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Discussion Most mindblowing Mario secret

Irene

Irene

Soar long!
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Playing Super Mario World right now and I’m just so in love with the idea of the secret exits. As a kid, I initially had no idea why some of the stages were red. It was such a magical experience to find the Donut Plains 1 secret exit and all of a sudden trek out into the water. Almost like the game itself sort of broke open and extended what felt like its own standard boundaries and rules. This of course stretches itself to absurd degrees when Special World comes around, a secret world within the secret world.

Mario games are of course rife with secrets and main objectives that are hidden and tucked away in a way that makes stumbling upon them such an awesome and genuine surprise. NSMBU and Wonder both carries on the legacy of the secret exits, while the 3D games often have secrets in the form of cleverly hidden stars, shines or moons, or alternative power-ups in funny places.

What has been the single most mindblowing secret for you personally? One in a Mario game that just made you go “Huh?! What the hell is over here?!”

Is it Special World or maybe any of the secret stars in SM64? Or maybe it just is the 1-up at the back of the Whomp’s Fortress tower that the government kept from us all these years?
 
This is an old one, but I remember being amazed in Super Mario 2 (USA) in 1-1 that you could jump over the pit in the cave to get to a secret area with Bob-ombs. And then there's a door that takes you to the back of the boss room where you have to jump off the screen to get to the boss! Just totally mind-blowing for 6 year old me, and way ahead of its time in terms of secrets in a video game.

Also, who could forget in The Wizard watching the kid play Super Mario 3 and get the hidden whistle in the first fortress? I still love that movie to this day lol
 
For me it's not a level but a hidden move. I was quite perplexed that doing a ground pound during a shake in Mario Galaxy results in a homing ground pound. It's actually a really neat move! Unless I'm mistaken the game doesn't tell you anywhere, at least not obviously
 
Don’t know if this counts, but maybe the most surprised I’ve been in a Mario game was in Mario Kart 64 when you could drive off road in Royal Raceway and discover Peach’s Castle from Mario 64. It was just so unexpected and neat to revisit an area that already meant so much to me in such a fun different context.

I was thinking too how the pull Peach’s Castle has for me never quite left when I was so surprised to jump into a painting in Mario Odyssey and wind up there in full HD from a distance.
 
xghost777 said:
Don’t know if this counts, but maybe the most surprised I’ve been in a Mario game was in Mario Kart 64 when you could drive off road in Royal Raceway and discover Peach’s Castle from Mario 64. It was just so unexpected and neat to revisit an area that already meant so much to me in such a fun different context.

I was thinking too how the pull Peach’s Castle has for me never quite left when I was so surprised to jump into a painting in Mario Odyssey and wind up there in full HD from a distance.
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Peach castle changed Mario games forever.
 
Irene said:
Special World comes around, a secret world within the secret world
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Came in to say this. I also loved finding Yoshi hanging out on top of the castle in Mario 64.

And of course we can't forget the biggest secret of all Yoshi evading taxes
 
Irene said:
Playing Super Mario World right now and I’m just so in love with the idea of the secret exits.
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I remember being so wowed by them as well. As I never owned an NES, SMW was my introduction to Mario games and it was that part of that game that I loved the most (along with the colourful SNES graphics)

Fake edit - actually my first Mario game was Super Mario Land on the Game Boy but I'm not counting it
 
There's an added star in Super Mario 64 DS where you can use Luigi's specific power-up to go inside the mirror room where Snowman's Land is. If you're curious enough to try and walk through the door on the reflected side of the room:

sddefault.jpg


You find a white space of nothingness that isn't on the map, and a hidden Power Star. Thought it was incredibly cool and a bit eerie finding this at night on my DS.
 
My first level-in-level was Hazy Mazy Cave having the secret entrance to the Metal Cap Area at the absolute bottom and then exiting back outside - something about that whole vibe was so mysterious, I've probably been chasing that again my whole life lol.
 
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I think learning about Princess's Secret Slide in Mario 64 as a kid was probably the one that made the strongest impression on me. Just the realization that the hub world was itself a level with its own secrets to find, that changed the game for me.

It's either that, or playing SMB1 on my parents old NES and finding the warp zone in 1-2 by running on the top of the screen

On a meta-level, recently I learned the random scribbles on some signs in Sunshine aren't just nonsense but are in fact a full replacement cipher and someone actually managed to translate them, and that kinda blew my mind
 
DenkeyKong said:
For me it's not a level but a hidden move. I was quite perplexed that doing a ground pound during a shake in Mario Galaxy results in a homing ground pound. It's actually a really neat move! Unless I'm mistaken the game doesn't tell you anywhere, at least not obviously
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The red star level is the way the devs seem to have "intended" for you to figure it out (if you didn't passively pick up on it during the game itself). Using the red star increases star bit/coin draw and the way the level is set up will make it so you'll feel "instinctively" like you're supposed to ground pound to end up in the center of a circle of purple coins.

If you do that, the ground pound iirc homes in on the center of the circle and you get the coin draw.
 
Also a shoutout to the goddamn book in Super Mario Sunshine that mystified me for years and gave rise to a lot of urban legends.



crazybenjamin said:
Thinking about it, crouching on a white platform to get a warp whistle was pretty cool. Also using two whistles to skip to the final world!
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Gotta love Maddy Makes Games for putting in an easter egg reference to it in Celeste!

 
oh yeah, being able to warp whistle inside the warp zone to warp even further is also pretty wild

Man, Mario Wonder was sold as supposed to be going back to this idea of the "unexpected" but it unfortunately still doesn't measure up to these sort of things.
 
Stopdoor said:
oh yeah, being able to warp whistle inside the warp zone to warp even further is also pretty wild

Man, Mario Wonder was sold as supposed to be going back to this idea of the "unexpected" but it unfortunately still doesn't measure up to these sort of things.
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Hate to break it to you, but its because were old. I bet Wonder is at least as mind-blowing to kids today, as these things were to us back then.
 
Hermii said:
Hate to break it to you, but its because were old. I bet Wonder is at least as mind-blowing to kids today, as these things were to us back then.
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I sort of agree but still, unlike a lot of what's cited in this thread pretty much all of Wonder's wonders are self-contained, consistently encapsulated in the levels they appear in. Finding Captain Toad with a view of the next world is kind of neat but not really the same.
 
Being able to kill Phanto in SMB2 by throwing stuff at the key over and over is pretty wild. There are some craaaaazy secret 1ups in Mario 64:
 
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Also, there's one of my favourite moments in NSMBU when you think you've got the "old tricks" by jumping over the ceiling, only for the game to troll you with the true secret exit on top of it.

Screenshot-2024-04-22-174650.png
 
Somehow I never noticed the white mushroom houses in SMB3 back in the day

mario.fandom.com

White Mushroom House

A White Mushroom House is a special type of Toad House which appears in Super Mario Bros. 3. It can appear in any world except World 8 if the player collects at least a certain number of coins in a specific level of that world. Unlike regular Toad Houses, a White Mushroom house consists of only...
mario.fandom.com mario.fandom.com

Treasure ships? no problem. Warp Whistles? Found them all. But never accidentally came across one of these, and never heard of their existence in the tips section of magazines either.
 
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sir_crocodile said:
Somehow I never noticed the white mushroom houses in SMB3 back in the day

mario.fandom.com

White Mushroom House

A White Mushroom House is a special type of Toad House which appears in Super Mario Bros. 3. It can appear in any world except World 8 if the player collects at least a certain number of coins in a specific level of that world. Unlike regular Toad Houses, a White Mushroom house consists of only...
mario.fandom.com mario.fandom.com

Treasure ships? no problem. Warp Whistles? Found them all. But never found accidentally came across one of these, and never heard of their existance of them in a tips section of a magazine.
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Got my first one by accident after clearing 1-4 perfectly (aka trying to get as much coins as possible).
Oh, the look of my face at that moment :eek:
 
I remember the pipe on the sides of the cliff in Delfino Plaza in Super Mario Sunshine that leads to the grassy bonus level kind of blew my mind, if only because I didn't know about it until years later and had never thought to look up there.

Maybe not the most secret secret, but it definitely is something special I always remember finding out about.
 
zumaddy said:
There's an added star in Super Mario 64 DS where you can use Luigi's specific power-up to go inside the mirror room where Snowman's Land is. If you're curious enough to try and walk through the door on the reflected side of the room:

sddefault.jpg


You find a white space of nothingness that isn't on the map, and a hidden Power Star. Thought it was incredibly cool and a bit eerie finding this at night on my DS.
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Wait WTF I never knew that I've played this for 20 years holy shit
 
Hermii said:
Hate to break it to you, but its because were old. I bet Wonder is at least as mind-blowing to kids today, as these things were to us back then.
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Nah, what happened is they changed how secrets work.

Mario 3 could be as crazy and esoteric as it wanted because none of it was actually important to completion. It was really all over once they started doing things like Star Coins. At that point secrets that gave you extra lives or alternate paths through the game had become well and truly irrelevant, so all that was left was things that had to be reasonable to find because the game was actually counting them.

I mean, if you don't do this you get shit like the bonus room inside a bonus room or a game that takes a community effort to solve, it's a good idea, but it does mean the secrets in these games can never be the same as in older ones that were more about getting to the end by whatever means than about completion. You still had a bit of this in Mario 64 with things like the random warps all over the place or the exploding butterflies, but that was really the last gasp of Mario esoteria.

Wonder brought back a lot of how that era of the series was designed, but it didn't touch this and I kind of doubt Nintendo ever will because it'd just come off as a waste of resources nowadays to put all these things in the game 90% of players will never see.
 
crazybenjamin said:
Thinking about it, crouching on a white platform to get a warp whistle was pretty cool. Also using two whistles to skip to the final world!
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At first I thought all of you were talking about the warp whistle on the first small Castle, but after reading you about the white platform, I searched and I have just discovered that there are TWO whistles on the first world. Playing the game again and again for more than 30 years and there are still things I don't know, amazing!
 
Link_enfant said:
You can kill big boos, green slime balls and saws in Super Mario World by sliding on them.
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Weird obscure Super Mario World mechanics with no practical use are a rabbit hole.

I still can't get over how you fall slower if you're holding down the jump button. Who actually ever noticed this playing it casually?
 
Luneth said:
At first I thought all of you were talking about the warp whistle on the first small Castle, but after reading you about the white platform, I searched and I have just discovered that there are TWO whistles on the first world. Playing the game again and again for more than 30 years and there are still things I don't know, amazing!
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For me, the whistle in World 2 was the one that I didn't find until long after I had found the others
 
Double warp whistle is the king of secrets imo.

The early Odyssey warp to the island overlooking Peach’s Castle was pretty great as well.
 
Stopdoor said:
oh yeah, being able to warp whistle inside the warp zone to warp even further is also pretty wild

Man, Mario Wonder was sold as supposed to be going back to this idea of the "unexpected" but it unfortunately still doesn't measure up to these sort of things.
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The big problem Wonder has is that it's secrets often don't feel very connected the overworld and even if they are the reward isn't crazy like you and others already said. That's something it's not one uping previous titles on like World on with its crazy alternate paths.

But honestly finding the secrets in Wonder is often a way better experience than something like World. In World, like 80% of secrets are just done through using a Yoshi or a Cape, which means that the process of finding them is extremely homogonous and often pretty obvious. The remaining 20% feels really random to a stupid degree. In Wonder, a lot of the secrets are very level specific and it's much more thought out how some of them are hidden. This doesn't mean they aren't easy to find, necessarily, but the joy in Wonder is often actually finding the secret and not the reward you get for it, because they're much more cleverly done.

I personally played World right before Wonder and thought the way secrets worked was pretty overrated, precisely because finding them often just relied on the same Wing Cap or Yoshi power up with very little variation. A lot of the secrets felt like they were on autopilot even if what you got for them (which I suppose is what people actually mean by "secret") was cool. There's a certain irony that the game's entire identity almost is secret exits but finding them is often pretty homogonous and not always that interesting.
 
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Super Mario is fantastic when it comes to secrets, bonuses, and all sorts of stuff. It's been that way since the beginning!

Look at how much Super Mario Bros. crams into what was, for the time, a pretty packed game. Coins and power-ups hidden in discrete blocks! Bonus rooms packed with goodies! Hidden extra lives based on how many coins you got in earlier stages! Warp Zones to let you zip across the game's worlds! My favorite level in the game, 6-2, pushes this idea to the max, with four different bonus rooms and multiple hidden power-ups. This kind of discovery - not strictly warp zones, but finding these bonuses and surprises everywhere - is fundamental to the Mario experience. And you see that in the move to more expansive world maps in 3, the secret exits in World, the open ended progression with tons of bonus stars/shines in the sandbox 3D Mario games, the variety of mechanics and goodies and bonuses in the course clear 3D Mario games, the NSMB games blending the formulas of 3/World, and of course, Super Mario Bros. Wonder focusing a ton on in-level secrets and surprises combined with more open world maps packed with bonuses and optional materials.

As for the very best secret in a Mario game...well, some of the ones that immediately come to mind have already been mentioned. But I'll throw my hat in the ring!

The Special Zone of Super Mario World, a difficult bonus world accessed from the game's more obvious secret/warp zone world? Excellent stuff. I definitely didn't get there as a kid, and eventually finishing it and unlocking the autumn world map was a big accomplishment at the time. Even now, it's a good final challenge that I tackle before the final boss whenever I replay the game. But I also love things like the Forest of Illusion's required secret exits, or the branching path you can take through Vanilla Dome and the Twin Bridges.

How about the several secret stars in Super Mario 64? The Princess's Secret Slide isn't a hard secret to find, but it was such a neat bonus - let alone the bonus star for finishing the track fast enough. The Cap Switch courses felt magical to find as a kid, too. "Hey, why's the sun shining on the carpet?" Then you look up, and BAM, you're flying! Shout-out to the mirror room Star from 64 DS that was already mentioned, that might be my favorite new secret star.

I remember really loving the unlockable Luigi in Galaxy bonus you unlock for getting 120 Stars. Is it a bit of a chore to replay a 14ish hour game again with another character? As an adult, yeah, but as a kid, I was stoked to play the game again. The Grand Finale Galaxy and the Wii Menu picture as the final rewards were a satisfying bonus, one last march through the starting area seeing the different characters after the story and a final memento resting on your system memory. As an adult, I think I prefer the Green Stars of Galaxy 2. You beat the game, nice, here's more game, structured a little differently and with a faster pace that reminds me of star collection in 64. And then you get a super challenging final level out of it, a trend that has carried forward in most Super Mario games now to tremendous effect.

While calling it "one" secret would be a stretch, Super Mario Bros. Wonder's Sunbaked Desert quickly climbed to the top of my favorite Mario desert areas because of its world map. Finding levels hidden among the dunes like mirages, going into caves or around buildings for even more levels, discovering the hidden Poplin Shop, it truly embodies that classic Super Mario focus on discovery. I'm eager to see what further directions they could take with world map design in 2D Mario.
 
zumaddy said:
There's an added star in Super Mario 64 DS where you can use Luigi's specific power-up to go inside the mirror room where Snowman's Land is. If you're curious enough to try and walk through the door on the reflected side of the room:

sddefault.jpg


You find a white space of nothingness that isn't on the map, and a hidden Power Star. Thought it was incredibly cool and a bit eerie finding this at night on my DS.
Click to expand...
don't try the white room in Mario 64 fps fan made game
🥶
start on 19:35
 
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