Yoshi isn't around, but all 4 players will still get to ride Plessie

With the release of Super Mario 3D World creeping up on little cat feet, producer Yoshiaki Koizumi and director Kenta Motokura recently sat down with IGN to talk about some of the more noticeable inclusions and omissions in the game.

The increasingly iconic Cat Suits were the natural first stop in questioning. According to Motokura, the item and its uses came through a discussion of different new actions Mario and company could make in the game as well as abilities that could prove useful to beginning players:

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Talking to the designers, some of the things that came up were a Mario that could walk on four legs, or on his hands and feet, and also a Mario that could climb walls. If you climbed walls, that meant you could go to places that you normally can’t. Also, if you’re not such a great player, you might be able to save yourself when you fall off a wall. Thinking about those different actions, running around on all fours and climbing walls, it turned out that a cat was a perfect animal that everybody knows.

A trickier-looking item, the Double Cherry, is something Motokura said was not added to necessarily add difficulty to the gameplay, but to add excitement and open up more opportunities for single players:

I guess what you could say is that something unexpected is more likely to occur when you use that power-up. It helps to replicate some situations where you need to have multiple players, to activate an event for example. It’s also a good stand-in when you’re playing single-player and trying to access a multiplayer event.

Breaking the rails of the typical Mario overworld map has also caught the interest of many. According to Motokura, some places will still need to be accessed in a certain sequence, but there are definitely features to be found in free-roaming:

I can’t tell you too much about it, but there are some hidden elements included on the world map, where it looks like you wouldn’t be able to access them, but you might be able to somehow. Also, there’s a Miiverse element to the world map, where you can actually see comments that people have posted on Miiverse on the world map itself. You’ll see those comments as you walk around the world map. In just one world, the world map, you can have all kinds of different experiences.

Yoshi will apparently not be showing up in any usable form in the world, however. Motokura said the beloved dino had been a consideration, but other abilities such as the portable piranha plant and Princess Peach’s floating jump mirrored Yoshi’s typical repertoire of actions.

Also omitted from Super Mario 3D World is an actual 3D mode, which Koizumi said was considered, but dropped:

We did look into a stereoscopic aspect for the game, but when I personally thought about four players sitting there with 3D glasses all right next to each other, it just seemed a little funny to me. [laughs] So we wouldn’t necessarily want to do that.

Sitting on the couch in a cat suit still seems perfectly normal in Nintendo’s book, though.

What part of Super Mario 3D World are you most excited about, or what feature cut from the game most disappoints you? Let us know below.

[source ign.com]