Are there really any terrible Mario games?

Mount Wario

Mount Wario

King Bowser
Pronouns
He/him
Putting aside those boring edutainment games, I can only think of games that have been disappointing. I even like Mario Party Advance.

But are there really any that are bad or awful?
 
I guess in terms of buggy, broken messes, surprisingly, I don't think a single one is.

But there's exactly one Mario game where it's arguably unethical its gameplay also happens to be utter trash (albeit standard[!!!!] for 'bile games) AND it makes me uneasy that Nintendo isn't above exploitative, manipulative crap mobile developers, EA, Ubisoft, and Activision regularly do. They clearly can do this if they think they can get away with it, and I'm hoping they don't spill this into their console offerings.

No other Mario game disgusts me as much as Mario Kart Tour.
 
Talking objectively, no. No matter what flaws you point out in a game, it will still have its fans, and if someone out there likes it, it can't be objectively bad.

But, if giving my personal opinion, I'll say Paper Mario: Sticker Star, because I despise the changes it made to Paper Mario that became standard for the series. I hope to every deity that may or may not exist that this heavily rumored next game finally bucks Sticker Star's influence, once and for all.
 
People who say any Mario game is truly terrible have not heard of the following games as far as I'm concerned:

The Quiet Man
Ride to Hell: Retribution
Big Rigs
Umbrella Corp
Contra: Rogue Corps
Bubsy 3D
Sonic 06
MindJack
Dungeon Keeper Mobile
Star Trek Trexels
Final Fantasy: All the Bravest
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5
WWE 2K20
Custer's Revenge
Ethnic Cleansing
Superman 64

Also, the Russian jank that Glowsquid and I love talking about.

The lowest Metacritic score a Mario game got was like, 50? High 40? The games above have like, 30's, 20's and even less (Ride to Hell has a 16-19 on Metacritic!). Mario is Missing is just a poor edutainment title, but it at least doesn't have like, gamebreaking bugs. Hotel Mario just has mediocre gameplay aside from its memetic cutscenes. And I happen to like Mario Party Advance too, I find it an underrated game with an interesting single player mode with charming dialogue.
 
Honestly, I'd say 'no', I think even the worst Mario games are only mediocre, which easily still puts them above literally every video game on the Wikipedia article for 'games notable for negative reception'.

(And, honestly, if anyone actually does say yes [outside of counting exploitative shit like MKT, which I'm personally not, as much I hate that crap], then I actually envy you for not having played any genuinely terrible games.)
 
Wikipedia has this list of games notable for negative reception. No Mario game had made that list. Period.

There are some terrible games out there. Even besides the garbage heap that is Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric (bought it before I knew about its reputation), that's nothing in comparison to the numerous F2P gacha games out there. I remember I wasted several years of my life on a certain game called Star Wars Commander, an F2P in which you spend more time waiting than playing, punishes inactivity, and eventually, years later, brings you to the horrible realization that all that time you spent was painfully unfun. Commander is my least favorite game of all time because that very thing happened to me. But even so, it gets worse. Much worse. Imagine Star Wars Commander priced at $60. Yeah, EA actually does that, and I've been fortunate enough never to play one of their games that follow that horrible, horrible pay-to-pay-more model.

Mario Kart Tour is the closest Mario has gotten to that level of bad. And even then, it's pretty tame compared to Star Wars Commander (or maybe I'm just wiser about my time now) and especially to the pay-to-pay-more EA games. Tour is easily the worst Mario game and is a horrible, horrible direction for Mario, but even it doesn't reach that level of terrible.

You Paper Mario fanatics who insist that Sticker Star and Color Splash are terrible games because they took away your precious original characters are actually really lucky. You didn't waste away years of your life on a garbage F2P like I did. You simply have never played a terrible game.
 
Also, I implore people to actually check out gameplay of the terrible games I've listed on YouTube. Reviews, Let's Play, whatever, rather than just reading the Wikipedia entries or looking at Metacritic scores. It's an enlightening experience (it would be even more enlightening if you sat through and played them but let's be honest, many of those games on there do not deserve your time).

YoshiFlutterJump said:
There are some terrible games out there. Even besides the garbage heap that is Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric (bought it before I knew about its reputation), that's nothing in comparison to the numerous F2P gacha games out there. I remember I wasted several years of my life on a certain game called Star Wars Commander, an F2P in which you spend more time waiting than playing, punishes inactivity, and eventually, years later, brings you to the horrible realization that all that time you spent was painfully unfun. Commander is my least favorite game of all time because that very thing happened to me. But even so, it gets worse. Much worse. Imagine Star Wars Commander priced at $60. Yeah, EA actually does that, and I've been fortunate enough never to play one of their games that follow that horrible, horrible pay-to-pay-more model.
Click to expand...

One of the games on my list, Star Trek: Trexels, is actually a 3 dollar game, not a free to play one, and it has a particularly terrible F2P economy on top of it, where it's extremely restrictive and it has timers on top of timers with ludicrous premium currency amounts required to access, with "gameplay" being bare minimum bad. Pixel costumes cost a heavy amount too, for what amount to just recolors and minor 8-bit resprite of the game.

Oh, and there's the notorious Dungeon Keeper Mobile, which is also published by studio killer EA. The game goads you to spend money constantly; it's a tile-based game where it can take 24 hours just to tap one tile for a tunnel on a large grid.

There's also a Harry Potter mobile game that has the first timer and paywall that strangles your player character for a time unless you pay money and that's particularly disgusting.

What's unfortunate is that the mobile market is filled with exploitative garbage like those games, and it's sickening that Mario Kart Tour isn't by far, the worst offender. At least Mario Kart Tour has some sort of...gameplay behind it...rather than just waiting timers to perform minimal tasks?
 
Last edited:
Some of the games listed are worse because they function though. Big Rigs is great for memes and shit (infinite speed reverse trucks that phase through everything and can climb up cliffs anyone?), not to unsimilar to how Glowsquid and I enjoy horrendous voice acting.

maxresdefault.jpg

it's got a cult status because of it

Games like Final Fantasy: All the Bravest though? They're functional garbage.
 
I guess it all really depends on how you look at it.

In a objective sense, I don't believe there has been a truly awful Mario game worthy of being considered one of the worst games of all time on the level of something like Ride to Hell: Retribution or Bubsy 3D. Even some of the weakest entries in the entire Mario franchise are at the very least functionally sound, you don't have to worry about Mario randomly clipping through ground collision and falling out of bounds or just the game crashing out of the blue without a second thought.
 
Even the games that Mario fans have a bone to pick with, which includes a few Mario Party games and especially Paper Mario's two games, doesn't really feel bad, especially Mario Party. Perhaps that feeling is quelled after Super Mario Party's release, but even before them, the previous Mario Party games felt like they kept the spirit of Mario Party, like you still have the wild variety of minigames and their various puns, and the luck element. Compare this to Sonic (2006), where its horrendous reputation actually caused games after it AND before it to have their reputation suffer, save for a lucky few (namely those involving Classic Sonic). It's difficult to say when it will recover from it, but I wager it will take a long while to go.

Thank you for reading.
 
Mario Party 9, Island Tour, and 10 had enjoyable things about them, I just refused to touch their board mechanics.
 
Why is that? I personally think it's excellent.
 
Ray Trace said:
Why is that? I personally think it's excellent.
Click to expand...
First it takes at least 20 minutes for a battle, then you have a little walking section, then another battle...etc
Second the game drags on.
Third the coins do nothing.
I would go on but that would require an entire thread.
 
Sounds like tactical turn-based RPG games aren't your thing then.
 
Mario Party

Any of them.
 
Nintendo's quality control is too strict to allow any truly awful games to be released with the Mario name. However, since the term "terrible" is relative, you can have games that are terrible compared to the Mario series' standards. A "bad Mario game" is still at least a mediocre game.
 
Mario Kart Tour, all I'm gonna say.
YoshiFlutterJump said:
You Paper Mario fanatics who insist that Sticker Star and Color Splash are terrible games because they took away your precious original characters are actually really lucky. You didn't waste away years of your life on a garbage F2P like I did. You simply have never played a terrible game.
Click to expand...
I mean there's also the fact the gameplay's pretty trash on its own terms but go off I guess.
 
I think within the context of the mobile market, it's a mediocre phone game. But standard f2p fare is terrible fare, and that game actually has real life consequences if you fallen prey to its gambling mechanics.

Why the fuck is that game rated PEGI 3, the game goads you to spend money getting items that spawn from a randomly-generated lootbox, that clearly requires some form of parent discretion.
😒
 
Ray Trace said:
People who say any Mario game is truly terrible have not heard of the following games as far as I'm concerned:

The Quiet Man
Ride to Hell: Retribution
Big Rigs
Umbrella Corp
Contra: Rogue Corps
Bubsy 3D
Sonic 06
MindJack
Dungeon Keeper Mobile
Star Trek Trexels
Final Fantasy: All the Bravest
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5
WWE 2K20
Custer's Revenge
Ethnic Cleansing
Superman 64
Click to expand...
Action 52, most of LJN's shovelware tier games in the NES+SNES era, and Hong Kong 97 also belong there too.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back