You could also argue that the lack of forward momentum in DKC is due to DK's weight. In theory, his *momentum* should be greater due to his mass, but because of the fact that he's jumping (so it's not a simple forward movement since he's also going up), gravity kicks in and severely influences his jump, which leads to him jumping shorter distances compared to, say, Diddy Kong. And no, if you could jump 8 times your height and run at ridiculous speeds, it wouldn't work anywhere remotely close to Super Mario. You wouldn't jump at that angle, you wouldn't be able to change direction of your jump midjump, you would land at a different angle due to gravity and then run a couple of steps after landing because of the remaining momentum etc.

I realize this is too much effort for an argument about a moveset in a videogame, I just want to stress that in my experience, Mario's moveset is the opposite of intuitive and "realistic if it was possible". Lyra stressed that your post was good, so I felt like responding, because I strongly disagree. I'm not really passionate about this topic, I just like to discuss stuff.

Irl, you can twist this sort of gamelogic any way you want.



So anyway: Imo, DKC's controls are much more intuitive than Super Mario's. I instinctively learned what is possible and impossible in DKC, whereas in Super Mario, I kept dying because the controls and the jumping is completely ridiculous and incalculable at first. It starts with the angle, continues with the height and ends with the length of Mario's jump. Everything about Mario's moveset has to be learned, nothing is intuitive. The hitboxes are bad, too, imho, but that's just a small point. With DKC, I immediately knew how it's supposed to be played. Granted, that's also due to the more simplistic moveset and the relatively moderate difficulty level in DKC. However, calling Mario's momentum intuitive feels intuitively wrong to me. Everything about it is awkward, which is probably the reason why only that series has that kind of moveset. I realize that Super Mario probably demands more skill (that I'm definitely lacking), but that doesn't make it necessarily better at all. And yes. it doesn't seem like I'm good at Super Mario, but I'm more or less a grownup and I can distinguish disliking something because I'm bad at it from disliking something because it lacks certaing qualities. I would have a far better time with SMW if it was actually intuitive.