To anyone who’s been playing games for a long time, cheerfully subversive spirit might not come as too great a shock. Certainly, it is far from the first Nintendo game to take a sideways look at the conventions of the series. The and RPGs, for instance, have regularly poked fun at the plumber’s platforming adventures, offering irreverent commentary on ideas that might make sense within the games themselves but have little truck with real-world logic. Yet they do so from a position of relative safety: as spin-offs, they’re not bound to the same kind of restrictions wegames, and as such, all bets are off.
