The best Super Mario games, ranked
It's-a list.
Super Mario is video games to a lot of people, but behind the brand awareness - and the blockbuster animated movie that is currently breaking records in the cinemas - is a series that never settles into a rut. Mario always weighs the same - he's always that lovely piece of elastic to fling around colourful levels - but even before you get to kart racing and golf games, each Mario adventure always takes him somewhere new.
So to celebrate the success of the Mario movie, we've tried to bring together a list of our favourite Mario games - not including the many, many spinoffs. And it's hard - really, really hard. See what you think of our choices.
11. New Super Mario Bros. U
Wii U, Nintendo Switch.
Okay, not everybody's choice for a list like this, but hear me out. New Super Mario Bros. U has always felt like the summit of a certain kind of Mario game. Sure, on first playthrough it's a loveable Mario romp with a few new power-ups, a nice world map, and a sweet line in creative enemies. But play it again, particularly the challenge modes, and it's the absolute apex of Mario as a technical platformer.
It gets really tricky! More than that, it requires an engagement with every part of the Mario moveset. This game is a gym for the mind as well as the fingers, and if that's your kind of Mario, then its appeal is truly endless.
10. Super Mario 3D World
Wii U, Nintendo Switch (Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury).
Mainly remembered for the cat suit, this is, in truth, the long-awaited spiritual successor to Super Mario 3. The same short levels, the same wild levels of invention, the same desire to put Goombas in footwear - this time, an ice skate. To see it is to feel true joy.
There's more, though. Series-best power-ups in the form of the cherry, which duplicated Mario until you're running a whole little army through the candy-coated worlds. Chaotic, hilarious multiplayer. A lovely felty-feeling to the places you rush through. Play it on Switch to get the fascinating open-world experiment Bowser's Fury included. It's secretly kind of brilliant in its own right.
9. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
Game Boy Advance, 3DS (Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions).
PSA: this may be the best Christmas game ever. Mario & Luigi is a game of constant gimmicks and surprises, but it also has a truly beautiful colour palette, alive to pinks and purples and golds. I played this for the first time back in the days when I still went home for Christmas, and it's the kind of game that I was constantly itching to get back to.
It's also some of the most sustained character building in all of Mario, if that's a think that can be said in any serious way. Mario and Luigi share a house, travel around and meet fans who all want to see the famous jump, and at one point indulge in a bit of Peach cosplay. It's a rich game even before you get to the ingenious two-character traversal mechanic that sees you leading Mario and Luigi around as a single unit, each with their own jump buttons.
Throw in some glorious turn-based battles and you've got a cracker. Thousand Year Door might be the cleverer game, but this is just a colourful delight - pure Mushroom Kingdom confection.
8. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
SNES, Game Boy Advance (Yoshi's Island: Super Mario Advance 3), Virtual Console, Nintendo Switch Online.
Somehow, a Mario game without Mario - or rather, with Mario cast as a baby, slung on Yoshi's back or floating in a balloon - turned out to be one of the most inventive Mario games of all time. Yoshi takes the limelight here, with an egg-flinging attack and a lovely fluttery long jump, while the papercraft levels create a truly timeless look and the levels themselves?
The levels themselves! Never has a 16-bit game been so in love with texture, from the bouncy bodies of bosses to the crunchy, crumbly destructible yellow clay you find in levels, and the sharp, glinting gems down in the mines. Enemies zoom into and out of the screen, devouring platforms or sending out sprays of water. Monkeys each watermelons and machine gun the pips, and that push-pull of advancing forward while keeping hold of Baby Mario gives the whole thing a rigour in amongst the chaos.
7. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
GameCube.
Of all Mario's adventures in papercraft it's surely Thousand Year Door that has best endured the test of time. It's still the first game I pop into my broken Gamecube whenever I forget that it's broken, which seems to happen more and more these days. Thousand Year Door shines for me in a cluster of quite specific ways. First, it embraces the comedy of Mario as a silent protagonist - he's Charlie Chaplin and/or Mr Bean thrust into a world of characters variously lifted from Agatha Christie and 2001: Space Odyssey. We can all relate to an MC who falls asleep during exposition, right?
It also doubled down on the idea of turn-based combat as a theatrical performance, with an audience of Mario extras you can whip up into a frenzy by nailing those QTE-based attacks. It taught younger Final Fantasy-venerating me that you can make the numbers in RPGs smaller, without any serious loss of substance - the tactics are cleaner for the fact that you can do all the damage arithmetic in your head, without opening a menu or resorting to a wiki. It gave Princess Peach something plot-related to do while cooling her heels in the villain's castle. Oh, and I love the floral patterns in Boggly Woods.
6. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Wii U, Nintendo Switch.
Is it too obvious to say Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the best Mario Kart? Perhaps. But when people think of the best Mario Karts, the question typically becomes synonymous with "which has the best tracks?" - and the Nintendo Switch iteration practically has them all.
Mechanically, 8 Deluxe is something of a middle-ground between the more experimental Double Dash!! and more conservative follow-ups that didn't let you hold two items or achieve pink flame boosts. And it has acquired the mechanics the series has adopted as standard along the way, such as Mario Kart 7's gliders and under-water sections. It's nice you can go anti-gravity here, but it's hardly the selling point. As ever, it's those tracks: the Wii's Maple Treeway, the DS' Waluigi Pinball, and 8's own forays into the worlds of Zelda and F-Zero. Can Mario Kart be perfected? 8 Deluxe is the closest we've come so far.
5. Super Mario Bros.
NES, SNES (Super Mario All-Stars), Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, NES Mini, Nintendo Switch Online.
I know, Donkey Kong and Mario Bros and all that jazz, but Super Mario Bros is where the series really begins, a huge, scrolling adventure filled with creative ideas and brought to life by a truly beautiful physics system. If it wasn't for the ability to run and jump a little further, to manoeuvre in the air, to internalise how much Mario weighs and how he will land, would Mario truly have outstripped the other platformers of the time?
It's a great game however you encounter it, but special mention should be made of Super Mario Bros Deluxe for the Game Boy Colour, which introduced a challenge mode and - gasp - whacked a world map in there. Purists may prefer the NES original, but for me, Deluxe is where it's at. I must find my old cartridge.
4. Super Mario 64
N64, Nintendo DS, Virtual Console, Nintendo Switch (Super Mario 3D All-Stars), Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack.
So many memories here. For a while after its release, magazines used to print players' pictures of Mario asleep, in his idle animation, in unusual spots. Mario asleep in a tree. On a ledge. At the top of a flagpole.
That gets at the heart of this game, I think. It's not just Mario in 3D, and making 3D look easy. It's not just those beautiful analogue controls, perfected on their first outing. It's Mario games as a place, and as a place where there is fun to be had and things to do in between the levels.
And even the levels fit into this logic. Mario's designers made mountains and islands and volcanoes and castles, and then seemed to work out what fun might be had there. The landscape here seems to have come first.
Or was it the controls? That brilliant suite of moves that works as naturally in three dimensions as it previously had in two. Mario 64 really is something else.
3. Super Mario Galaxy
Wii, Nintendo Switch (Super Mario 3D All-Stars).
To me, Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel remain at the absolute apex of Mario 3D platforming. Its endlessly inventive spaces challenge the very idea of what a video game world has to look like, and how a character can move between spaces - slingshotting from floating rock to orbiting island, or simply trotting away upside down underneath one of Galaxy's many spherical planetoids.
Better yet, Galaxy does all this while never becoming too complicated. Its spaces beg for experimentation, for play. Indeed, later games have struggled to recapture the same sense of freedom found when seeing a mini solar system of areas and ideas, and the wonder of working out exactly how to get from A to B. Oh, and yes, you can also become an actual bee. After Super Mario Sunshine's FLUDD-based training wheels, Super Mario Galaxy is a truly cosmic upgrade.
2. Super Mario Bros. 3
NES, Game Boy Advance (Super Mario Advance 4), Virtual Console, NES Mini, Nintendo Switch Online.
Ah, the Mario Variations, a proper sequel to the first Super Mario game delivered in brisk, biscuit-sized levels, each of which throws in a one-off twist before you're off somewhere else.
The Tanooki Suit is the obvious star here, but personal favourites include the Goomba Shoe, a level that starts by scrolling you in the wrong direction, and that desert level where you're dive-bombed by the sun. Also, the honky-tonky player piano soundtrack has never been better. AND there's a level where Mario can be straight-up swallowed by a fish. Gah.
1. Super Mario World
SNES, Game Boy Advance, Virtual Console, SNES Mini, Nintendo Switch Online.
In Japan, Super Mario World came with a map you could unfold and pin on the wall. That's the magic of this game, I think. It's Mario, but it's also a sustained exploration of his home.
What a game. What an astonishing, generous, creative, mind-boggling game. From the first Ghost House to the crossing of Cheese Bridge and the varied lands beyond, this contains some of Mario's greatest levels, but also does so much more. It slots them together to give you a playable atlas of Mario.
Oh, and we get the best incarnation of Yoshi too.
