Overall, I think this hack was pretty fun. I’ve never played the original Mario Forever but I enjoyed the unconventional level design. I’m mixed on the secrets, I looked most or all of them up. I don’t care, not sure how someone’s meant to figure that out blind anyway. I liked the any% route enough to do a run but with the autoscrollers backloaded at the end, I don’t feel the desire to continue. World 9 was… eh it was ok. I struggled a big, particularly the fast roto discs and Venus plants (I guess that could be multiple levels) plus the first half of 9-6. The 9-6 boss is where I had the most trouble. While version 1.5 does adjust the difficulty to the rest of the hack, phase 3 is still I bit too tough IMO. I understand that “phase” 4 isn’t really a full phase but that’s terrifying to see after that hardest phase of the boss, at least for me. Took me about 45 minutes for the fight after the hour+ I spent on 1.4 before it seemed completely hopeless. I have many years experience with SMW but I am bad at custom bosses so it is hard to judge. Curious what other people think of 1.5 Bowser as it seems anyone playing 1.4 just used savestates, which is understandable given the length and difficulty.

I’m glad a remake like this exists and I hope to see more since I much prefer the SMW engine (playing on SNES) than fan game engines with different physics… even if they are slightly modified for this haha.