Video Game / Kaizo Mario World

You want your Super Mario?
Here's your Super Fucking Mario.

"This is the video game version of cutting yourself."

— ProtonJon, playing Kaizo's Special World 2.

Welcome.

An insanely difficult ROM Hack of Super Mario World, Kaizo Mario World (literally, "Hacked" or "Remodeled" Mario World; known as Yūjin Mario in Japan) is well known for being the Trope Codifier of the Platform Hell genre (well eclipsing the popularity of earlier examples such as Jinsei Owata no Daibouken and the then-unnamed Super Mario Forever), and for being the game that launched a lot of Let's Players' careers on YouTube.

The whole thing is rumored to have started as a simple Mario World hack made by a Japanese internet user known as "T. Takemoto" to challenge their friend, and by some unknown stroke of luck, was found and LPed by a team of Something Awful LPers as 'Asshole Mario World', based off the difficulty. The popularity of these original playthroughs spread across the internet, causing a lot more people to play the game. This hack is also pretty much the entire reason the vast majority of Mario hacks, regardless of game, are sadistically hard, especially those that have been made with the explicit purpose of submitting them to LPers so they can torture themselves for everyone's amusement.

The original hack was followed by two official sequels, Kaizo Mario World 2 and 3 and inspired several unofficial games.

See also I Wanna Be the Guy, and similar ROM hacks: Casio Mario World, Grand Poo World, and JUMP.

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This game provides examples of the following:

• Ascended Glitch: You'll have to pretty much know a bunch of glitches in the Super Mario World engine to get through this hack.
• Big Boo's Haunt: The ghost houses are a sadistic homage to the already frustrating and labyrinthine ones found in the original. The Big Boo boss is made ridiculously hard, allowing zero room for error.
• Bizarre Puzzle Game: What this game really is to the uninitiated. A third of the game is figuring out how to get past certain parts of the level by using certain tricks or exploiting the physics engine.
• Boss Rush: The Colosseum in Kaizo 3 has a series of Legacy Boss Battles against Big Boo and Reznor from Kaizo 2, followed by Big Boo and Retro Bowser from Kaizo 1, in succession.
• Brand Name Takeover: Thanks to this game, "Kaizo" is now fandom speak for any ridiculously hard SMW hack or any hard ROM hack in general; several other hacks have adopted the name Kaizo, such as Kaizo Mario Bros 3, Kaizo Mario 64 and Kaizo Mario Galaxy 2.
• Butt-Monkey: Luigi gets dogged even though he isn't directly the protagonist. Why is this relevant? At the end of Kaizo Mario World 3, the game shows the total number of deaths you got throughout the game. Get 200+ deaths? You are ranked as Luigi, who is worse than a water flea (100-199 deaths).
• Couch Gag: Each of the three games have variations on the opening Thwomp trap pictured above. The first game positions it so that you won't die unless you jump, the second game inverts this (you have to jump in the right spot to activate an invisible block that stops the Thwomp from hitting you), and the third game puts a pit below you (though, like the first game, the text box will pop up before you fall off the screen).
• Cranium Ride: Spin jumping on dangerous enemies to pass over spikes or the like. Taken even further in 3, where an entire level is centered around riding on top of a Mega Mole while avoiding the scrolling scenery.
• Developer's Foresight: The Start-Select exit code is removed for all three games, so you cannot go back a level and snag any power-ups or Yoshi.
• Everything Is Trying to Kill You: As with most Platform Hell games.

• Foreshadowing: In Kaizo Mario World 3, the beginning message includes the words in English "PROJECT -KILLING PEACH-". Guess who you face in the first castle.
• Game Mod: Obvious.
• Grimy Water: Gray water is death.
• Guide Dang It!: The sequel mixes it up a bit by having a level consist not of ridiculous deathtraps, but a convoluted, Rube Goldberg-esque series of actions required to access the end of the level. Taken up to eleven in the penultimate stage of Kaizo Mario World 3.
• Hailfire Peaks: Special World 4 combines The Lost Woods flavour with Big Boo's Haunt foes.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: Compared to the hell that's come before, Invisible Bowser (from 1) and Underwater Bowser (from 2) are cakewalks, although certainly harder compared the original game's Bowser fight. Hammer-Throwing and Fireball-Spitting Bowser from 3 is arguably an aversion to this, as there is a MASSIVE amount of randomness involved.
• Helpful Mook: Accidentally Assisting flavor. See Cranium Ride.
• Instant-Win Condition: Subverted, especially with the Kaizo Trap. If you fall off a cliff to nothingness after finishing a level in Super Mario World, you will still die; the original game was just kind (or smart) enough to not put cliffs there. Kaizo, not so much.
• Invisible Block: A staple of the series, often used to trick players.
• Kaizo Trap: The Trope Namer, of course. One infamous level requires you to trigger a P-Switch near the end of the course so that Mario doesn't fall into a pit of lava and kill himself during the victory scene. Making matters worse is that the level is on a very short timer, meaning the player is likely to miss it and dash into the finish line before the timer kills them.
• Leap of Faith: Required way, way, way too often.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • The first special stage requires the player to perform a leap of faith over (essentially) a Bottomless Pit and hope that a fish jumps up at the right place for them to bounce off and continue. There is no set pattern to how the fish appear at all, meaning the jump comes down to pure luck.
  • Special world level 2. 100 seconds and, while possible, you should probably save scum, as Pokey moves in random directions and could waste time you need to beat the level in time.
• Nintendo Hard: Lets put it this way—the easiest levels in this hack make most of Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, the Special Zone from the original Super Mario World and the Impossible Pack from New Super Mario Bros. 2 look like Yoshi's Island 1.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Enforced; many passages are only big enough for the small one-hit Mario to pass.
• Oddball in the Series: The third game is the only one with custom palettes, custom graphics, custom sprites, and even custom music.
• Platform Hell: Most of the game, although taken to further and further degrees by imitators.
• Press Start to Game Over: The title screen opens with a Thwomp crushing Mario, and quite a few levels try to kill you a couple seconds after they start.
• Rush Boss: Bowser in the third game. While everything kills you very quickly for obvious reasons, Bowser in the third also goes down quite quickly. That doesn't mean he's easy however; in fact, he's undoubtedly the most difficult of the three Kaizo Bowser battles.
• Save Scumming: Beating this hack (and others of its ilk) "legitimately", without using emulator save states, is virtually unheard of.
  • Has actually gotten more and more popular as the game has turned into a well-known speedrun, with many people now who have beaten the games without save states. In fact, one has even beaten the game deathless.
• Schmuck Bait: The last bonus level has a huge pile of blocks, a leaf stuck underneath it, and a finish line. Guess which is the Schmuck Bait.
  • The very first level of the second game has a finish line right at the start. If you're familiar with the second special stage in the first game, you'd know not to touch it.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Hope you have your ice sliding skills perfected, these games exploit the mechanic's difficulty for all its worth.
• Spikes of Doom: As Munchers and normal spikes, and in great quantity in all levels.
• Temporary Platform: Used throughout the mod, including the infamous Kaizo Trap.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: You won't see many traps until you get killed by them. This is, again, one of the most common features of both the original and imitators.
• Video Game Remake: Kaizo Mario Advance 2. How shall the gameplay of Luigi from the GBA version work with these levels?
• Serial Escalation: How insanely difficult will this stage be? Practically gets turned into an art form.
• Shout-Out: The third level of the first game is called Cerulean Cave, a reference to a location in Pokémon.
• Turns Red: Bowser in the third game takes five hits to kill, and something new gets added every time he gets hit.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: The reward for beating the Special World in the first game is a Feather, so you can actually avoid the One-Hit-Point Wonder rule... only it's stuck in a place that is impossible to escape, since the blocks are too high for Mario to jump over. You cannot exit the level by using Start-Select, either.

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