LogFAQs > #978934884

- Cape Feather Tier
Mario Kart (Series)
Cape Feather: As a kid, this was pretty much the only item I wanted. I loved flying around in SMW, finding the secret stuff in the clouds, looking for secret exits. The speed of it was very fun, as was trying to control your movements by crazily pressing backward and trying not to collide into things or fly too far. I understand why we rarely get flying items in Mario, but what I don't understand is why there are so many. You have the feather, the leaf, the winged cap, the P-balloon, the bee mushroom, and I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. Like, there are clearly so many restrictions on what Mario characters can and can't do, but there appear to be no such restrictions on the power-ups they use.

- Kuribo's Shoe Tier
Rosalina
Luigi Wins Without Doing Anything
Kuribo's Shoe
Super Paper Mario
1-1 Theme
Minus World: This is my second favorite video game glitch, after Missingno. What makes them so good is that they're unintentional, still playable elements in their games, which lends a weird, creepy factor. Looking it up the Wiki, it tells me that the world is actually World 36-1, but the came can't display 36, so it just looks like -1, which is kind of disappointing. The idea of a secret accidental reverse world in the game is really compelling. I'm almost slightly surprised that Missingno and the Minus World never got any kind of shoutout by Nintendo in later games. It would be really easy to add a pokemon or level inspired by them. It has to be an intentional decision not to do so, right?
Count Bleck
Bowsette
Luigi
Bayonetta Nintendo Content
Thwomp
Charles Martinet: I know very little about this insane weirdo. Just google him, and he looks completely insane. He does look like the kind of man who could devote thirty years of his life to saying "wahoo" in four different voices. And man, he is really good at those four voices. He's great as Mario, Luigi, Wario, and Waluigi, and I read him explain once the logic he used in how to voice each. He didn't just make up random voices, he actually put thought into their personalities and used it to inform his acting, like making Waluigi try to mask his insecurities by acting like he's hot shit. But "Mario ambassador," what does that even mean? He surely got removed by Nintendo for some reason. I just want to know if it's a better or worse reason than Kojima replacing Hayter, the guy everyone loved, with Keifer Sutherland for no reason at all.
Hammer Bros.
Glitzville: Why does a wrestling level take place in a medieval Chinese building? Who cares! See, this is why Paper Mario is so good. Instead of having grass level, fire level, ice level, it has things like an archeology level, or a pro wrestling level. Everyone loves Rawk Hawk of course, he should've been the party member instead of Mini-Yoshi. The idea that the cartoony Mario world, which is full of just nonsense, can have something as seedy as a rigged wrestling tournament, and Mario needs to rise through the ranks for whatever reason, is great. It's at odds with the normal Mario atmosphere in a way that enhances the game instead of detracts from it, and in a way that can't really be done in the normal platforming games. The Paper Mario games (the three that matter, anyway) really do a fantastic job of utilizing the resources and genre they have access to in creative ways.
Super Mario Maker 2
Hexagon Heat
Mario vs Chrono Rivalry: I was hoping no one would nominate this, I really didn't want to deal with it. Six matches this went on, SIX. Mario wins four, but one of his losses involves LFF. Crono wins two, but two of his matches involve weird rulings by CJayC. I don't hate this rivalry, and I agree that it's sort of more interesting than Link vs Cloud, since there is no discussion possible anymore about who the strongest character is in these contests... but Crono also fell off hard, while Mario did not. I think GameFAQs is probably the only site on the internet where this would even be a rivalry at all. I'll say this, though. Even though two of Mario's victories are dubious, neither is anywhere near as bad as Link vs Draven. That one to me is the most questionable decision in the entire history of the contests, because at least Mario and Crono were never going to actually win the contest itself. I'll also say this, I've contributed pictures for about a dozen matches, and only one ever got accepted, which is this: https://i.imgur.com/V3AnYz4.png. I was bummed when these got rejected: https://imgur.com/a/DM4JNZc

- Hammer Suit Tier
Paratroopas
Dire Dire Docks (Theme)
Dr. Goomba Tower
Chris Pratt
Triple Jump: Everyone loves the triple jump. It's a great idea, too. Gives Mario more height in exchange for needing more room to maneuver, and lets slightly more skilled players (but not crazy skilled ones) do more impressive things. Almost anything that increases Mario's ability to do platforming at the cost of requiring more skill is good to me, as long as it's not some kind of super aggravating glitchy thing.
SupperMarioBroth
Super Mario Bros.
Beep Block Skyway
Vivian: Yeah, I know what you're doing, you saw how I ranked Birdo and wanted to nominate the other LGBT-adjacent character. So be it. I'll say this: when I played TTYD as a teenager, I never questioned that Vivian was a girl, because they obviously removed all of the gender stuff from the game. Never even occurred to me to ask. And as a character, Vivian was great. Useful in battle, reasonably compelling as a character when she falls out with her sisters, all of that works really, really well. Not the best companion, that title of course goes to Admiral Bobbery, but still good. According to the Wiki, Vivian is "inconsistently" either a transwoman or a male crossdresser, and in the Japanese version, her sisters insult her with male insults. I believe it. Like, to be clear, Vivian is no Birdo. Regardless of the pronoun issue (which is confusing even in Japanese), Vivian does not look or act anywhere near as gross as Birdo does, and so won't place anywhere near that low. And you know what? I completely respect wanting to identify as a girl, then dressing as a cute goth witch. Goth has to be the single fashion style with the greatest divide in how good it looks depending on your gender. Go ahead and identify as female, then take advantage of the fact that girls are socially more able to wear silly clothes than boys, that's fine. It's probably true that if you remove her trans/crossdressing element, her character changes for the worse and loses some of its complexity. Like, the bullying she undergoes from her sisters takes on a whole different meaning if it's because of trans stuff. The thing is, obviously this game is from 2004, and there's no way any of that was being thought about by the writers. I'm sure that to them, "Vivian being a boy" (I don't mean that offensively) was just a way to include some more jokes, and now it's become more complicated, the exact same way as Bridget from Guilty Gear, where they clearly made the character to be a boy as a weird sex fetish thing in the early 2000s, and now pretend that it was always their intention that s/he be a respectful portrayal of transwomen. I'm actually curious how this will be handled in the remake. I don't think they'll just completely cut Vivian's gender issues again, but at the same time, I can't imagine they'd include trans insults in a Mario game, so I don't know where they're going with this. God, this was longer than I anticipated. This makes me not want to do one of these topics about Persona, because I know someone would nominate that one scene with Naoto.
Hell Valley Sky Trees