I think I'd have to go with SMW
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2025
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Super Mario World all day long.
SMB3 was an absolute banger and revolutionised the platforming genre while making the hardware run things it had no business doing, so much so that even id Software took inspiration from it.
World just improved the formula in every single way though. Far from ragging on SMB3, World just took an amazing game and polished it up beyond what was expected.
They made both games at the same time. In my opinion there isn't even a competition. Both games are showcases of the best of each console.
Sorry, that's not correct. SMB3 was released in 1988 in Japan. It was delayed in North America until 1990 and released in the same year as SMW, while Nintendo of America ironed out its Super Nintendo console launch.
Super Mario World, in fact, started development as a port of Super Mario Bros. 3.
SMB3 has better powerups, though.
They're interesting but aren't used in novel ways. Leaf is great and Cape expands on it. Frog is entirely optional, Tanooki and Hammer are nice upgrades to Leaf and Fire Flower but don't meaningfully change how you approach the game, the Shoe exists for a single level gimmick, and the map items are all little shortcuts to play less of the game. SMB3 does not use its unique tools to build new kinds of puzzles or present alternate paths through a level they just make the challenges a little easier.
Cape, P-Balloon, and Yoshi are much better utilized.
This is extraordinarily wrong!
There are secrets that you need specific power ups to get to.
This is almost nothing, though. The secret areas are a handful of coins, or an extra power-up, or a magic whistle. Three sections of a water level or a wall of ice in one world is not a puzzle nor an "alternate path" in a meaningful way. E-reader? The niche peripheral adds a tiny bit of extra content for the GBA release of the NES game and that's among your best arguments?
SMB3 is very good for what it is and a technical achievement but ranking it above World is pure nostalgia.
OOOOOORRRRRRRRB
Speaking of hardware limitations, Kirby's Adventure plays like a mid gen SNES game, I have no idea how they got it running on NES. I need to play through it again
Kirby's Adventure is the largest NES game ever officially released in terms of ROM size, and has a frankly absurd amount of graphics tiles. Just consider all of those required for the copy abilities thumbnails alone and you'll see what I mean. It pulled basically every trick the MMC3 mapper is capable of, and was definitely a masterpiece of the system in the original sense, i.e. it displays astonishing mastery of the mechanics of the Famicom/NES.
What I find more amazing is that the MMC3 isn't one of the mappers that confers any additional sound channels and the American NES didn't support that capability anyway. So the entirety of the game's iconic soundtrack fits within the confines of the NES' two square waves, one triangle wave, one noise channel, and singular PCM channel.
I think ultimately it ran into memory constraints, even with the additional 8 KB provided by the mapper. If you sit back and look at them as a whole, its levels are all quite short. It's still my favorite NES game bar none, though.
Programming all the copy abilities had to be a nightmare. Not only the graphics but the controls for things like the wheel & hi jump, the pallet swaps for the Freeze abilities, the environment interactions from the Hammer... it's a ridiculous amount of content by today's standards and it was made over 30 years ago.
Then add in cutscenes (all in-game engine, but still), between level overworld sections, mini-games... It's baffling!
Half of that game would be DLC/premium content if it was made today.