screened approach but it all works if you’re a little patient with it.

If you don’t plan on jumping into custom level-making or multiplayer antics right away, Story Mode allows you to take on over a hundred custom Nintendo-designed stages in whichever order you choose. This mode feels much more robust than the pre-made levels in the last Super Mario Maker game. These stages are doled out in large groups at a time and you can choose the order you play them in. Finishing a level comes with a coin reward that – along with the coins collected in each stage – can be spent to rebuild parts of the now demolished Mushroom Kingdom castle, layer by layer. Nintendo isn’t talking yet about how exactly Peach’s castle was toppled to the ground, but I have some theories, such as “It’s probably Bowser” and “It’s definitely Bowser.”

Toad gives you “jobs” to complete (AKA a bunch of totally different levels to beat) and you’ll use the coin rewards to rebuild the castle. It’s weird seeing him wearing a hard hat but his natural head is probably soft and spongy so it’s good to see him taking care of it.

The levels in Super Mario Maker 2’s Story Mode are wildly creative, tightly polished, occasionally weird as hell, and frequently bounce through every classic Mario game style available. If you’re a younger player who didn’t grow up with vintage Mario games and you’re wondering why exactly a murderous sun is chasing you through a Super Mario 3-themed level, for example, handy menus can be accessed to give you a brief history lesson. Story mode works as an inspirational showcase for the kind of levels you could be building yourself in Mario Maker 2, but it’s also totally fun and rewarding in its own right. Slowly rebuilding the castle is a wonderful new metagame for the Mario formula and I really hope it returns in future games.

This particular Story Mode stage put a new spin on the classic Mario “ghost house” theme by letting me navigate a labyrinth with Yoshi while stacks of creepy pumpkin Goombas stalked me.

Super Mario Maker 2 brings the addition of a construction kit inspired by Wii U’s Super Mario 3D World, albeit redesigned as an entirely 2D game. You can’t bring your Mario Maker level creations made in the 3D World tileset to any of the other art styles like Super Mario 3 or New Super Mario Bros, which is a bit odd considering that’s such a key component of the rest of the building mode. 3D World has unique cat-based move sets like wall climbing and diagonal dive bombing that would probably be weird in the original Super Mario Bros. style, so this section sort of lives in isolation from the rest of the game.

Sure, 3D World is mostly known for having a cat suit, but these custom 3D World inspired stages bring all sorts of other crazy new gameplay mechanics, too! They don’t carry over to the other classic Mario art styles, however.

At first I was a bit disappointed that creations made here don’t carry over to the classic Mario art styles available in the rest of this sequel, until I started to approach it for what it was: an excuse for Nintendo to introduce all sorts of modern and classic 3D Mario standalone game modes (like Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario Galaxy, and Super Mario 64) to Super Mario Maker 2 without having to worry about them communicating with the 2D Mario tilesets. Playing Super Mario 3D World style levels entirely as a 2D platformer with custom levels feels like a totally new Mario game, and a really unique one at that.

Finally, I got together with a few other people and gathered around a single television for some local multiplayer across a set of custom-made Super Mario Maker 2 levels that were available. If you’ve loved playing four-player Mario games like New Super Mario Bros. U or Super Mario 3D World in the past, Super Mario Maker 2 allows you to basically recreate those experiences, but with user-made levels that you can either build yourself or download from the internet. Each stage had its own parameters and goals such as “work together” or “collect 100 coins” or “be the first person to the goal,” which took the already chaotic co-op experience of previous multiplayer Mario games and made it even crazier. This mode is insanely fun and the idea of sitting around with friends and having a nearly infinite supply of Mario multiplayer levels to download and play is tremendously exciting. You can also have two players build a stage together by each holding a Joy-Con if you’d like a co-op experience that involves much less frantic yelling, fighting, and cheering.

Local multiplayer is hilarious, blissful chaos that had me screaming obscenities at friends and strangers. To be abundantly clear, I have zero regrets about this.

Super Mario Maker 2 launches on June 28th, and if the massive Super Mario-loving install base for Nintendo Switch is any indication, this sequel may inspire millions of budding game designers to create and share their own levels and provide the world with an endless supply of stuff to play. There’s an absolute ton of things to do here and I genuinely can’t wait to keep playing it.

I only had a few minutes at the end of my demo to throw together a custom stage but I decided to write out these mysterious letters in bricks. Nobody knows what they stand for.

Brian Altano is a host and producer at IGN. He also co-hosts a weekly Nintendo show, available right here or wherever you get podcasts. Feel free to follow him on Twitter!