YMMV / Kaizo Mario World

• Anti-Climax Boss: Bowser in the first game is exactly the same as the Bowser battle in Super Mario World. The only difference is that he is invisible. If you're familiar with this boss battle, it's actually not that tough.
• Better as a Let's Play: As with almost any deliberately frustrating game, but Kaizo takes it to new levels.
• Breather Level: The underwater level in the first game. Still difficult, though.
• Condemned by History: After years of other bullshit ROM Hacks being made specifically to piss off the player, and quite the big backlash against these kinds of hacks in general by ROM Hacking communities, even outside of Super Mario World, and LPers alike (quite a few big ROM Hack LPers have flat out quit playing ROM Hacks because they were tired of getting nothing but "Kaizo clones"), the original Kaizo is, at best, seen as a relic of a bygone era, and at worst treated with nothing but bile for creating the mindset that "ROM Hacks need to be bullshit hard for the sake of being bullshit hard" in the first place. It would take nearly a decade for "Kaizo clones" to recover, not returning to prominence until the appearance of hacks such as Invictus in the late 2010s and even then, they often include some form of Anti-Frustration Features like giving the player infinite lives, more generous checkpoint placement, and making the platforming challenges more clever and thought out than having to repeatedly make a pixel-perfect jump to keep things from feeling frustrating.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • The game’s difficulty is so ludicrous that the game crosses over from frustrating to funny and probably back to frustrating before going back to funny again.
  • The infamous Kaizo Trap. You're probably throwing your keyboard or controller out the window...and likely also laughing at the absurdity of being killed during the "Course Clear!" screen.
• Difficulty Spike: A casual Mario player could most likely complete the first two levels of the first game. The third level is what separates the men from the boys.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Many of the more ridiculous things in Kaizo Mario World are possible in Super Mario Maker, including the outright impossible, in Super Mario World, fight against Bowser directly. Admittedly, throwing hammers was relegated to his son.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Slowbeef's SNES9X
  • ProtonJon's "100 seconds?" and "Move Faster Pokey!"
    • His reaction to the Kaizo Trap is also hilarious.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: The second game just increases the hellishness of the first one.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Depending on one's perspective, the third game is generally considered this; the level design is considered less gimmicky than that in the first two, and some traits that are regarded as eyesores such as stacked munchers are toned down (you can walk across many of them with Yoshi) or eliminated completely. Notably, for this reason the third game was the only Kaizo hack accepted as a submission on popular tool-assisted speedrunning site TASVideos.org.
• That One Level:
  • The original's second Special Stage, and not just because of the trope it named. Special mention goes to the infamous Pokey segment.
  • Kaizo 2's third level, with constant munchers and mobile ropes. It's hard to the point that after the goal post is crossed, Chargin' Chucks applaud you for clearing it.
  • The second-to-last stage in Kaizo 3. The second half is one giant Rube Goldberg machine of death, and if you screw up even once, you will be unable to access the exit pipe.

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