スーパーマリオくん 7

The start of the Super Mario Land 2 arc last volume gave me a lot of hope that things were on an upswing and Volume 7 follows through on that promise. It's not that the Super Mario World arc was bad, but it clearly had pacing issues and wasn't really plotted all that tightly, focusing more on gags than story progression. This is easily the best volume of Mario-Kun yet (and SML2 is one of my all-time favorite Mario games even if it is too easy until the end) and the gags are still coming fast and furious, but the storytelling is more focused and carefully plotted. Individual chapters have more setup and payoff rather than every gag just being an Airplane-style one off and there's more continuity between chapters, like this little kleptomaniac cape guy who joins the group for a bit.

Overall, it's starting to feel more like an actual story and not just a series of comedy sketches that happen to be themed around a specific Mario game. I think the structure of Super Mario Land 2, specifically that there are six MacGuffins to try and collect also forces this plotline into a nice pace (I don't imagine we'll follow Mario collecting 70 stars during the Super Mario 64 arc but maybe he uses some speedrun tricks). Even the little puzzles at the end of most chapters just seem more complex and engaging.

What isn't getting more complex is the reading experience. The past two volumes of Mario-kun have been some of my easiest, most lookup-free Japanese reading yet. These admittedly aren't the most complex stories but the humor does rely on a lot of puns, to the point where I think the main reason these were never translated (aside from some occasional deeply cursed humor) is the fact that so much of it relies on wordplay, and I'm actually getting the joke 9 times out of 10 which feels great. I generally try 15 new words a day in my Anki deck and reading through Mario-kun I'm adding so few new words that I'm actually outpacing what I'm adding to the deck which feels amazing and encouraging. I'm almost feeling like I could take the Kanjitomo/Yomichan training wheels off with this series, but I'll still keep them open for reference.