Super Mario Encyclopedia: The Official Guide to the First 30 Years

It's a very beautiful book but it is less of an ecyclopedia than an anthology. First of all it only covers the 17 games in the main Super Mario Bros series, so no Mario Party or Mario Kart games. Even the original Mario Bros. game gets hardly a mention.

Secondly, the book is not arranged alphabetically as an encyclopedia would be, but is instead entries are grouped by game then further broken down by characters, enemies, and (oddly together) items and obstacles.

The main detraction though is the inconsistent font size. Pages range from 6 entries on a page to over 60. As a result he typeset on some of the pages varies from very difficult to read without squinting all the way up to the top of the eye chart.

It's an overall decent book that is thorough with what it covers but could have benefited from the eye of an experienced layout designer.

Just received my copy in the mail today after preordering way back in February. The book arrived in good condition. Ive had some trouble in the years past with the Legend of Zelda series which came a bit dinged up. But to my surprised it was in good condition!
The pages are really thick and great quality. The color is done nicely and should really hold up over time when referencing from it over the years of use. These kinds of books are perfect to pick up and flip through in short bursts like during commercials on tv or just passing time or just remembering your first time playing all these games as a kid with the pictures and levels!
The content is pretty in-depth. Each game goes by in order of the game's release. Starting with Super Mario Bros and ending with Super Mario 3D World. They go through the main characters first and then the enemies you encounter throughout that specific game. They have page of all the worlds and courses in order that you play through along with Items, obstacles, and power up break downs.
It's a pretty awesome book to add to your video game collection!

I'm not a professional Mario-book-reviewer or anything, not a ravenous semi-pro gamer, and I paid full price for my copy of this book. That said, I think it's great! I bought it to read with my boys, ages 6, 4 and 2 and for that it is perfect. Full color, full page graphics. Thick pages. Info is in small tidbits covering many aspects of all the games. Each game gets a section full of art and tips and there are sections dedicated to the differences in the game art over the years. It has inspired us to pull out games we haven't played in 20 years and let the boys give them a go. We buy all the Mario texts and this one is my 4 year old's favorite.

This isn't really what I had hoped. I thought it would be, well, and encyclopedia (crazy, right?), like the Mario Wiki with interesting entries on different types of Goombas, et cetera. It's not that at all.

Instead, the book is divided into several chapters, each which focuses on one game from the Mario universe. Each chapter is laid out exactly the same, covering the game's story (reprinted verbatim from the game instruction manuals), the power-ups, the enemies, items, and worlds. There are a lot of screenshots, but they are extremely small and not always well-chosen. Descriptions are placed next to each screenshot that also seem to be taken directly from instruction manuals.

Really, what this is is a compendium of instruction manuals for virtually all Mario games, with really tiny screensots. That was not what I wanted at all.

This read is kind of disappointing. It is an encyclopedia, in that it just lays out all of the basic information for every core Super Mario game... but don't expect anything more. There's no inside information on the making of the games or characters, from the designers themselves. There's no original material. And it stops in the Wii U era. Don't expect any information on Super Mario Odyssey, or ANY of the spin-offs in the last 30 years including Mario Kart, Yoshi's Island, Wario Land, Donkey Kong Country, etc. Recommended only to folks that are new to Mario and want a general overview of his past games that they've never played.

So when I first saw that this book was coming to North America, I obviously got really excited. However, after purchasing the book, I flipped through it for a while, before sitting down to peruse its contents seriously. I was extremely disappointed at what I found. This book can barely be called an encyclopedia at all, and its a damn shame. What a missed opportunity, a waste of money, and a waste of space. It gets some points for including some neat tidbits here and there but what takes up most of the pages are ridiculously broad descriptions and pictures of the enemies and characters from only a handful of the mainline Mario titles. In addition, there are some artworks that we've all seen before that come from the covers of the box art of each game and promotional materials. Some other nonsense is included, but really nothing to excite you, tell you things you didn't already know about these games, or hold your attention for long. For me, it's like skimming through the Marvel comics preview catalogs: You'll look through it once real fast to see whats inside, and put it down and never touch it again. Forget this garbage book and instead spend your money on something better, such as the Art of Mario Odyssey, although I believe you have to import that book.

Not as nice as I expected - content really didn't excite me as it focused on characters/ items instead of history of the individual game. If you own instruction manuals for the games they are pretty much copied and pasted into the text of the book. I was a little disappointed.

I don't know what I was thinking. This book came in damaged. I was surprised at the fact it was not wrapped. I thought it was used at first. But I looked through this book. It is horrible. I can't justify keeping it. The build quality is horrible. The presentation is ridiculous and I wouldn't recommend this to anybody. Whoever made this book. They are not good at making books.... Not this one anyways.

This book is large, and touches on mainline games from the original up until 2013, does not include side games or Mario Kart or anything other than pure Mario. It is light on lore and feels like an exaggerated instruction booklet. Complete disappointment, with the exception that it’s cool to learn enemy names from some of the older games, and the single short sentence bio that is included. That’s all you get. One sentence, and it’s a short one usually. That was enough for me to give 2 stars.

This book is not an encyclopedia as advertised, you will not learn much about the world and lore from it. You will only learn brief bits about each mainline game in the series, and even then, I’m old enough to remember the paper instruction books that came with the games and there is not much more in this book than there was in the instruction books.

Bummer.

The content is good, although not an encyclopedia. It is mostly a guide to all the Mario games, each with their characters, weapons, Marios suits, and stages, but only mentioning them, so not deep explanation of anything.

However my rating is because the pictures are very small, I think the pictures showing each world in each game are 1 by 2 inches. And the captions are really small. It is really hard to read and appreciate. So, it has all the worlds, but you can barely see them, you lose all the detail with such small images.

It can be done better.