Originally Posted April 2020:

Since the world is in the midst of a full-on global pandemic, you might think that now’s the time to sit down and play yourself some Dr. Mario World, Nintendo’s latest smartphone game. And hey, if you like Match-3 games, maybe you’ll enjoy the diversion. But if you’re already a Dr. Mario fan, you might be a little disappointed.

The thing is, DMW is not the dropping-pieces puzzle game you know and love. It is actually a Match-3 game, complete with the touchscreen controls you’d expect from that sort of thing. It’s free-to-play and comes packed with all the in-app purchases and habit-forming, manipulative “freemium” nonsense that seems to be required for smartphone games today. Ironically, I don’t think a real doctor would actually recommend playing it.

Speaking of real doctors, this game’s premise indicates the Mushroom Kingdom has dangerously lax medical regulations. First Mario puts on a lab coat, declares he’s a doctor, and everybody just shrugs and says, “Well, he’s a renaissance man. Mario does lots of jobs!” Then Luigi puts on a lab coat and everybody says, “Ok sure, if Mario can play a doctor on TV, so can his little brother.”

But now, in this game, literally every character of note is an unlicensed pharmacist. Yikes!

Nintendo could never have predicted where we’d be today and what kind of dire conversations we’d be having around the Coronavirus. But maybe this isn’t the best time for the “everybody’s a fake doctor” premise. Granted, this game is all silly nonsense—plus even Bowser and the Kooplings want to contribute to fighting the outbreak, that’s positive, right?—so I guess we can look past the potential cringe factor.

The day this game dropped, back in July, I was actually vacationing in Japan. That didn’t stop me from downloading the app and immediately diving in. I think I might actually have played 30 minutes that first day, and probably another 30 minutes the second. There was a lot to like about the game: vibrant visuals, lots more characters to play, certainly plenty of clever game mechanics to discover. The game was not bad by any stretch, even for a smartphone app.

That said, it wasn’t really Dr. Mario.

Now, if you’re read much of this blog in the past then you’ll probably know that I’m a big Dr. Mario fan. In 2015, I broke my right hand and found that I couldn’t play most modern video games in a cask, but I could play original Game Boy games. That’s when I started playing a little Dr. Mario everyday, and I’ve never stopped. If you can think of a particular version of Dr. Mario that Nintendo has release over years, I almost certainly own it. (Yep, even Nintendo Puzzle Collection for GameCube, released only in Japan.)

Since I’m probably more invested in this puzzle series than most folks, please feel free to disregard my criticism of this game as the “not my Dr. Mario” ramblings of a curmudgeonly old man. But as excited as I was for a new game in the series, I lost interest in DMW almost immediately. Instead of the shiny new phone app, I was back to playing the original NES Dr. Mario on my Switch in no time at all. Even when they’re made by Nintendo, I don’t think these mobile games are for me.

Look Dr. Mario World is fine, I guess, but it barely feels like Dr. Mario game to me. Sure it has viruses and pills, but the drag-and-drop controls, plus the fact that you're matching 3 (instead of 4), really makes it an entirely different game altogether. It's cute sure, but overall doesn't hook me. It’s just kind of "meh".

Update 2022:

Sooo in hindsight, the answer to the question posed by our headline here—“Is now the time to play Dr. Mario World?”—turned out to be a resounding YES. For anyone looking to play DMW, 2020 was actually the ideal time to do it. Because Nintendo completely discontinued service for the game as of November 1st, 2021. It’s gone, it’s dead, it’s over. ‘Twas an online only mobile game, so you can no longer play it at all.

While I wasn’t the biggest fan of DMW, I find the way in which it was suddenly discontinued to be genuinely disconcerting. What are World’s fans going to do now? There is literally no way to play it anymore, it’s just gone. It strikes me as rather dystopian that a game can be instantly snapped out of existence the moment our corporate overlords decide it’s not profitable enough. This is precisely why I don’t think server-based, online only games are a good idea. They’re too transient, too ephemeral.

And shame on you, Nintendo; this is a pretty bad look. I guess the doctor is out…FOREVER.