Nintendo explains the absence of count of lives in Super Mario Odyssey

The commitment to exploration did not make it a "strictly necessary element."

Months ago Nintendo confirmed that the promising Super Mario Odyssey of Nintendo Switch would not show at any time the screen of Game Over; when he died, the old mustached plumber would lose several gold coins and that is it. Why the change? Why is there no traditional life meter?

The director of this new adventure of 3D platforms, Kenta Motokura, recognizes that the commitment to exploration detracted from the idea of losing lives to the point of glimpsing the always fearsome "End of the Game." The Japanese creative remarks that the video game is plagued by checkpoints, in case we fall into a trap, "so we decided not to use the traditional lives system because it was not a strictly necessary element."

Motokura acknowledges that they also thought about how "it would affect the desire to play some users because, while some of them are good and rarely run into the Game Over screen when Mario runs out of lives, there are also more inexperienced ones which would end up seeing it frequently. " Somehow, that risk to finish the game would reduce the desire to freely explore the new and colorful world that will transport us Super Mario Odyssey.