[RT-55J]

One minor comment regarding SMB3's overworld: Getting a game over does not entirely reset the completion state. Fortress levels stay complete upon game overs, along with their corresponding locks, thus essentially making them act as checkpoints within each world. Some other stages, such as all of the tank levels in World 8, also stay completed upon game overs. Given that SMB3 does not hyper-proliferate 1-ups like its successors, this is a rather welcome affordance given by the design.

What I'm saying is that none of SMB3's nor SMW's successors quite understood the implications of their world map designs, so they kind of just deteriorated the concept into a fancy-looking level select menu with an odd wrinkle here or there.