GAMER LOUNGE 20XX (NO CASUALS!!)

[MrYoshbert]

The day they'll use a different antagonist besides Bowser in a main Mario game is the day a pig earns his piloting license.

Super Mario Bros. 2 and both Super Mario Lands.



Wait, you said main Mario platformer.  Never mind.

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Also, am I the only one who thinks the concept of a grown-up Bowser traveling back in time and messing with his longtime nemeses' past selves actually sounds kind of badass? Hey, put this idea in the hands of competent developers and we could get something pretty cool here.

I'm imagining some kind of Partners in Time thing.  Bowser gets Kamek to warp him through time and space with the intent of rewriting history and fixing all of his past mistakes.  His meddling starts screwing things up in the present, such as the Mushroom Kingdom turning into Neo Bowser City and Peach becoming his queen or something to that effect, and adult Mario and Luigi use Professor E. Gadd's time machine to chase Bowser down through time and undo his retconning rampage, reliving past events along the way. Eventually, Bowser shows up just in time for the original Yoshi's Island endgame sequence and tries to eliminate the Bros. in their infantile form so they'll cease to exist in the future, and it all culminates in some over-the-top climactic showdown between the Marios, Luigis (and Yoshis), and Bowsers of past and present.

There. I think my FanFiction.net-esque foaming at the mouth sounded ten times more engaging than Yoshi's New Island's endgame right there.  Actually, forget the Yoshi game; that could all make for a pretty damn awesome anniversary game, like Mario's answer to Sonic Generations. Hire me now, Nintendo.

The only reason why this scenario didn't work in YIDS and YNI was because of the mediocre execution; in both games, there was absolutely no buildup for that plot point, and it just came right the hell outta nowhere.  The fact that both final battles paled significantly in comparison to that of the original Yoshi's Island didn't help matters, either.