Have you ever wondered what a Mario game would look like if it’s plot was just a whole more serious?
Well wonder no more as I present to you Super Mario World: Hunters Revenge Revised.
A romhack that’s actually part of a series of Romhacks that fall under the umbrella of “The Devious Four Chronicles”.
This will by no means be a 100% percent playthrough, I’ve seen how that can go for some romhacks and I’d rather keep my sanity.
So without further ado let’s get mario’d up.
Epsiode Two and forward won’t be stretched. Sorry about the stretching in the first episode.
I must admit, I´ve seen a lot of mario romhacks, so self-inserts? sure, characters dying? almost par for the course, but this is the first time I´ve seen one with an infodump like that.
I do have to disagree with you though, I’m hoping it get’s rabsurd, but in a fun way.
In today’s episode things get a little rougher as the difficulty gets kicked up a notch.
However we do get our next plot dump and learn a bit more about what’s going on.
Also to address a general complaint about the commentary blocking the action I have moved the position of the subtitles.
So now you can kind of sorta ignore them if you want.
Things start to go south as we proceed ever deeper into the mutation.
There are a couple spot which I think are kinda stupid.
One of those spots being the wall climbing triangles. You know the ones that you have to run straight at to run up the side of a wall.
Well in this episode some of them are put into positions where you can’t actually get a running start at them but instead must do a run jump at them and hit just the right spot or you are screwed.
The next spot would be right outside the boss where you have a large canyon and only a single enemy floating closer to your side.
The problem here is that you have to jump off the enemy at just the right time or risk hitting your head against a ceiling or not being high enough to clear the gap.
Add to that that the checkpoint is just before the guantlet of yellow walls that you have to wait on hunter to get through and you have a recipe for a somewhat frustrating time.
It’s time to leave the comfort of the forest and go into the byways of space.
The castle itself is not bad. My only complaint would be with the space auto-scroller where you have to climb vertically with very little room for error before you get blocked from climbing further and are forced to take a death.
However there is a major problem with the space level that comes after the processor. Namely it’s primary gimmick, namely it’s use of the p-balloon.
To start things off they kind of control horribly in this game. upon touching a balloon Mario will start to rise automatically.
Now this isn’t a problem in the first instance. Oh no, the problem comes up in subsequent instances where rising is not what you want.
To go down you have to mash down on the d-pad until Mario starts descending but even then that doesn’t always work as he’ll sometimes start to float back up when you don’t want him to.
Bear in mind that the balloon power is on a timer and when you are fighting to get Mario to sink so you can go below another block and hopefully hit it in the just the right spot before the timer runs out, you start to see the problems with the gimmick
I best not forget the level is laced with Baseball Chucks who are near unavoidable in a lot of spots. The worst one however is situated just past and above a p-balloon block in such a way that if you don’t have Mario going down as soon as you touch the power up
then you are as good as dead. This in itself is very difficult to do since Mario will rise from the moment you touch the power and that’s usually what gets you killed by the baseball chuck.
This stage does have an issue that a lot of stages in this game seem to have and it’s that the levels are too big and there isn’t enough checkpoints to balance out the size.
For instance it takes about eight to minutes to reach the checkpoint in today’s stage. It’s not an easy task to get to a checkpoint without save scumming due to enemy placement and the way the stages are designed.
I would have given up on this game a long time ago if I had to do this straight because of how frustrating a lot of this game is and how precise you have to be in a lot of places to even advance.
I kinda wonder what the original un revised version was like.
There actually is another version of this romhack. Instead of revised it’s called recharged. It’s pretty interesting in the fact that it looks like a completely different game but’s actually not. If you are familiar with revised you can tell what levels are what even if they look different in terms of tileset and a few changes in layout.
One note is that revised changed out hunter’s castle and put processors in their place. Another point is that the majority of boss battles have been removed and the one’s with scorpion have been tweaked and improved upon to be a lot better than they were in Recharged. In any case Revised seems to be a much more refined version of Recharged but that still doesn’t mean I’m going for the extra content. I’ve seen those levels and I don’t want to put myself through that.