Quicksay: The Law of Cutscenes (Patreon)

After completing a world in Super Mario Bros. Wonder it takes about two minutes before you can play again. I know this because I began replaying it recently and got so bored during these transitions I simply started counting the seconds in my mind. You exit the current level, see the castle from the outside, are teleported back to the hub and then have to watch a cutscene where you release a lock on Bowser’s castle, afterwards Florian speaks a little before you can access the world map again. This happens six times over the course of the whole game, although some of them don’t involve castles so they might be shorter, I’m not going to time them all. Maybe two minutes isn’t so bad by itself but there are other interruptions elsewhere. For example at the start of each world you’re often given a free Wonder Seed by one of the NPCs there, this probably takes about half a minute each time. I could go into excruciating detail about all the little breaks which annoyed me but you get the idea. I’ve said all this before in my Super Mario Galaxy 2 review which is a game that wastes far more time than Wonder.

Nintendo have gotten better about these things since the worst excesses of the Wii days. Super Mario 3D World, Bowser’s Fury and Super Mario Odyssey are all relatively good in this regard. Due to the sheer number of moons in Odyssey, its cutscenes end up taking a large amount of time which is certainly not my ideal but I can understand that no fanfare at all might lead many players to feel disappointed when they get a moon. What bothers me more is the redundant nature of the moons going into the ship, essentially adding another cutscene for each moon, albeit a similarly short one. Perhaps if that fueling animation was made a little more climatic then moons wouldn’t have needed cutscenes upon pickup, even for casual players to feel satisfied. Nothing beats the Galaxy games for sheer cutscenery but Wonder is certainly a regression compared to the more recent Mario titles in that regard.

I do know how to have fun - and not just when I’m playing. I think it’s fun that Bowser turned into a castle. I think the Wonder Flower effects are fun, even if they don’t always lead to the best gameplay setups. I’d love to see Nintendo lean into this psychedelic aspect of Mario even more than they just did. All that stuff is great but it’s nonsense. It’s nonsense by design which is what makes it so charming but that’s also why I can’t be expected to care about any of it. I don’t need to see Bowser turn into a castle more than once. I don’t need to be told the flower people are suffering or that Florian is grumpy or whatever. It’s all nonsense and that’s fine.

Granted, you can skip the intro cutscene but there’s a lot of Florian chatter you’ll be subjected to every playthrough. You’ll always have to watch the locks around the castle disappear. You’ll always have to mash through the text with the pointless NPCs. You’ll always have those little bite size levels which are almost as much loading screen as gameplay. This is not why anyone plays Mario.

I’ve played Super Mario Bros. 3 many times. It’s a good game to play if you just want to zone out for a while because there’s so little fluff. Finish level, select next level, move on. Finishing a world is the longest break in that game and it takes less than half as long as it does in Wonder. Almost all of the minigames and guest houses can be ignored. It’s almost entirely gameplay. By comparison I’ve only completed Wonder once and yet my second playthrough has stalled out because I’m a little tired of the wasted time already. I’m sure I’ll replay it on several occasions over the coming years but I won’t always be in the mood. The fluff really does hurt the replayability which is a shame.

Still, I know I haven’t really said anything novel here so I’d like to formulate my position in a new way which makes the problem as clear as possible. Let’s lay down the law. The law of cutscenes.

If mastery of a game reduces the total playtime

and

If a game has even a single unskippable cutscene

then

Mastery of that game will only increase the cutscene to gameplay ratio.

Correct me if I’m wrong but the above seems like a bulletbillproof statement of logic.

Not every game fulfills both of those conditions but a lot do, including Mario. Keep in mind, mastery isn’t just speedrunning. Wonder isn’t a hard game but practically everyone will die a few times on their first playthrough, sometimes even on easy stages. Next time through, you’re likely to die less, which saves time. You also learn where all the pickups are so you don’t have to search for them again, which saves time. Going for 100% is not the fastest way to beat the game but if you do it repeatedly, you’ll probably do it faster every time.

I imagine most of my readers agree with me or are at least sympathetic when I complain about excessive cutscenes but in case you aren’t, I’d like you to really consider the logic here. If someone at Nintendo proudly proclaimed “We’re going to make a Mario game where the better you get at it, the more time you spend watching cutscenes you’ve already seen.” would everyone burst into applause? Obviously not and yet they sleepwalk into that absurd situation over and over again. Of course Mario is just my go-to example, many developers are doing the exact same thing. Some of them are doing it right now.

I understand that most people want narrative trappings and I’ve even enjoyed some very narrative-heavy games myself. I just refuse to believe that the story must come at the expense of the interactive portions, especially for mechanically-focused titles like Mario.

The law of cutscenes applies to Super Mario Bros. 3 as well. The conditions I outlined above are quite stringent after all. Even a short, two second intro cutscene would be enough to qualify so it would be prohibitively difficult to avoid fulfilling the criteria in every game. For Super Mario Bros. 3, I just find that the ratio is still at an acceptable level for me, no matter how many times I finish it. The point is not that cutscenes must be avoided at all costs, just that this cutscene-to-gameplay ratio is a real thing and it tends to tilt in the opposite direction to what the most dedicated players want.

When someone enjoys a game so much they want to master it, the game gets worse. That outcome is more than a bit strange, isn’t it?