Super Mario Maker 2: Everything announced during Nintendo Direct
An entire kingdom worth of new features.
It's a me!
Super Mario Maker 2 has eaten a ton of Super Mushrooms and really powered up.
Nintendo aired the Super Mario Maker 2 Nintendo Direct on May 15 and announced a truckload of new features for the Make-Your-Own-Mario-Course game, the sequel to 2015's Super Mario Maker for WiiU. While the Direct veered into pure advertisement territory for a while there (and some fans online were calling it boring), a staggering amount of new features and modes were revealed showing just how much Mario Maker 2 looks to have improved from the original.
There was a lot of new information dumped on us in just 15 minutes, so we've collated all the new announcements right here. Sister site GameSpot have also laid out some of the new information, including Nintendo turning Mario Making into an esport.
A huge amount of new tools, a fleshed-out story mode featuring over 100 courses designed by Nintendo's course-making geniuses and more information about the Super Mario 3D World game style is below, as is a direct link to the Nintendo Direct.
New tools
- Create diagonal slopes or conveyor belts
- Angry sun!
- Freely draw snake blocks and the super-fast blue snake block
- On/off switch for red and blue blocks
- Seesaw
- You can customize the water level. There are three distinct water levels, so you can make levels which begin above ground and finish underwater
- Create vertical sub-areas
- Scroll stop
- Banzai bill
- Dry Bones shell, impervious to lava
- Big Coins (10, 30 and 50)
- New sounds and new music from long-time Mario composer Koji Kondo
- Clear conditions can now be set for each level. Nintendo suggested clear conditions such as "defeat all the dry bones in a level"
- Twisters and icicles
- Red Yoshi
- Parachute
- Boom Boom
- New course themes: Desert, Snow, Forest and Sky
- The moon (more on that below!)
Story mode
Super Mario Maker 2 will include a story mode where you need to reconstruct a castle. More than 100 courses are included in the mode, created by Nintendo's expert designers. As you progress, there appears to be new characters you will interact with and they will offer you jobs -- side quests -- of a sort. The further you get, the more you get to renovate your dilapidated castle and gain access to higher and higher levels.
There's also a dog. It's called Undodog. It's cute for a square dog.
Bark bark!
Online
Nintendo announced a suite of online options for SMM2 including the most obvious one: the ability to share your courses over the internet. You will need a Nintendo Switch Online account to share any of your creations.
The online component will include a very Miiverse-like assortment of features. You can filter courses and leave comments on ones that you've enjoyed, as if you're throwing someone a "like" on Facebook. Players will also be able to create a "Maker profile" and will earn Maker points when other players like their courses. You can also customise your look by completing objectives, amid the endless challenge returns and courses queued up at random.
But the biggest development is a new mode known as Network Play. It amounts to an online multiplayer experience, so you can jump into courses with other Nintendo Switch users around the world and play together.
Importantly, you can download courses and play offline, but whether this is limited in any way was not discussed.
The moon
The Super Mario Maker 2 moon is not as angry as the Majora's Mask moon. Good.
A real game changer, Nintendo announced a new tool: a cheery, smiling crescent moon.
The moon unlocks "night courses" across SMM2, which totally changes the way to play. The moon follows the path of the enemy, Angry sun, and if you touch it's smiling face you instantly torch all the enemies on screen.
But the most interesting aspect of the moon for makers will be the fact that it transforms the courses you create based on their theme. For instance, in Sky-themed courses, night mode means less gravity, whereas Snow-themed courses become extra slippery and Forest-themed courses become filled with poison water. Some items even transform, too.
Play in Super Mario 3D World
The 3D world game style is very different to the other styles -- and you can't toggle between this style and the game's four other styles (Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World and New Super Mario Bros. U) without resetting the entire course.
That's because 3D World has a number of features that only apply to its particular style. It will include Cat Mario's return and Meowser, as well as 3D World specific tools such as the clear pipe, the crate, mushroom trampoline, the warp box, spike block, ! block, blinking block, track block and enemies such as the piranha creeper, skipsqueak, Charvaargh and ninja-star throwing Pom Pom.
Oh and, there's now a Koopa Troopa car that Mario can jump into and zoom through levels as if it's a 2D Mario Kart.
All in all, Super Mario Maker 2 looks absolutely stacked. The game releases on June 28 and will cost $70.
