I absolutely love the Super Mario Bros. games. Since Super Mario Bros. 1 right up until today, they've been innovative in their game play, level design, secrets, and many other aspects of a universally accepted great platforming adventure game series. They've brought us many memorable characters and their style has been emulated countless times.

And yet...I'm sick of the story. Save the princess, defeat Bowser. Save the princess, defeat Bowser. Enough!

[Disclaimers]

Ok, true, Super Mario Bros. 2 deviated from the tired story by allowing the Peach to be a playable character and Bowser wasn't the main villan. But I'm willing to bet that no one counts that as a true Mario game anyway.

Ok, true, Super Mario Sunshine was just about cleaning up the island, but that game was just kinda stupid. To me, Mario just isn't cool unless he's shooting fire balls or flying (maybe someday he can do both at once?)

Of course when I'm writing this, I'm not including any of the games like Super Mario RPG, Super Paper Mario, any of the Mario Party or Mario sports games, Mario Paint, or anything else. Just the straight up adventure platformers.

[/Disclaimers]

Even despite those examples of deviance, the core elements of every Mario game remain the same: you travel to various worlds/lands, kill various enemies, collect coins and power ups, and eventually you finish the game and say "now what?" The games haven't ever relied too heavily on in-game dialogue or problem solving puzzles like the Zelda series. It's just shoot this guy with fireballs, jump over this pit, don't fall in that hot lava, avoid being eaten by this fish, etc. Mario basically acts as a cursor that you guide through mazes of death. Simple mazes of death, at that. Where's the character development? Where's the drama? Mario was the first character to be truly represented in 3D. Why is his psyche still relegated to the world of 1D?

Another thing I can't stand is the difficulty of the games. I don't know about you, but I've never beaten SMB 1 or SMB 2. They're just too hard for me. I love them to death and I can get pretty far in them, but towards the end, I just hit a brick wall. And that's not to say that as a kid I couldn't beat them but now they're easy -- no, I still can't beat them even to this day. The game over sound in Mario 1 is an all too familiar soundtrack to my life.

On the other hand, newer versions of Mario like Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy are just entirely too easy. On my first play through of Galaxy, I beat the game in 12 hours (which includes a lot of time where I was just screwing around, exploring the game). There was a time in Galaxy where I had 45 lives. What am I going to do with that many lives? Assuming there was a really hard part that I couldn't beat (there weren't any) I'd probably only play that part about 10 times before giving up, not 45 times.

In my opinion, the series hit its stride with respect to appropriate amount of difficulty with Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World. SMB 3 is difficult, but not unbeatable and certain parts are definitely not for the passive gamer. SMWorld is on par with this, while actually had more difficult levels and slightly more confusing overworld design, which confused and frustrated some gamers while at the same time challenged hardcore gamers to play on and explore.

My complaints to the series as a whole might not stand up across the board, but I believe that we've been rehashed the same old Mario games so many times that they're now too easy. The gamers are starting to anticipate the moves of the developers, rather than the developers being one step ahead of us, which is sad to me. I challenge Shigeru Miyamoto to incorporate some elements of the Zelda series into the Super Mario series. Make the games more action oriented. Make the games have complicated puzzles that we need a strategy guide to figure out. Make the games have more options rather than just "which level am I going to play now?" And for Christ sake, please give Mario some character development! Maybe he doesn't always want to be a good guy or save the princess. Maybe he'd rather clean sewers all day.