kaizo
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: simple
Topics: video-games
Etymology: From Kaizo Mario World, the name of an early set of fan-created levels in this style first released in 2007, where kaizo is from Japanese 改造 (kaizō, “revamp, remodel, modify”).
Inflected forms:
Senses:
gloss: A philosophy of game design distinguished by very high difficulty levels and hidden traps that can only be solved by repeated deaths and trial and error, especially associated with romhacks of Super Mario games.
pos: noun
tags: attributive
often
uncountable
examples: I like too, he stole kaizo. Like, that name, that's the ubiquitous term for romhacks that are more annoying to play. […] Is kaizo now just like an internet adjective for anything that's, like, mildly irritating?
I recently played the kaizo hack known as Invictus.[…]As my sore hand recovers, I’m left asking this question: is “kaizo” good game design?
What if it could be different? What if there was a way for your average Mario player to learn these tricks? That’s what GrandPOObear, one of Mario Maker’s most prolific streamers, is trying to accomplish with his already-impressive “tech talk” series, where he combines detailed video tutorials explaining basic kaizo techniques alongside Mario Maker 2 stages he’s specifically designed to help anyone accomplish those very same techniques.[…]GrandPOObear wasn’t born with inherent kaizo knowledge;
Troll and kaizo levels, however, are designed to generate very different sets of emotions in their players, and to understand these we must understand first their construction and the intentions of their designers, before considering their players.
A kaizo trap is an obstacle that will kill the player if it gets triggered, but there is no way of knowing where a trap is unless it gets sprung.
Many Mario Maker 2 kaizo stages can take over 25 hours for a top-level player to beat. Even at its most impressive, solving a kaizo level is an incredibly repetitive act: Each one of them will take hundreds (if not thousands) of attempts to clear, meaning that any viewer will essentially be watching the same level for hours on end. For some reason, watching GrandPOObear, or other kaizo speed runners try and fail, over and over again was the only thing I could focus on, the only thing that kept the fear out of my mind.
“There’s still a stigma in the [Super Mario Maker 2] community that troll levels have, which is that people think the super expert hot garbage levels are troll levels,” Chichiri said. “And the well-made troll levels are so much the opposite. They are carefully designed levels made with a lot of planning and psychology in them. It’s not just ‘Lul kaizo block’ or ‘Lul enemy spam’ or ‘Lul this required item was in this hidden block you’d NEVER ever find.’ So I wish people would stop calling the hot garbage levels ‘troll levels’ when they’re really not.”
A simple, unexpected obstacle is not only funny but also creates that special sauce that makes kaizo so fun to watch.[…]The most classic example of a kaizo troll is set up like this: You’re jumping over a pit, but midway through the jump you bonk your head on a block that wasn’t there before, sending you to your death.
While the game doesn’t touch the main plot or structure of the original Pokémon Emerald, this Kaizo edition changes basically everything else. […]Pokémon Dark Rising: Kaizo. That last one is a remake of the first, only much more difficult like you’d expect from a Kaizo game, but also has some significant plot and structural changes that make it worth experiencing again.
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