Super Mario Run, at first sight
Apple’s iPhone event for 2016 had one special announcement, other than discontinuing headphone jack in iPhone7, it was the official entry of Super Mario on iOS.
Three months later, in Dec 2016, Nintendo launched the game on iOS. On the launch day it was downloaded ~2.9 million times, which is more than thrice of super popular Pokemon Go’s launch day downloads. I was one of those 2.9m downloaders and here is what I think about Super Mario Run.
Installation
Once the app is downloaded from AppStore, the installation does not finish unless user completes a three step pre-onboarding process. This kind of pre-onboarding is used by our general purpose software installations on Mac/Windows/Ubuntu and as a mobile gamer, I strongly dislike this.
Top mobile game makers understand two things very well,
- New players want to reach the game screen quickly.
- Players never create/link account before playing the game long enough.
This is why Supercell and King give a Facebook/Game Center logins inside the game rather than increasing onboarding time. Nintendo should have removed this pre-onboarding process completely.
Onboarding
Onboarding of the game is long and can be considered divided in two parts.
- This is an essential part of onboarding. It is a tutorial for Mario’s controls which mainly explains how Nintendo has replaced the buttons of traditional gaming remote with mobile touch. Having seen the poor pre-onboarding, I thought Nintendo must have given a text tutorial to teach controls but they did well on this front. Player is given a very easy one-time stage to progress and controls are taught in between this. These 6 screens explain how our Mario does his actions.
- Mario is now sent to the Mushroom Kingdom where Toad tells him the story of kidnapped princess Peach and introduces him to the first stage of World Tour.
Before leaving, Toad also says one last thing which forms the basis of the second mode in game, the Toads Rally.
This completes the onboarding and Mario is own his own now. This was executed very well and kept as smooth as possible.
Modes
There are two modes in the game, one is classic World Tour and other is Toads Rally. Everytime player completes a World in Tour, he is awarded some Rally Tickets each of which can be used to play the Toads Rally once. In this mode, player competes against another player in front of a large Toads audience for one minute.
Whoever collects more coins as well as impresses more Toads, wins the Rally. Winner earns some of the toads from loser’s Kingdom. So World Tour is a single player mode and Toads Rally is a multiplayer mode. Cool! A very mobile-like thought process in designing modes. But what will I do with these Toads? Meta-game answers that.
Meta-game
The game has two consumables, Coins and Toads, they can be spent to buy decorations & buildings to build the Mushroom Kingdom. Kingdom is initially a colorful empty land having a tent like small castle. The more toads you have, the bigger your castle becomes. Clicking on the castle shows the what this happy Kingdom looked like in past before being wrecked, meta game is to rebuild the kingdom. Buying stuff costs coins or toads or both.
There are some special buildings too, which serve unique purpose in the game. Like there are 4 different Bonus Games Houses, each of them costs different kinds of Toads and lets player play a bonus game every 8 hours to earn Coins and chance to win Rally Tickets.
There are other special houses, purchasing them unlocks more characters in the game. You can then choose to use other characters run for you instead of Mario all the time.
So yeah, building Kingdom sounds cute but essential on many levels to unlock more stuff in game.
Monetization
There is a bad news.
The World Tour has 6 worlds, each having 4 stages. But only first three stages of World 1 are free to play, the other 21 stages can only be played by paying 620 INR (= 10 USD).
This is not the mobile way of monetizing game. Mobile gamers are habitual of paying small amounts of money slowly as the game levels up. They pay money to make small progress then more money to make more progress and then more money to make more progress. Nintendo did not give much thoughts to it and released a demo version of the game and expecting players to pay money to unlock full version.
Miscellaneous
Yeah, it requires working internet to launch the game, why? Maybe because the players have a Kingdom which needs to be consistently synced with server, just like villages in Clash of Clans.
But Clash of Clans villages are dynamic, they are making progress every second like resources generation, raids, constructions progress etc., so CoC village is different everytime and needs server on every launch but Mario’s Kingdom is not dynamic, why does it need constant internet connection then?
This Retry screen could have been better designed.
Remember this power from classic Super Mario? After collecting this flower, Mario’s clothes turn white and he could shoot fireballs, there is no such power up in mobile version.
Finally, except the unusual way of monetization, I like the game. The team has put in great efforts to make the gameplay absolutely smooth.
