“We thought of setting the difficulty level about as low as we could go realistically for this game because we saw this as an entry point to the Mario games for a lot of people. So the way we see it is someone would pick up Super Mario 3D Land and play that, and then maybe they would move onto Super Mario Galaxy or Super Mario Sunshine or Super Mario 64 after that.

Speaking as a Mario game fan personally, I should admit that I had trouble trying to clear the first two Super Mario Bros. games. So for me, I wanted to create a game that I could at the very least clear. Even if it meant using Assist Blocks, I was able to clear this one, of course.

Even though there’s still a little bit of good challenge in worlds 7 and 8, people have at least the option to adjust the difficulty for what feels appropriate to them. If that means they need to challenge themselves to find all the star medals in a certain levels, they can do that. But we’re not forcing people to do something at a very high level of difficulty all the way through.” – director Koichi Hayashida

 

It is hard to imagine growing up without playing Mario games. Some of my greatest memories have to do with play Super Mario/3/Land/64/ect. It is hard for me to imagine that 3D Land could be peoples first Mario game.