Back then, you had a reason: they seemed super hard, crazy niche, and difficult to get into. You may have heard about your friends playing it on NES or Game Boy Advance, but just never bothered to try it yourself. There's a chance that the Fire Emblem franchise means nothing to you. 3D Land proves that Mario can be just as iconic on his newest platform as he was on all his previous ones.
And the visuals use the stereoscopic 3D better than virtually any other game on the system.
The stages are brief enough for a portable, but pack a ton of creativity into every corner - along with some really challenging bits in the post-credits content. The colorful visuals, power-ups, and enemies are all reminiscent of past Mario titles, but it plays fresher than ever thanks to some of the best level designs in series history. As you can tell by its placement on this list, it did all that with a simple whip of its Tanooki tail. It needed to transition Mario's well-defined gameplay onto the handheld screen, make the series more mainstream than previous entries, and sell the 3DS to consumers worldwide.
After revolutionizing and evolving the 3D platformer on consoles, Super Mario 3D Land had a lot to live up to as the first original, handheld entry in the 3D sub-series.
