I remember my family was going through a rough time at the time this came out. I'd rather just avoid all this hassle and just have one character like in the original. The most efficient way to play the game is to just play as Yoshi 99% of the time and swap caps as needed, but even that's annoying because all of your character's voice clips will be replaced by obnoxious Yoshi noises. Luigi trivializes any sort of platforming challenge with his overpowered backflip while Wario is basically useless outside of the small number of stars that require his specific power-ups. They all individually have less functionality than Mario did in the original game (since they split the power-ups between them) and they're not well balanced with each other. It's hard to work up the drive to revisit it when I could just play some actual Mario 64 instead and have a way better time.Įdit: I wanted to add too that the way they implemented the playable characters is really lackluster. None of the new content is compelling (outside of the minigames, which were included in another game anyway) and the controls are crippled compared to the original release. I like the extra content a lot as well.Īnd as an added bonus, you have the mini games For example, Yoshi defeats the King Bomb-bomb by swallowing the bombs he throws then spitting them out at him. They also added 30 extra stars to the game, some extra levels, and there's some differences in the design of the castle and levels to accommodate these character changes. Each character plays different, can do different things, such as smashing different coloured blocks, turning invisible, using the flying cap, becoming metal, etc.

You also don't start the game as Mario, you start it as Yoshi and have to unlock Mario, then Luigi, then Wario. You hold the Y button to run, and its really fine.

Despite that, I still think it works a lot better than people might think, or at the very least you get used to it.

You can play it on a 3D with the analogue circle, but its still not quite right. You can either use the D-Pad, or a touch screen virtual analogue control, which has always felt strange to me. Mario 64 DS seems to be largely forgotten as a Mario title, and I think it deserves more of a look.Ī lot of the detraction around Mario 64 DS seems to involve its major hurdle, that its a DS game with no proper analogue control.

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