YMMV / Mario Kart: Super Circuit

• Awesome Video Game Levels: This game's Rainbow Road. Its music truly shows what the GBA is capable of in spite of its technical limitations, being rather catchy and getting your blood pumping. Its level design also is rather interesting, being made of various bounce pads that can be used for Ultra shortcut-style Sequence Breaking, allowing racers to jump really far ahead. As a bonus, for the only time in the series so far, the series acknowledges the RPG sub-series, with the Paper Mario castle in plain sight in the course (being made by Intelligent Systems certainly helped this). While it doesn't reach Mario Kart 7 and Mario Kart 64's Rainbow Roads Best Level Ever heights, it's pretty good in its own right just like the original SNES one, among others. Its fans hope it returns remastered just like them.
• Bizarro Episode: The oddball of the franchise's mainline games. It is the only mainline game not developed by Nintendo, instead being made by Intelligent Systems. And while not the first game to recycle track themes (Super Mario Kart has two or more of each course sans Rainbow Road after all), Bowser Castle appears a total of four times in the game. Plus, there are five cups instead of the standard four, and there are even a few bizarro levels themselves, such as Cheese Land, Sky Garden, Ribbon Road...
• Critical Dissonance: The game is tied with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the most acclaimed game in the series (due to how back when it was released being the first portable Mario Kart was a big deal, even though it didn't do anything innovative and recycled a significant amount of content from prior entries), but while fan reception isn't outright negative, most fans tend to view it as So Okay, It's Average.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Just like in Mario Kart 64, the lightweight characters (Yoshi, Peach and Toad) are the game's best characters due to how the weight classes' stats were distributed, making lightweights faster^note Actually, every character can reach the maximum top speed in this game, but theses specific characters are broken because they benefit all lightweights advantages like acceleration, handling and off-road with a great top speed, which is supposed to be the heavyweights privilege. The developers were at least conscious enough of this to reduce their bonuses on Grand Prix.
  • This game gave red shells a secondary function by allowing players to drop it behind them and the next player that passes it gets attacked by it. This made it too easy to place it by gaps or jumps in order to make people fall off the track, so the function got removed in future games.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: This game got some of this reaction from people. It's a handheld Super Mario Kart with the graphics and sound effects from Mario Kart 64.
• Memetic Mutation: Thanks to a brief gag in Every Mario Kart Character Ranked by Schaffrillas Productions, it’s become a common joke in the Mario Kart community to claim that Tony Soprano is playable in this game.
• Narm Charm: The intro music may be over-the-top, but its "gotta go fast" vibe gives a good shot of adrenaline for the challenges of the game.
• Nintendo Hard: Getting a three-star ranking in Grand Prix. You must win first every race, collect many coins, win as fast as possible, and more. The wiki explains the criteria.
• Once Original, Now Common: A portable Mario Kart game with four-way multiplayer, even if it had some obvious technical limitations, was a huge deal back in 2001. In later years, when the portable Mario Kart games became much more comparable to their console counterparts — and especially when Nintendo merged their console and handheld lines with the Switch — this game's limitations are all the more glaring, even if it's still agreed —similarities aside— to be a solid entry overall.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general fan consensus of the game. Compared to 64 and later installments, it doesn't do anything innovative, but it's still a decently fun game with a catchy soundtrack.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • There are points in the theme for Yoshi Desert that sound like a groovier version of Freaky Fred's theme.
  • The overall melody for Shy Guy Beach and Cheep Cheep Island sounds more than a bit similar to the classic theme from A Summer Place. Dare to compare.
• That One Level:
  • Luigi Circuit (which returns in Mario Kart DS) is filled with puddles of water which cause you to spin out if you aren't careful... and which, of course, the computer never runs through. It also has a lot of sharp turns.
  • Lakeside Park. First of all, from the second lap onward there's a volcanic eruption that work similar to the Shy Guy Pirate Ship, but the real challenge is that there are two sections near the end involving tight turns with ramps along the outer walls. Touching these ramps will send you back to an earlier part of the course, wasting far more time than if you had simply fallen out of bounds and all but guaranteeing a loss.
  • This game's iteration of Rainbow Road not only removes the railings for most of the track, but replaces it with ramps, which creates a suction effect along the edges that makes it even easier to fall off. The track is absolutely littered with boost pads, and those that don't launch you into the abyss will likely launch you into an active thundercloud instead. While the abundance of boost pads coupled with the ramp physics makes it possible to skip large portions of the track, attempting to do so is a far greater challenge than just racing along the track normally.
  • SNES Rainbow Road is even narrower than the original version, making it easy to fall. Karts also tends to move sharply towards the opposite direction during turns in Super Circuit, making turns harder in comparison to the newer games, especially with the heavier characters, resulting in punishing falls and wasting several seconds if you don't time your turns well.
• Values Dissonance: In Sunset Wilds, the Shy Guys wore Native American headdresses in the Japanese version. This was edited in the international versions due to being seen as offensive elsewhere. When the track reappeared in Mario Kart Tour and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, the Shy Guys were replaced with explorer Shy Guys carrying prospector equipment.
• Vindicated by History: While widely seen as the weakest entry in the series, fans have improved their opinion on the game's tracks, after they reappeared in games like Mario Kart Tour and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, no longer shackled by the system limitations of the GBA. Seeing the vision for these courses fully realized has led fans to anticipate more courses from this game appearing in Tour and 8 Deluxe.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The continuous sunset in Sunset Wilds not only looks gorgeous, but is also ingeniously synced with the course's lap progression.

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