Well, this is it. The final part of our journey through Nintendo's 1996 "starting with a showstopper" N64 launch game Super Mario 64. This last update entirely covers the top floor of Peach's Castle, where the last two courses and the final encounter with the King of Koopas await. The game ratchets up the difficulty again here, presenting two courses where almost any mis-timed jump will mean a long trip into the abyss. Additionally, both courses make excellent use of the vertiginous feelings possible with the 3D format: it used to be that you couldn't look down. It's an option now with a free-roaming camera, but perhaps not a recommended one.

What's incredible about the "you need this many gewgaws to continue" system is how it alleviates late-game trauma. As every Mario game will slowly escalate the difficulty until you're passing through the intense vehicle stages of Super Mario Bros. 3 or challenging the confusing halls of Super Mario Bros.'s World 8-4, every subsequent Mario game offered ways to mitigate this difficulty curve as well:

• Super Mario Bros. introduced warp zones (along with almost everything else Mario-related) to help you preserve your finite lives for the harder stages by skipping most of the still-challenging mid-game. A resourceful enough player that knows where all the 1-Up Mushrooms were could use that mid-game to stock up. (Then again, if you were that resourceful, you'd probably know how to get an infinite number of those little green guys.)
• Super Mario Bros. 2 provided warps as well, far better hidden this time around, and also provided the Princess as a playable character, whose hover jumps made a lot of the platforming-heavy areas trivial. (You could draw some ugly conclusions from the idea that the one female character would also be the easiest to play as, but this is moot as the original source (Yume Koujou Doki Doki Panic) actually had two female characters, one of which would eventually become Luigi. You could draw some conclusions there as well.)
• Super Mario Bros. 3 had the warp-enabling whistles, but more so allowed the players to collect items that could be spent before a level to make them easier to cope with. This ranged from burning one of the many different suit power-ups of the game, to using the priceless P-Wing or Jugem's (Lakitu's) Cloud: both of which could allow you to skip over a troublesome stage entirely. Saving a stock of items for the final world came highly recommended.
• Super Mario World was even bigger on warps and alternate paths, providing multiple options to reach Bowser's Castle if one path grew too taxing. The final location even had a "back door": providing an easier route to the boss if you could reach it.

With Super Mario 64, you have the option of skipping the last few courses entirely. The final milestone target is seventy Stars of a possible 120: scarcely over half of the total amount. The DS version bumped this up to eighty, but you could still gather that many Stars by completing the first twelve courses and grabbing a handful of secret Stars. If you knew about the 100-Coin Challenges and where most of the hidden castle Stars were, you could even be done after the first eight courses (7 Stars x 8 courses + 14 secrets = 70). That would mean never even having to touch any course after the basement - practically half the game.

However, for any serious player, nothing short of the full 120 amount would suffice. Even if you went straight to the game's conclusion after the requisite seventy Stars, you would never feel that Super Mario 64 had been truly "completed" with the other fifty still out there. Those extra Stars could be considered post-game challenges, or a type of high-score to share with your N64-owning friends. That's the accessibility-focused genius of the milestone collectible progression system, and why so many imitators (like most of Rare's N64 oeuvre) would be so fixated on the concept.

We're going to cap off our run here with Stars 104-120, all entirely superfluous depending on your view, and bring Mario's first 3D adventure to a close. Before we start, however, here's a quick recap:

1. Part One included the introduction, the castle exterior and interiors and the first two courses: Bob-Omb Battlefield and Whomp's Fortress. It also covered the first three secret Stars, including the Flying Cap switch zone. (7 + 7 + 3 = 17 Stars total.)
2. Part Two completed the ground floor with a three-fer of Jolly Roger Bay, Cool, Cool Mountain and Big Boo's Haunt. We also covered the aquarium secret Star and the first Bowser's Road course. (7 + 7 + 7 + 2 = 23 Stars. 40 Stars total.)
3. Part Three ventured into the basement for Hazy Maze Cave and Lethal Lava Land, popping by to chat with a helpful Star Toad, the evasive MIPS and his two Stars, and the Vanish Cap and Metal Cap switch zones. (7 + 7 + 5 = 19 Stars. 59 Stars total.)
4. Part Four concluded the basement with Shifting Sand Land and Dire Dire Docks, as well as the second Bowser Road. (7 + 7 + 1 = 15 Stars. 74 Stars total.)
5. Part Five climbed Mario to new heights as he took on Snowman's Land and Wet-Dry World on the castle's first floor, taking a moment to gab with the second Star Toad. (7 + 7 + 1 = 15 Stars. 89 Stars total.)
6. Part Six concluded the interstitial castle floor with the twin horrors of Tall Tall Mountain and Tiny-Huge Island. No secret Stars this time. (7 + 7 = 14 Stars. 103 Stars total.)

Toad #3

The last of the three helpful Star Toads, this one is again right out in the open equidistant between the entrance to Tick Tock Clock and the entrance to Rainbow Ride, to ensure that the player as a number of opportunities to see and go talk to him. In addition to the Star, he'll also give you a pretty important hint as to how Tick Tock Clock works. As I surmised with the previous Star Toad, this is either a magnanimous little confidence booster from the designers as Mario heads into more diabolical courses, or a smart aleck way of hiding a Star out in the open by giving it to a tutorial-dispensing character to hold long after the player feels they have a sufficient grasp on the game. It's almost like hiding an infinite lives cheat in the instruction manual.

Wing Mario Over the Rainbow

The last secret Star course in the game, Wing Mario Over the Rainbow is the ultimate challenge when it comes to the oft-awkward flying mechanics of Mario's Flying Cap. A small arena filled with clouds at various heights, the goal is to use the course's cannons and Flying Cap to maneuver around collecting the red coins. Dropping out of the sky, either because a cap ran out at an opportune time or a mis-timed landing, leads to a fate almost worse than death: Mario is deposited outside the castle without harm. While this previously meant being able to revisit the Vanishing Cap or Flying Cap zones as often as the player wished without losing lives, here it means a minutes-long trek back to the top of the castle for another shot at the Star. It's debateably the toughest Star in the game to get (though a few of the 100-Coin Challenges might argue otherwise) and has the harshest penalty for screwing up. At least you won't be seeing a Game Over screen.

Tick Tock Clock

The Course

I love the idea behind Tick Tock Clock. The course itself can be extremely difficult without knowing how it works, but it only takes a few leaps into the clockface portrait to figure out that there's something odd about how the course operates. The course takes place within inner-workings of an immense clockwork structure, not unlike Castlevania's compulsory clock tower stage which almost always occurs late-game and is similarly filled with traps and pitfalls. It's a vertically-oriented course, except unlike most of the spiral courses, you're working your way up an inner-helix. That's probably a fancier way of saying "you're climbing the walls of this internal structure" but whatever. I'm happy for the opportunity to insert the word "helix" anywhere outside of a Twitch Plays Pokemon retrospective.

So, then, the course's big gimmick: the clockface portrait has a pair of hands that quickly cycle through the minutes, at a rate about of about six seconds per full revolution. Depending on which of the four cardinal direction numbers the minute hand is pointing at - 3, 6, 9 or 12 - the course will be subtly different. Specifically, this determines the speed of every moving part within the course besides enemies: turning platforms, spinning cubes, swinging pendulums, steady clock hands, spring-loaded wall bars and others are all moving to the pace subject to the player's moment of ingress.

• At the twelve o'clock mark, the clock's mechanics completely halt. Absolutely nothing moves, and the course's omnipresent and reverberating ticking is eerily absent. While this seems like the perfect configuration - no more getting thrown off platforms that intermittently turn around - the player is actually trapped in the lower half of the course without moving platforms to take them higher. There are probably ways to get higher without depending on the platforms, but if there is it's not immediately apparent nor easy to do. Instead, this configuration is required for a single Star that would be impossible otherwise (though it greatly helps with a couple of others) and considered a fool's errand for the rest.
• At the three o'clock mark, the course is at its most stable. The speed is slow and constant and is best suited for exploring the entire course for whatever Stars you're chasing after. It's considered the safe default, and once the player has determined how Tick Tock Clock works (the Star Toad gives you a hint, if you bothered to talk to him), their best bet is to (almost) always ensure that the hour hand is pointing towards the three.
• At the nine o'clock mark, we have the same situation, only now the fixed speed is incredibly fast. There's very little reason to attempt Star-hunting with this setting unless you're speedrunning (though most speedrunners have found ways to avoid having to wait for moving platform patterns to complete) or are looking for a challenge. From a design perspective, it's to create at least one deliberately undesirable outcome to galvanize players into solving the puzzle you're created. Were all four configurations beneficial or were otherwise non-issues, the player might not ever bother trying to figure out why the course's platforms are acting weird.
• This undesirability is most keenly felt at the six o'clock mark, which will wildly fluctate the speed between the twelve o'clock, three o'clock and the nine o'clock settings, as well as an additional reverse speed. As well as dealing with the occasional fast-moving platform, it's almost impossible to predict the behavior of any of the moving parts in the course at any given point. This is the hardest of hardcore modes, therefore, and is designed purely to force the player to deduce the clock puzzle or else suffer from "Kobayashi Mario" scenarios like this one-quarter of the time.

There's some small mercies too. The course is almost entirely absent of enemies beyond a few of those fireball-spitting spheres (the guide calls them Kuramames, as they apparently have no English name), some bob-ombs near the start and a thwomp at the very top of the course. There's also a single Heave Ho from Wet-Dry World but he's easy enough to avoid. Like the following Rainbow Ride, the designers evidently considered the course layout itself difficult enough to traverse without garnishing it with more enemies. That, and the small amount of space on the handful of stable platforms wouldn't hold many enemies before they got too crowded.

The Stars

Roll Into the Cage is a bit of a misnomer, as this Star requires you run acrossing a turning hexagonal platform and then past a conveyor belt. There's no big rolling log to be found on this course, which is what the Star's hint would suggest. It's possibly a translation error, though you could consider the conveyor belt to be "rolling" items along its path. I wouldn't be sure what the correct verb for travelling on a conveyor belt might be (besides "conveying"), so I'll give the localizers some slack. I mean, it might well be some oblique reference to a popular 1990s song for all I know. The 90s was... well, not a great time for music on the whole. Interesting, but not great. This is also one of the few Stars that can be reached on the twelve o'clock setting, as it's not high enough up the course to be inaccessible. With the hexagonal platform and conveyor turned off, it's considerably easier, though it was plenty easy already.

As with the previous, Pit and the Pendulums is another misnomer, but at least this time I know it's a deliberate reference. It's an Edgar Allen Poe short story, in fact, which seems a bit heady for a Super Mario game and perhaps better suited tonally for the spookhouse course. There's no pit involved, unless you count the pit that awaits you underneath if one of the pendulums knocks your jumping trajectory off. Again, this is another Star that's accessible (and easier) if the clock's been stopped at the twelve o'clock mark. However, this is about as high up as you can go with the clock stalled, so don't expect any easy options from here on out. (While it has more to do the fact that these two are accessible before the other Stars - besides the next which sits somewhere in between - I feel like they've been grouped together as the first two Stars so the player can be rewarded for solving the entry speed puzzle early with a couple of sitting ducks.)

I stated that this Star isn't accessible with the frozen twelve o'clock setting, but it's sort of still possible to drop into the niche that holds the Star from above. The proper way to do it, which is to say the slow way, is to wait for a horizontal clock hand to make its way across the room to where Mario is standing, and then ride it across to the opposite wall where the niche is. The clock hand is one of two in the course, and the longer of the two, so you can piece it together that it's probably the minute hand. Were one to view the whole course vertically, though, I'm not sure it'd even be visible. Obviously, if the clock is stopped, the minute hand becomes inaccessible.

Stomp the Thwomp is the requisite "make it to the top" Star, but given the difficulty and the fact that the course is one big vertical climb, it's pushed to the fourth slot. The rather large thwomp at the top of the course can't actually be stomped, but you will need to ride it up to reach the Star at the very peak of Tick Tock Clock. Because the vertically moving platform that takes you here is inaccessible on the twelve o'clock setting, you're better off moving to three o'clock and learning how the course's rhythm works. It reminds me a lot of those stages in Super Mario 3D Land/World where the platforms pop in and out of reality with a little ticking rhythm, and those stages were almost assuredly derived from this course.

The businesslike name of Timed Jumps on Moving Bars probably comes from the fact that it might be hard to figure out where the Star is without it. Past the point of inaccessibility if you were playing the course at twelve o'clock, the path suddenly splits. The second way, across a number of those Double Dragon style wall pusher blocks, eventually leads to this Star. It's on the way to the Thwomp Star and the player could easily find it first, but here's a big ol' hint if they didn't manage to spot it on the way up.

The "Stop Time for Red Coins" Star is the game at its most devious. The red coins are immediately apparent upon entering the course, but are spread across a number of spinning turnkey-style platforms. You can reach one or two before getting thrown off, but reaching all of them is practically impossible. The game twists the knife further by allowing you to access these platforms higher up in the course, convincing the player that there might be some way to come down from above to reach the remaining red coins. The final tease comes by making this the final Star of the course: if the player doesn't know the solution, they would have to pass them by for literally every other Star in the course (well, except the 100-Coin Challenge, I suppose). The solution is, of course, to freeze time with the twelve o'clock setting and simply grab them all with utter ease. The Star hinges entirely on the player solving the clock hands puzzle ahead of time, and if they don't (and still can't when this hint name comes up) they're boned.

100-Coin Challenge: The course has one last jab at the player with this challenge, which forces the player to collect every coin on the way up to the summit. There's a small margin of error, but without the ten-twelve coins from the inaccessible red coins, the player has to be fairly precise when grabbing every last coin from the various ? blocks and enemies. The red coins are there to trick the player into switching to the twelve o'clock setting to make them accessible, though of course this means many, many more coins are now out of reach. But hey, if you can't mess around with your players on the penultimate course, when can you? Oh, on the ultimate course, you say? Well, they're way ahead of you.

Rainbow Ride

The Course

While Rainbow Ride is less crafty than Tick Tock Clock it is no less difficult, providing a few branching linear paths (I realize that's an oxymoron when read the wrong way) to the course's various Stars. Most of the course is only accessible via magic carpet, which rides along an obvious determined path and will vanish if Mario leaves it for more than a couple of seconds to be reset back to its origin point. The course is very open, which can be both a disadvantage (it is disquietingly easy to fall to your doom here) and an advantage (a particularly foolhardy player can make long jumps to skip over parts of the course).

Both this and the previous course uses the game's recurring bonus stage music, a "frantic-ass bluegrass" (to paraphrase the Game Grumps) rhythm meant to spring you into action, as if to hammer home the earlier point I made about these last two courses being almost entirely optional with the many other sources for Stars the player can resort to when attempting to reach the necessary seventy (or eighty) target for the final Bowser Road. While the developers designed these two to be very challenging, they also made them surplus to requirement, possibly in case the 3D controls were too much for a new audience to get to grips with. It's not completely impossible, but Rainbow Ride is on par with the various Bowser Road courses: a lot of linear obstacle courses with a harsh penalty for failure.

Rainbow Ride is also the most abstract of the courses with its design. It has the compulsory giant's castle - a staple in above the clouds fiction thanks to Jack and the Beanstalk - and an airship - another staple, although in this case for the Super Mario series specifically - the various structures that litter this course makes it feel less like a real place with some rationality behind its construction and more like a... well, a video game course. The rousing music and silly environment seem to lend to the idea that this course, more than any other, is a non-essential "bonus" challenge.

Then again, Super Mario Kart began a recurring theme in Mario games to make a rainbow-themed course its ultimate or post-ultimate destination, and Super Mario World goes deeper into that formula by making the rainbow-connected Star World stages a late-game optional challenge. Perhaps Rainbow Ride plays into all that, as rainbow worlds will for future Mario Kart games and a handful of the core series. You'll notice, too, that most of the recent Mario games have a rainbow-themed bonus world in them that will often appear post-final boss.

The Stars

The Stars for Rainbow Ride are a little less interesting because of the way they all appear at the termination point of a route. If you're on a route, preferably one you haven't been down yet, you're all but guaranteed to reach a Star at the end of it. For that reason, the Star hints are at their least crucial here, except perhaps for trying to figure out where you've already been. With this Cruiser Crossing the Rainbow Star, the player simply needs to follow the route of flying carpets that leads them to the airship. The Star can be found on its bow.

Likewise, the Big House in the Sky (which sounds like a place where dead prisoners go; doesn't really reflect this cheery rainbow course) involves taking the other carpet ride where the course splits, which flies in a circuitous path around the eponymous castle in an attempt to throw you off before reaching the castle's roof. If you do fall off, there's a well-hidden way to avoid dying or having to quit the course: you have to go outside to the castle's balcony, where a sudden gust of wind drops you off elsewhere in the course. It's a bit of a detour, but it's better than having to start the course over with one fewer life. The castle interior, oddly enough, has more furniture than even Peach's Castle does. You'd think they'd reuse some of those furnishings, huh?

The red coin maze is a simple enough series of leaps and hops through a vertical maze. By which I mean, the entire maze is only a few lengths thick but very big when taking in the horizontal and vertical axes. That it has a cutaway side is an interesting attempt to either revisit Mario's 2D glory days or an experiment in forced perspective where you can no longer see where Mario's jumping too from over his shoulder, but have to rely on a traditional side view. The maze also has a couple of well-hidden elements in its upper floors, accessible only by wall-jumping up from the bottom left corner: if you hit the blue switch and wall jump all the way up, there's a huge number of blue coins that will be instrumental in completing the 100-Coin Challenge for this course. The Pink Bob-Omb cannon operator is up here too, and is also vital for a later Star.

Swingin' in the Breeze is about as close as the game gets to a scrotum joke, and it also marks the first of the two Stars accessible by taking the south route from the big crossroads in the center of the course. This crossroads is actually four spinning plates that go off in the cardinal directions: you approach from the east, can go north for the two above flying carpet Stars, can go west for the aforementioned coin maze and go south for this and the following Star. It's like the course has its own little four-way hub, though the south path is better hidden because of the way the camera points away from it. There's also a shortcut straight here too, accessible by long-jumping from the very first platform you drop onto when starting the course. Swingin' in the Breeze involves moving across a few pendulous swing platforms, and given that these things are also in the Bowser Road course, don't expect much difficulty. It is worth noting, though, that the first swing has a safety platform underneath while the second does not. It's classic escalation.

Tricky Triangles takes the other route from Swingin' in the Breeze, eventually culminating in a series of pyramids (not triangles) that flip around when a ! switch is hit. These pyramids revert back to their normal pointing-up status very quickly, to the extent that the player has to leap off before reaching the last one and hope they reach the opposite platform where the Star waits. While the game is kind enough to put a platform underneath the pyramid-filled structure, the way Mario will launch off them at a tangent when they revert might throw him clear of this safety net. Tricky, indeed.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow is the final course Star and a somewhat melancholy note to end on. It involves reaching the airship and using the cannon in its stern (I hope you found the Pink Bob-Omb to blast through a rainbow ring and land on a floating platform. This platform has a Chuckya on it, as one last "screw you" to the player if they happen to land right next to it, but the game will have taught the player enough times to aim at something Mario can grab when using the cannon: in this case, the flagpole that helps the player identify which island to shoot Mario towards. This can be a mean Star to find if the player doesn't know where the cannon is or if one exists at all, but then there's no reason to not explore that airship when you first reach it. If you head straight for the visible Star on its bow instead of checking the rest of it out, you only have yourself to blame. Funny how often that seems to be the case with these more elusive Stars.

100-Coin Challenge: The only piece of advice is to end on the airship, as I believe it's the only area you can't return from. Then again, maybe I haven't really looked. The lion's share of the coins can be found via that blue coin switch I discussed earlier, and the target isn't really possible without grabbing most of them by wall-jumping to the top of the maze area. There's actually more coins than you might expect, and as long as you don't fall off while checking every corner (and getting those blues) isn't as difficult as it seems. Well, no more difficult than getting around the course is to begin with.

Bowser in the Sky

Bowser in the Sky presents one of the toughest challenges in the game, apposite for the final destination. It's another series of obstacles placed in a linear, consecutive order, much like the previous Bowser Roads, but now there's nothing to stop Mario from plummeting to his doom and most of the obstacles are Rainbow Ride-difficult. In addition, the player is once again expected to find another eight red coins hidden throughout. The game pulls off two absolute stinkers in this regard, hiding one red coin behind a big solid platform that makes it impossible to find without moving the camera around, and the second is directly under the stairs to the boss pipe. It's easy to get psyched out into thinking you've missed one when you're that close to the end.

The final encounter with Bowser makes the previous two feel like the trial runs that they were. Not only does Bowser need to get clobbered by bombs three times, but he'll grow increasingly stronger and adopt more attack patterns the more he gets hit. After the second hit, he destroys most of the arena, forcing Mario to be very careful when approaching his tail. The odd rainbow tint that colors this final encounter just serves to make the final boss more unnerving, as does the brand new final boss music.

The best part of the Bowser fight is that, after he's beaten, he'll give you two different parting messages depending on how many Stars you've earned. The <120 Stars message is very clearly of a mocking tone, as if to suggest that there are still holdouts in the castle and Mario won't ever truly win. If you do have 120, he'll sound aghast that he missed so many and teleport away with his tail between his legs. Just one of the small bonuses for fully completing the game (the second, of course, I already discussed in Part One when describing the castle exterior: let's just say Jeff's favorite little green dinosaur stops by to congratulate Mario and award him a hundred 1-Ups he no longer needs).

Which brings us to the end of this scenic route through Super Mario 64, still one of the greatest Nintendo games ever made. Heck, one of the best games period. I hope I've impressed on you all that while the game is mechanically trailblazing and a strong foot forward for a fledgling system built to be far more polygon friendly, it was Super Mario 64's adventurous and unpredictable spirit that made it a true winner. If we ever see anything this inventive from a major publisher's tentpole release any time soon I'll be profoundly shocked.

Be sure to consult the list at the top of the page if you want to revisit some of the earlier courses. All that's left is to watch the bittersweet ending montage and eat some cake. (Does no-one think it's a mite weird that Peach had a little Peach and Mario placed on top of the cake? What could she be hinting at, hmm.)

Good run! Still holding out for Banjo-Kazooie next. :D

Tick-Tock Clock note: every star is obtainable with the clock stopped. Thwomp's conveyor belt can be reached by abusing a programming loophole to triple jump off of a steep slope: if you're going at triple jump speed when you land after a double jump, you can triple jump off of any surface you can stand on, even if it's otherwise impossible to stay standing on. Triple jump off the slopes in the pit below the thwomp, immediately wall jump, land on the conveyor belt. Bam.

Similarly, I think it may be possible to collect almost all of the Rainbow Ride stars without ever touching a carpet. There's a safety slope below a pole that I think can be reached with a triple jump from the spinning junction where Lakitu hangs out. The Big House star requires a carpet as far as I can figure, but you can technically reach the airship without any help, if I remember correctly.

Not that I'd recommend it.

These were fun to read and definely increased my appreciation for a lot of the design behind Super Mario 64, which was one of my first games.

I'm looking forward to the inevitable run through of Gex 2 where you go out of your way to talk about how NOT to make a 3D platformer level.

I have very little to add this time around, as these stages are the ones I have explored the least, except that you say you should end on the airship when doing the 100-coin challenge because it's the only place you can't return from, but you say it immediately after writing about the existence of the canon, which gives you a way back to the central part of the stage.

Anyways, this series has been a really fun read and I'm glad I've been following it this whole time. Thanks!

@generic_username: I wouldn't say the cannon is a reliable way to get around, but then it might be possible from the island the cannon gets you to. Either way it seems like a long shot, so to speak.

Thanks for all the comments throughout this series guys. Edifying and encouraging.

@mento: Yeah, the island you shoot to is more what I was referring to; it's quite possible to get to other parts of the level from there. Though shooting the canon can be a little nerve-wracking until you really get to know how it works, and even then, it's even more intimidating on this particular level.