super mario 64 last impact crystal caves

#Super mario 64 last impact crystal caves trial#

This labyrinthine layout is both one of Hazy Maze Cave’s defining features as well as one of its greatest gremlins.

#Super mario 64 last impact crystal caves trial#

The surprisingly baffling layout can sometimes feel gratifying to grasp by constructing a mental map through trial and error, but it can also be exasperating, as it relies more on blind memorization than chipping away at a more cohesive whole, a la Dark Souls. And as a maze, it succeeds in feeling like a random shuffling of rooms and concepts, each illogically leading to the next. But this might be the point - the course is a maze, after all. The course tries to explain itself via map, but it’s indecipherable low-res gobbledygook. It’s not really worth trying to describe exactly how all of this is interconnected. That elevator descends to an underground lake featuring Dorrie the restless sea dragon. Follow the left path at the start and you’ll come across a room with tumbling boulder, connected to the red coin room as well as another room with an elevator.

From there, you can access a toxic maze (the “hazy maze” of the level’s title) which itself has multiple exits, two of which lead to their own star. Follow the path to the right and you’ll arrive in a room with various platforms and a related red coin challenge. Upon entering the course, the player confronts an indecipherable course map and a branching path offering two possible directions. As a self-described maze, it is the most branching, winding, interconnected course so far - sometimes to its own detriment. This is the actual entrance to Hazy Maze Cave, where the player will indeed unlock the metal cap, a power-up that allows Mario to sink in water while cosplaying as a T1000. Inside is a Toad that gifts the player a star merely for conversing with him and a puddle of metallic goo reminiscent of the mimetic polyalloy from Terminator 2, evoking the particularly amorphous course accessed through it. As if smoothing the player into unconventional course entrances (perhaps in case they missed Big Boo’s Haunt‘s uniquely unconventional entrance), the player will stumble across a star door with no stars.

Upon beating Bowser in the Dark World, the player earns the key to the basement, a flat fee for the next three courses. Hazy Maze Cave is the sixth course in Super Mario 64, although you’d be forgiven for not knowing that since it opens up at the same time as courses seven and eight.

In this installment, I’ll be taking a look at Course 6 – Hazy Maze Cave. With the upcoming Super Mario Odyssey being only the third Mario game in the same vein as Super Mario 64 (following Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine ), it is high time to reexamine one of the evergreen staples of the video game canon. In this continuing feature, I will examine each of these fifteen courses in detail, attempting to pick apart each course and evaluate its accomplishments and inadequacies. Over twenty years later, Super Mario 64 remains a top-notch example of bravely innovative and masterfully fluid game design not only for its groundbreaking three-dimensional gameplay that was a tipping point for the entire industry but also for the design of its intricately crafted and sweepingly diverse fifteen courses.