I've been interested in the world of Kaizo Mario ROM hacks for years, ever since seeing Invictus get run at GDQ. Modern Kaizo hacks like Invictus are astoundingly gorgeous and inventive. As someone that loves hard action games, I didn't want to only enjoy these games second-hand through a stream — I wanted to play them myself. After eating up every other available GDQ run of Kaizo hacks a few years ago, I spent a couple weeks trying to learn the original Kaizo Mario World, and came to a maybe obvious conclusion.
Kaizo hacks are hard!
I spent probably fifteen hours on Kaizo 1. I got pretty good at it, with the help of a good online guide. If I dropped a save state at the start of the levels and on checkpoints, I could make it through all of them at least once.
But the idea of doing a complete run was terrifying, mostly because it meant doing the goddam dolphin level in one continue along with the preceding switch palace. The game saves after every level except switch palaces, and as luck would have it my least consistent level was right after one. You can easily farm for lives in the water level later on, but just getting past that dolphin level was an insurmountable hurdle to me. So I put the game, and the genre, down for a couple years.
Kaizo hacks are very hard. But in the intervening years our technologies have advanced. We don't have to try penetrating the world of Kaizo with the oldest, crustiest, hardest hacks anymore. (I say this with love and adoration for Kaizo 1 — it really is a cool thing, and I want to return to it someday.)
A few months ago, I saw some footage of Memory Lane on YouTube. I fell in love immediately. It looked like the Kaizo Mario World I knew and loved, but with fast, infinite retries, cute custom music, and a new emphasis on quick, graceful movement reminiscent of Ultra Star (everyone's favorite Kaizo 1 level). I loaded it up on my RetroPie and proceeded to bang my head against the first level of seven for about a week. I never beat the level (although I got quite close).
Kaizo hacks are hard!
Shortly after my second failure, I searched for "Kaizo Beginner Hacks" on YouTube. You get a lot of results now, most of them posted in the last few years. I watched a handful of them, but my favorites were OreosArePoop's and BarbarousKing's. Oreo's video provides a long, exhaustive on-ramp of beginner Kaizo hacks, giving me a ton of cool-looking games to pick from. Barb showcases some gorgeous non-Kaizo "standard" hacks, action games that are tricky and exciting, but without the knowledge checks that make Kaizo feel impenetrable.
I started with Of Jumps and Platforms by Darolac. It's a seven level hack focused on fast action. The difficulty on SMWCentral is "Standard: Hard". I cleared it in a little over an hour, and from the first level I was head over heels for it.
It's just a gorgeous, delightful game. I don't actually like Super Mario World — I think it's long and boring, and the levels lack any of the momentum that made Mario 3's setpieces so delightful. But Of Jumps and Platforms takes the engine and enemies from Mario World, adds a few classy custom touches, and turns it into a tense, propulsive action game. I could easily see playing it over and over.
I needed more, obviously. I loaded up slurdgery next, one of the hacks cited as inspiration for Of Jumps and Platforms. The difficulty on SMWCentral is "Standard: Very Hard", and that "very" is doing a lot of work. slurdgery is longer, slower, and much harder than Of Jumps and Platforms, and I wasn't as immediately entranced with its style. But the fourth level, centered around avoiding poisonous versions of not just mushrooms but also fire flowers and capes, wowed me with its creativity. And the final level is legitimately epic. Just when I thought it was finally over, it hit me with an insane auto-run section that knocked me on my ass in the best way.
Outside of one other game I'm talking about in this post, slurdgery is the hardest hack I played for this binge. It took me around five or six hours, and despite lacking the Kaizo tag on SMWCentral, it still presumes a lot of knowledge of Mario World's engine. If I hadn't already known about regrabs (releasing and then holding the jump button to make wide, short jumps) I would've had a rough time in the finale. It's also one of my favorites — it's an epic journey in just nine levels, and its best moments hit me in a really good way.
Mario's Mystery Meat by Eminus is somewhere between a meme hack and a creepypasta hack. It reminds me of MyHouse.wad, which I also didn't enjoy much. It's mostly about the jokes and spectacle, but it gets hard right at the end, in pretty obnoxious ways. I got through the Will Smith tower okay (it's a solid bit of level design), but the maze afterward was just insufferable to me, and I had to resort to save state practice to make it through. The very hard multi-stage end-boss could've been fun as the climax to a meatier hack, but I was pretty sick of the game at this point, and again resorted to save state practice before getting through it legit.
This was the only game I finished that I needed to practice with saves, simply out of a lack of patience. The aesthetics are obviously impressive, but I'm engaging with these hacks because I'm looking for tight, exciting action and clean dramatic arcs to the play. All the other games I'm talking about deliver on those fronts. If I was in a different headspace, or if I was more familiar with Vinesauce memes, I could see it hitting a lot better.
I played the next two hacks concurrently. One is a Kaizo tutorial hack, focused on exhaustively running through the weird little nuances and knowledge checks of Mario World's physics that Kaizo hacks rely on. And one is a "real" Kaizo hack. I like this way of handling it — the tutorial hacks are really useful and worth playing through, but they feel a little like homework. Cutting them with an actual game is a good way to keep the fun and momentum going.
Let's talk about the tutorial hack first. There are several big ones, but I went with 2Kaizo2Learn by BlueRibbonHighLife. I liked that the world map was totally open — if you get stuck on one level, you can take a break and play some other levels instead. There are tons of levels, but they're mostly very short. The game gives you clear instructions on some trick or bit of technical movement, then the whole level is executing that one trick. Every eight levels or so there's a "test" that strings together several tricks into a proper mini-Kaizo level.
2Kaizo2Learn is great. I got briefly stuck on a few of the later levels, but I'd just look at BlueRibbon's commentated playthrough, and that was enough to figure it out. The final test is positioned as a "victory lap", and that's what it feels like. When I finished this, I felt a lot better prepared to jump into real Kaizo hacks.
Love Yourself by Chondontore absolutely rules — it's still my favorite hack I've played so far. It's a fairly gentle beginner's Kaizo hack. There are no shell jumps, no weird Yoshi or cape tricks. It's still hard (it is Kaizo), but I saw it listed on multiple videos as an excellent entry point, and I agree. The levels are all delightful and the music curation is fantastic. My favorite thing about SMW hacks versus the original game is the focus on tightly designed, exciting levels that propel you forward through the game, and Love Yourself is fantastic at that.
But what really blew me away with Love Yourself was the storytelling. The climactic castle levels are a blast. There's a level themed around "breaking into" the fortress, Mega Man 1 Wily 1-style. The double-length climactic castle level itself is excellent. But the real star here is the final epilogue level, after the climax. It's a gorgeous bit of storytelling unlike anything I've experienced in a Mario game before. I don't want to elaborate and spoil it — if you're going to play any game on this list, I think it should be this one. I've seen four friends play through it after I first went nuts about it online, and all of them had a great time.
My next hack was Cute Kaizo World by slopcore, and I breezed through it in a warm haze. I was planning to tackle a few more very early beginner hacks after this one, but when I cleared it so easily I decided I was ready to push forward. I don't have much to say about Cute Kaizo World; the levels are well-constructed, and the overall game has a nice, comforting mood, like a warm hug. It has a few shell jumps, some secret exit trickery, and the last level pushed me harder than anything in Love Yourself, making it an excellent ever-so-slightly-harder chaser to the other intro hacks.
Love Yourself and Cute Kaizo World are very new hacks; both were released in 2022. Quickie World and Quickie World 2 by Valdio came out in 2018 and 2019 respectively, and until recently they were the go-to "getting into Kaizo" beginner hacks. This makes sense to me — they're definitely doable in a reasonable amount of time for new players, but Quickie World 1 in particular is much harder than the beginner hacks I've mentioned so far.
I started tracking how long each level was taking me with Quickie World 1. More than half of the levels took me over twenty minutes, which isn't true of any of the hacks I've played since. One level, the climactic Sawfring Castle, took me over two hours. None of the other Kaizo levels I've played have even approached that. "Over two hours" isn't that long for "real" Kaizo hacks; if I want to beat Invictus someday I'll need the patience to tackle levels of that difficulty. But for where I'm at in my journey, it was a hugely demanding challenge.
It was also extremely satisfying. Quickie World 1 is still the hardest hack I've played so far, and I got a great high out of finishing it. It feels a little clumsier and more awkward than hacks like Love Yourself, but to me that just added to the charm. It's a lovely game, and one of my favorites of the bunch.
Quickie World 2 went down a lot smoother, and I think it's more soundly constructed in terms of level design and presentation. But it's a little like Cute Kaizo World; it's so smooth to play that none of it stuck out in my mind as super-memorable. I know I liked Field of Dreams, Sawfring Ruins and the final level. I'm looking through a playthrough now a month later, and a lot of levels jump out as "oh I really liked that one!" It's definitely a good time, but I still lightly prefer the first game.
Scary Bosses and Nice Sprites was the next game by Darolac, creator of Of Jumps and Platforms, the hack that kicked this whole journey off. It's definitely a big step up in difficulty from their last game. Pacing-wise this one reminds me a lot of slurdgery, a stated influence of Darolac's. Each level has a cute gimmick, and is usually divided into bite-sized challenges. The levels here seemed to take me a while, but that's a bit misleading — the levels are much longer than normal Kaizo levels, and they have several checkpoints instead of just one. So even though they took a while, they never felt overwhelming.
The bosses here are an obvious highlight. They're very kinetic and delightful to unpack, and certainly more exciting than any mainline Mario boss I can think of. The last boss in particular is really excellent. The super-segmented style of level design here and in slurdgery isn't necessarily my favorite though; I think I prefer levels that flow more. But a lot of Kaizo levels are built around flowing motion, so I'm glad to play a few games based around chunky game design-y gimmicks instead.
My last hack for now was Orcus by Jordan. In direct contrast to Scary Bosses, Orcus's level design is stripped down and minimal. There's a strong focus on technical movement and regrabs over all else. It feels really nice to me — it's right up on the edge of being too minimal for my tastes, but I think it works well. The framing device of the castle and the ominous threat of "Orcus" is extremely strong. Unfortunately, the rest of the game doesn't do anything with the Orcus conceit, and the actual climax is extremely brief and weak. This is one of the better hacks I've played here in terms of level design and construction, but as a story it was by far the most disappointing.
That's a bit of a sad note to leave off on, but I definitely intend to keep playing Kaizo hacks. I've been entranced by this world for years, and it feels amazing to finally carve my way into it. Orcus was the last beginner-level hack I had lined up — next up, I'm jumping into intermediate-level hacks. My end-goal is to play Invictus, which supposedly exists on the upper end of the intermediate, so I have several lined up to help ease me into the world of genuinely hard Kaizo hacks.
I also hope that this new interest extends into similar kinds of platformers, not just Mario World ROM hacks. I've told friends "I don't like masocore" many times over the years, that I don't like platformers with infinite lives about repeatedly trying the same very hard thirty second checkpoint over and over. My instinctive preference is for arcade-style action games, where the end-goal is to string together a complete 20-40 minute run of the whole game without hitting a game over. But these hacks have helped re-open my eyes to the appeal of masocore-type game structures.
There's no right or wrong way to make a platformer. You can make arcade-style platformers with hard game overs. You can make games with frequent, infinite checkpoints and extremely demanding self-contained challenges. And you can make easy games, where the arc of the game's story plays out in the music, in the mood, in playful bespoke interactions you have within the game world.
It's all about drama to me — I like to finish action games feeling that I've gone on some kind of substantive journey, and there's a million ways to reach that. I want to be more open about embracing alternative kinds of action game structures moving forward. Roguelites still look boring and crappy to me though, sorry.
