Mario Pinball Land has long been one of the most perplexing entries in the Mario canon. It's not the first Nintendo series to get a pinball-themed spinoff, but between its weird prerendered visuals, strange MIDI soundtrack, abundance of SM64 asset reuse, and wild difficulty swerves, it stood out as bizarrely unpolished by Nintendo's standards. It's hard not to wonder why it was even made. What did Nintendo see in Mario Pinball Land specifically?
Well, just recently, I decided to look into it myself by actually trying to play through Mario Pinball Land. I did try the game a bunch as a kid, but I never got more than a few stars because of how difficult it was, so I decided to use rewind to ensure that I actually made it to the end this time. Getting 100% only took me about two hours, but I left with a lot of thoughts.
Conceptually, Mario Pinball Land is very strange. The intro cutscene has Mario and Peach attend a fair with a ride that turns them into bouncy balls and shoots them at a target. As Peach is doing the ride, a bunch of Goombas hijack the cannon and turn it towards Bowser's Castle, shooting her at it. So Mario heads off to save her, and the only way he can do that is... turning himself into a ball too? Why can't he just run to Bowser's Castle normally? And what's with the ride? It feels really unsafe! Why wasn't there any security around it, the Goombas were able to just walk up to the cannon in broad daylight. Nothing in Mario Pinball Land's set-up makes sense, and the game only gets weirder from there.
Taken in a vacuum, I actually think that Mario Pinball Land controls impressively well. The pinball physics are pretty damn accurate and Mario feels great to move around the board. There's even an element of vertical depth here, Mario isn't solely tied to the ground like in most 2D pinball games. You can launch Mario off of certain ramps, certain enemies will make Mario dizzy and cause him to spin around with entirely different physics, and coolest of all, Mario will float when he's underwater. All this time, I thought Pinball Land's prerendered visuals were just for show, but the devs at Fuse Games actually managed to make a psuedo 3D engine work on the Game Boy Advance, and that's genuinely impressive. After doing a bit of research, I can confirm that Nintendo actually felt the same. Fuse Games showed Nintendo a demo of Mario Pinball Land and they were so impressed that they gave the go-ahead to make it an actual game. And yeah, I can see it. Mario Pinball Land's engine is incredibly cool, there's no denying that.
However, where Mario Pinball Land falters is in what it chooses to do with this engine. Pinball games tend to struggle with doing a proper Story Mode because it's hard for your average player to do execute precise actions in a pinball game. The only game I can think of that pulls off a platforming/pinball blend is Yoku's Island Express, and that game had to make a lot of concessions to not be too frustrating. Mario Pinball Land had the incredibly ambitious idea of being a Super Mario 64-inspired collectathon, and when it works, it does have some pretty neat moments. There are a lot of creative setpieces and fun Stars to collect, like shrinking Mario down with a mini mushroom to enter a beehive or igloo, to pinballing your way through a ghost house, to the aforementioned underwater segments which were probably my favorite part of the game.
However, for every moment of brilliance Mario Pinball Land has, there's at least three incredibly frustrating ideas as well. Mario Pinball Land asks for so much precision from the player, and yet there's so little room for error. Some enemies or objects need to be repeatedly pushed in a very specific direction, one particularly irritating Star tasked you with launching Mario off a ramp at some flying Kleptos, and some of the later bosses like Tutankoopa and Bowser get ridiculously frustrating with how much they ask of you at once. In the fight with Tutankoopa, for example, you need to hit Mario at a column to make him large and then hit him at Tutankoopa at the perfect time, while also dodging the homing attacks that Tutankoopa sends out at the same time. It's just too much. And what's even worse is just how punishing it is. It's so easy for Mario to accidentally fall out of a room and reset the mission, whether it's from him slipping through the flippers, or you accidentally hitting him into an open door, or you accidentally hitting him into a Toad Shop even though you had no intention of getting anything!
To be fair, there are some concessions made here. There are a lot of items you can buy, some of which are pretty gamebreaking. If you're having trouble killing a group of enemies, you can buy a Lightning and wipe them all out with zero effort. If you keep falling out of a boss arena, you can bring in a Blue Pipe to give you more of a buffer. And the coins you need to buy these things aren't too hard to get. On top of that, you only need 15 of the 35 Stars to fight Bowser, which is very generous by Mario standards (usually it's 70/120 Stars). However, even this can't fully fix Mario Pinball Land's biggest flaw, which is that even in many of its easiest missions, it's still requiring precision out of the player that just isn't possible in a pinball game. Even if it had the best pinball physics known to man, Mario Pinball Land would never work because its level design does not feel like it's built around the capabilities of a pinball game.
The overall presentation of Mario Pinball Land is also pretty strange. It uses a lot of prerendered visuals ala Mario Vs Donkey Kong, and at its best, it can look really good. As I said, the 3D effects in this game are impressively convincing, and there are a lot of cute little details from the enemy animations to even some of the backgrounds. I like this one bit where Mario jumps out of the haunted house onto a rollercoaster, rides it around the amusement park, and then gets launched back into the haunted house from another entrance. However, Pinball Land's overall look keeps getting held back by these weird moments of cheapness. There are a lot of asset flips from Super Mario 64, from the font to the coins to the Stars, the cutscenes look crusty and awkward, and some of Bowser's animations feel erratic and random. Even the soundtrack has this same dichotomy. A lot of it has this really tinny MIDI sound to it, but many of the melodies are actually kinda groovy? Like, Under The Sea and the Pufferfish theme are genuinely great despite their cheap-sounding soundfont.
When taken as a whole, Mario Pinball Land is unfortunately not a great game. While technically impressive, the fundamental game design just does not work, it's too frustrating and too punishing. I don't even think I could've beaten it without using rewind! However, I do want to give Fuse Games the credit they deserve because they did do something really impressive here. They made quite possibly the best pinball engine on the GBA, they managed to show a demo to Nintendo and get it approved, and they managed to create one of the most visually-impressive games on the console, all in their first game as a team of only five people. That's indisputably a really impressive achievement, even if I still don't think the game turned out all that great.
And the best part? Fuse Games did manage to redeem themselves. They got to make a second game for Nintendo in Metroid Prime Pinball, which got far more critical praise and is generally considered to be Nintendo's best pinball game. The team at Fuse Games kept the difficulty criticisms in mind and did a great job of making a more fair and balanced pinball game, while carrying over a lot of Mario Pinball Land's strengths like the physics engine and prerendered visuals. I'm glad I dug a bit more into this weird GBA spinoff because learning about the development of Mario Pinball Land puts so much of its weirdness into a new, interesting context, and it gave me way more appreciation for the game itself. I used to think Mario Pinball Land was just a cheap cash grab solely commissioned to desperately extend the life of the GBA, but that couldn't be further from the truth. It was a labor of love from a new studio that really wanted to make a splash with their first game
A year ago, I would've given this game one star no questions asked. But now, I think Mario Pinball Land deserves a bit more than that. It's a flawed, messy game, but its heart is in the right place.
2/5 Stars
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