You need something to open up a new door/ To show you something you seen before/ But overlooked a hundred times or more.
– Bob Dylan
New Super Luigi U is a work of art. There’s no denying it.
The Year of Luigi, a celebration of Mario’s criminally underappreciated brother, took place between March 2013 and March 2014. Its aim: to recognise that Luigi is basically the greatest thing Nintendo have ever created. The moustache alone deserves epics, treatises, odes to its glory.
If you’re in any doubt about this, just remember that Luigi ranked higher than Mario in a list of the best Italians in gaming. Admittedly, that list also claimed that Mario was a carpenter, but the ranking stands nonetheless.
Anyhoo, as part of the greatest year that there ever was, a few games released with an unusual perspective-shift, sliding the spotlight a few inches to the left of usual attention-hogger Mario and his dumb red hat to instead shine in wonderment on the great green glory that is Luigi. New Super Luigi U was one such game.
In New Super Luigi U, Luigi takes centre stage as the main playable character. This is, I must stress extremely powerfully, not just a reskin of New Super Mario Bros U. Sure, it initially released as DLC for that game and uses all the same assets and comes as a bonus (a bonus? – as if it isn’t the main attraction) with the Switch version of NSMBU, but it’s a new and joyous experience in its own right. Stages are harder, with shorter time limits. Jumps are floatier; friction’s influence is lower. Challenging, as befits the mastery that Luigi represents in his ultimate wondrousness.
Of course, there’s no Mario here, but things should feel familiar to players of Mario Bros. games. You dash, jump, get items, traverse obstacles to reach the end. There are coins. Standard stuff, but obviously all about eight times as awesome as usual ‘cos it’s Luigi.
For fans of multiplayer goodness, your companions here are Toad, Toadette, and Nabbit (the weird rabbit bandit who was kind of an antagonist in NSMBU). There are some items which can only be used by a particular friend, interestingly – this doesn’t happen much in regular Mario Bros. titles, but obviously Nintendo made way more effort to make sure things were interesting and super-sweet for this, the most important video game they’d ever created.
Basically, if you enjoy side-scrolling Mario games, New Super Luigi U is definitely the greatest game in the universe and you should play it so that you too can inevitably agree that there is nothing superior.
The Year of Luigi may have ended, in terms of how we foolish humans tend to express our limited understanding of the unfolding of time, but it continues in all of our hearts.
Though he’s been known by many names across the vast and peculiar landscape of the Internet, every iteration of The Sometimes Vaguely Philosophical Mage has shared an urge to look far too closely at tiny details and extrapolate huge, important-seeming conclusions. He now hosts Philosophiraga, the video games and philosophy podcast, for The Well-Red Mage, and can be found rambling about it and his other creative endeavours on Twitter.
Wahoo! You are a Super Reader! But the adventure doesn’t stop here… There’s more of this project in another castle! This article is just one level in an entire Super Mario Multiverse, a galactic collaboration between writers around the world sharing a bit of our hearts and memories about our favorite Mario games. Visit the Center of the Multiverse to see more:
