Missing the third Star Coin in
hotsocks.lvlx was unfortunate, and that happened to me as well. The entire relay was great, it had some of the craziest stuff that I've ever seen raocow's community put out, but my enjoyment was dampened by constantly worrying that I missed a Star Coin somewhere. Maybe putting Star Coins in the relay should've been prohibited. Because it's a total bummer to have to comb through the entire level to find the missing Star Coin and beat it again, especially when it wasn't in plain sight like the others. It kind of spoiled the sense of finality the level had for me.
As for the boss relay, it was awesome. It wasn't too hard thanks to the generous checkpointing, but the only parts I had trouble with were WhimWidget's first phase and Nimono's encore. Whim's phase took me a bunch of deaths to figure out that you can just hold the glowing Phanto to shoot bombs upwards. It was hard to tell what was going on because of all the hectic action on-screen. Nimono's phase was just plain difficult with all the attacks you had to dodge. I died a lot before I found a good strat, but that's not to say I found it bad.
Below is a repost of my YouTube comment, with my final thoughts on MaGLX3/MaFAB2 as a whole:
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First of all, this compilation was the second SMBX game I ever played (after The Invasion 2 several years ago), and I (re)learned a lot about how this engine controls and its various quirks. Shoutout to the Tavi/Zygl streams, which taught me a lot about the various glitches and tricks you can do in SMBX. Since they streamed during my work hours, I was only able to tune in live a couple of times.
I saw a good number of the VODs though, keeping them in the background. With all the time spent playing through this game, SMBX controls and mechanics feel really natural and good to me now, despite hitbox shenanigans.
I thought it was a good idea to publicly release the episode from the start. Being able to play alongside the LP allowed me (and others) to have better insight into what raocow was experiencing, instead of just watching the videos and commenting on them. I'm pleased that the audience abided by the honor system and didn't spoil any placements - I'm proud of the community for respecting that. I hope that in future MaGLXes, releasing the results episode before the official LP will be the standard protocol. The choice of not having to wait potentially months to learn where people placed is nice.
As for the new characters like Klonoa and Broadsword, it seems like I didn't have the typical experience. I thought Klonoa controlled fine, although I had no expectations since I've never played a Klonoa game before. It was actually in levels where his physics got modified that I had trouble using Klonoa (like Dog In Da Grass' level). But that didn't make it less enjoyable. Broadsword I feel has a lot of potential. I thought that his combo and mid-air combo attacks were cool and unique (they also gave you invincibility frames, I think). Maybe part of the reason why I don't dislike Broadsword is because I never had issues with accidentally downthrusting like raocow did. Interesting how people with different play styles can have game-changing experiences. I read somewhere that there are plans to cancel out of the downthrust, which should also serve to fix potential softlocks.
Big Wario's dash mechanic feels really great, but I had to map alt run to my controller's "R" button like in Wario Land 4. The biggest issue with Wario was losing most of your abilities when you're small, and I felt that some of the levels featuring him didn't effectively design around that. Not sure what the development team's consensus is regarding Wario. Keep him the way he is and trust that level designers will work around the limitations, or make him not shrink when taking a hit and just give him health? It'll be interesting to see what changes are made to these characters in future SMBX2 updates, because they may significantly affect future playthroughs of this contest (e.g., some levels might break and/or not give the original, intended experience).
Regarding hub organization, I'm glad it was possible to intersperse playing the Tier X levels with the regular contest levels. Doing it this way didn't take too much attention away from the contestants, as opposed to lumping all the extra content at the very end. Also, I appreciated that the lowest tier of levels wasn't outright called the "Garbage Tier" or something similar, like some other contests do. I always felt that was in poor taste, because most people don't purposefully aim for the bottom of the barrel with their entries.
Finally, I liked the gimmick of using sets of terms to help inspire a level. It was a good way to keep things relatively open, due to the many combinations that were possible. To be honest, I never really liked the MaGLX and MaGLX2 "Mad Libs" title gimmick. I thought it was too restrictive, and the "hard" level names a lot of people used always sounded too stilted and same-y for my tastes. Probably an unpopular opinion, because I realize that was part of the charm.
These past four months have been a wild ride. Thank you to everyone involved (judges, staff, contestants, viewers, and raocow) for such an amazing experience. Looking forward to the MaGLX4 sign-ups hopefully some time in 2022 maybe.
#1 mega cd enjoyer AND "making fun of"-er 
