Super Mario Land [Game Boy] - Hard Mode 1CC Playthrough (Sameboy 0.15.5)

0:15. Stage 1-1
2:49. Stage 1-2
4:41. Stage 1-3
6:35. Stage 2-1
8:24. Stage 2-2
11:20. Stage 2-3
14:02. Stage 3-1
17:02. Stage 3-2
22:04. Stage 3-3
25:53. Stage 4-1
29:50. Stage 4-2
33:05. Stage 4-3

Super Mario Land was one of the launch titles for the original Game Boy when the handheld was released in 1989. It started the Super Mario Land spinoff series, which would include Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins and Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. The latter would start the Wario Land series of games.

There are a few things that make the original Super Mario Land different if not the odd one out amongst Mario games from this time. One, Daisy makes her debut, so you save her instead of Princess Peach. Two, it's set in Sarasaland, which unlike Mushroom Kingdom is a weird trippy place with some references to real locations and feels more like a fever dream than something Miyamoto would have designed. It's odd seeing Mario in a place that resembles Easter Island in World 3 and the last world, Chai Kingdom, is an obvious take on China especially in 4-1. Speaking of Miyamoto, he wasn't involved as Gunpei Yokoi was in charge of this game's development, which explains a lot. I imagine he's the reason the fireball bounces in straight lines, as well as the reason for the two shmup stages (2-3 and 4-3).

The last thing that stands out is that it's so short. It's pretty nice in a way because you can do a run easily in 30-40 minutes, but I could see casual players beating Normal mode pretty quickly and not coming back to it much back then. Its briefness lends itself to speedrunning, but the fact that it was a handheld game back in the day made it less popular than the NES Mario game in the speedrunning community from the little bit of research I've done.

Like the original Super Mario Bros, it has a Hard Mode unlockable after beating the original game. This does add a little bit of extra replay value as it adds more enemies to spice things up. It does make the game more challenging, but it is still a pretty easy clear outside of a few moments here and there in the second half of the game. That pretty much summarizes this run as well. Outside of some nasty moments in 3-2 and 3-3, I didn't die a whole lot.

Also, the music is fantastic for an early Game Boy game. The World 4 theme is one of my favorite songs in a Mario game:

   • Chai Kingdom - Super Mario Land  

Played on Sameboy 0.15.5 (with Omniscale shaders) using a Hori Fighting Commander, without save states or other tool assistance. I highly recommend Sameboy for GB/GBC emulation. It's extremely accurate.