4 november 2025

hello, and welcome to part one of irhqteaotlimrhq (IseeL's Really Hard Quest to Explain All of the Levels in Mario's Really Hard Quest), the series that i'm going to be doing on here on iseel dot neocities dot com about explaining all of the levels in mrhqtctrhq (Mario's Really Hard Quest to Complete the Really Hard Quest), the nsmbw (New Super Mario Bros. Wii) romhack that i released a few months ago

here on part 1 of this series i'm going to talk about level 1 of the hack: pointy path.

pointy path is the second level that i started working on for the hack, and honestly i think that it definitely holds up and is still one of my favourite levels i made for mrhq. this level was just meant to be simple kaizo platforming and i do think that the simplicity works pretty well for the first level. i used spin jumps in the second half of the level, because people barely ever force spin jumps in nsmbw, so i thought it would be cool to emphasize that more in my hack (although i didn't end up using spin jumps throughout the hack nearly as much as i had thought that i would initially)

going through the level bit by bit, the first interesting thing to talk about is how i've used kaizo blocks in this hack. i have used kaizo blocks in most of the levels in the hack (although they start to drop off in later levels), because i honestly really like them as an obstacle, especially when they're used sparingly. a lot of the time i think people avoid putting kaizo blocks in their levels/hacks because it's trolly or whatever, but i think there's a lot of interesting things you can do with them

i guess the next thing to talk about would be star coin one. in the first version of the star coin 1 section, i hadn't put the star coin there, but when i was working on figuring out where to put star coins, i thought that this seemed like a cool idea and it worked well i think. additionally, the wood blocks and spikes here were just the same normal spikes and pipe corner blocks that i've used throughout the level and throughout the hack, but FatYoshi suggested making them look different to indicate that they would break when the switch was hit, and i did and i think that it works decently well or at the very least looks kind of cool

the next interesting bit would probably be the checkpoint. if i was making this level today, i probably wouldn't have put a checkpoint there, but i'm glad that i have it there in this version of the level. throughout the hack, i noticed that i was sort of tending to make shorter levels without checkpoints (and a similar thing actually happened in my mario maker super world), but i'm glad that some of the levels do have checkpoints

i already mentioned that i was forcing spin jumps, but i didn't really explain how it worked. i basically just made a location that was detecting if there was a koopa inside of it and when the koopa leaves it breaks blocks. jumping on the koopa normally doesn't work to get rid of the blocks, because the koopa just stays in the same spot inside of its shell and is still detected by the location, so you have to spin jump to actually kill the koopa and trigger the blocks (technically ground pounding also works, but the level design prevents that from working on most of the koopas)

i'm not super happy with star coin 2 of this level. i feel like i probably could have just made it a bonus room or something (and generally i feel like i really did not use enough bonus rooms for star coins in this hack), but instead it ends up just being in the overworld and feeling kind of clunky. idk it's probably fine, but just not really my favourite

the end section actually changed a decent bit. currently it's just jumping between a 2x2 gap between some spikes, but i went through a bunch of other similar jumps that were a bit harder and i eventually decided that i wanted the easier jump for the end

star coin 3 uses pretty much the same ideas as the koopa detection from earlier in the level, but now you have to hit 3 koopas in succession and then get into the star coin area.

the only other thing in this level to really talk about would be the section at the beginning that uses mushroom detection to put you into another room, but i think that would be better to talk about at the same time as i talk about junior jumble, which will be a lot later into the hack, so uh yeah. i don't really have much more to say about this level. i think that i'll probably talk about infra star next and pretty much just talk about levels in order.