Self Imposed Challenge / Super Mario Bros.

Self-Imposed Challenge examples in the Super Mario Bros. franchise.

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Games with their own pages

• Super Mario 64

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• Series-wide:
  • Beating any game by avoiding power-ups is hard. Including mushrooms as power-ups and avoiding them is a No-Damage Run.
  • Coinless runs, where you attempt to beat the game by collecting as few coins as possible. Accomplishing this task in some installments can require the use of everything from taking advantage of multiplayer (if available), to using barely-used secondary features (like the Wii U Gamepad in Super Mario 3D World), to the occasional glitch to avoid picking the golden things up. This type of challenge became extremely popular at the end of the 2010s. Alternatively, there are "coin-all" runs, where you try to collect every coin in the game. There's even a romhack called "Communist Mario", which makes collecting coins lethal. Once again, some games require you to use every trick in the book to even get close to pulling it off.
  • The low score speed run predates "coinless" and ups the ante by not only inviting you to end the game with the lowest possible score, but also doing it as fast as you can. This requires not touching anything — power-ups, coins, enemies, anything. The current record in Super Mario Bros is 500 points in a little under nine minutes.
    • In Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, getting a low score is apparently ludicrous and can only be pulled off on the GBA remake.
  • "Buddhist Mario", where you kill no enemies, collect no coins, and must walk through the gate at the end to show humility.
• Super Mario World:
  • Beat the game without using Yoshi.
  • Beat the game without visiting the Switch Palaces, thus not activating helpful blocks in other levels.
  • Beat the game without getting any non-mandatory stage points. raocow's done it before.
  • Beat the game using a DDR controller.
  • Play raocow's Super Stipulation World. His forum chronicles the attempt of LPer GVirusG to play Super Mario World when every level has a different "stipulation" which he must follow, like: "Buddhist Mario", "Anti-Ascetic Mario" (i.e. collect every possible point), changed controls, double emulator speed, no sprite/object layer, no standing still, you name it. The Bowser's Castle rooms at the end of each world combine all of the previous world's stipulations, making for some truly insane gameplay.
• New Super Mario Bros.:
  • Beat as many levels as you can using the turtle shell dash for the entire level. And if you're really tough, restart from the very first level if you get hit even once.
  • Beat as many levels as you can by ducking the entire level. Surprisingly, one of the few levels where it's relatively easy to do this is the very last one.
• Super Mario Odyssey:
  • The "minimum capture" run, or completing the game with as few captures as possible. The current record as of February 2021 is only three captures.
  • The No-Jump run — completing the game without jumping, which is nearly sacrilegious for a Mario game^note (thankfully, this is defined by the game's internal jump counter, which allows for captures and for bouncing off Cappy). This soon evolved into figuring out how many Power Moons you can collect without jumping, and by May 2020, methods for accomplishing this for 800 of the game's Power Moons had been discovered.
  • The bizarrely-named "Nipple%" run, a race to see how fast you can earn 1000 coins and purchase the Boxer Shorts outfit (which rather infamously leaves Mario shirtless with visible nipples).
• Super Mario Maker:
  • Playing a 100-Mario Challenge in the first game or an Endless Challenge in the second game without skipping a course is a popular one. It's not so hard on Easy and Normal, but good luck with Expert and especially Super Expert!
• Super Mario Maker 2: has the Iron Bros Challenge in where you must beat 50 levels consecutively without losing a single life or skipping in Normal difficulty. In fact, the challenge is extremely hard to the point that only two people managed to do. The reasons are that it relies with too much luck as there will be chances that it gives a level that can be considered Platform Hell, troll levels including Kaizo levels and too fast autoscrolling sections with platform hell combined which it makes the challenge really hard.
• Yoshi's Story:
  • The game has an "official" self-imposed challenge, the Melon Run. This requires eating all 30 Melons hidden in a level. The game goes out of its way to encourage this behavior, and it is the way to get high scores on levels.
  • There's also the Thirty Lucky Fruit challenge, which is more true to the trope. This challenge requires eating 30 Lucky Fruit instead on a level. However, each level only contains 12 Lucky Fruit normally. The way to get the others is via an Easter Egg: When you do a Ground Pound near a Shy Guy while invincible, it turns into a Lucky Fruit. Actually making sure you're in the vicinity of several Shy Guys while invincible is another story entirely. It's not even possible on all levels, or with all Lucky Fruit on a particular level.
• Mario & Luigi:
  • Since every enemy's attacks in the series can potentially be dodged or countered, low level runs are quite a common self imposed challenge among players, with Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story even rewarding you if you manage to beat it at level 17 or less. Good luck in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team though! One particular instance of this involved an attempt to only kill bosses and required enemies during the run, and it quickly became apparent that every boss from Big Massif onwards kills either of the Bros in just one hit as a result.
  • In 2017, a run called a chuggslocke. It is based on the way Chuggaaconroy played as a child. The rules are simple:
    • You can only visit each shop once.
    • Every time you level up you must upgrade HP.
    • You can only use bros. attacks on bosses.
    • No going to Fawful's Bean n' Badge (Only applies when playing Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time).
• Mario Kart 64:
  • A very strange example in which it is ludicrously difficult to get 8th Place as your final placement in the 1-Player Grand Prix, due to the game not letting you progress unless you get at least 4th place each race. This means you are required to get 1 point every race, and as a result, it is impossible to complete a Grand Prix with less than 4 points. In order to place 8th overall, you need to make sure that all of the computer-controlled racers have at least 5 points at the end of the cup since tie goes to the player. And this means that, out of the four races in the cup, all seven other racers need to either get first or second place (9 or 6 points respectively) at least once, or third place (3 points) at least twice (they will never get fourth because you will always be occupying that position yourself, and all places below fourth give 0 points). Achieving this requires being extremely good at manipulating the A.I. and preventing any racers from hogging all of the points. The YouTuber Captain Forest Falcon is one example of someone who has successfully completed the challenge.

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