GameSpot Video – Super Mario 3D World ‘Switch vs Wii U’ Comparison

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury continues Nintendo’s trend of taking some of the biggest and best games of the Wii U generation and bringing them back to the much more popular Switch platform. But while this is a re-release of an eight-year-old game, it’s not without some quality-of-life improvements that we showcase in this video.

The most obvious change when viewing the games side by side is that the speed of the characters has been dramatically increased, both on the world map and within the scenes themselves. You can still hold Y to make a dash, but now all the characters move a lot faster. This has the added effect of making Toad a much trickier risk-reward character, as his scoreboard was always a lot faster than other characters, and now he’s just blazingly fast. It also allows you to move around the map to choose your next step movement at a faster clip.

The Switch version is also just more visually appealing. Although the fidelity and textures are very similar, the icons have been reduced to take up less screen space, and the text boxes have been lightened to allow you to see the game world more clearly.

And, of course, the weird microphone blast mechanism for moving platforms has been changed so that platforms now move automatically. This weird maintenance just doesn’t belong to the Switch version.

But while the game makes a lot of changes, it remains the base game at heart. Super Mario 3D World is an exciting, cooperative platform adventure starring four characters with relatively different power sets. Mario is the all-rounder, Luigi has his fluttery high jump, Peach can float, and as mentioned, Toad is a little speedster. Finding your rhythm through this series of platforming stages as a character is as engaging as ever, and now you can do it through online co-op play.

While Super Mario 3D World is the major re-release, it’s also only half the package. The other part, Bowser’s Fury, is its own separate game that marries parts of the open-world design of Super Mario Odyssey with power-ups and elements of 3D World. Rather than completing a series of separate stages, you’ll collect new “Cat Shines” from a vast island environment and intermittently escape Fury Bowser’s rage. Or even get huge to fight it face to face. This new game doesn’t look like Mario Odyssey or 3D World.