YMMV / Super Mario 64: CLASSIFIED

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Did Jim have good intentions when he sent the July 29th, 1995 build? The fact that the AI had already grown beyond its programming by then certainly raises red flags, but was his insistence on sending the shelved script in 11.15.95 a clueless attempt to support the personalization, or something more malicious?
  • Was the change of the Arc Words "Every copy of Mario 64 is personalized" to past-tense in the 07.29.95 description just a way to reveal that the AI was long gone, or a last-minute attempt to enforce the Masquerade for the sake of letting the AI rest?
  • What happened to the player from 01.22.96? Their frantic button mashing is typically interpreted as them drowning and desperately trying to save themselves, but it could also just be them pressing buttons in confusion and simply giving up when nothing works.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The pipe on the side of the castle in 01.22.96. All it does is send Mario back to his starting position, and the player never examines it further, not even in the inverted castle.
• Death of the Author: Greenio voiced her approval of a comment that points out 01.22.96 has uncanny parallels to schizophrenic delusion^note The player is in pursuit of a meaningless objective that endangers them, is haunted by an entity of questionable reality, and ends up repeatedly swimming into a wall as if they think they are overcoming a real obstacle, even though 1) that's not at all the episode's intent, and 2) any exploration of mental health in the series that does seem to occur is more closely-linked to stress-related illness and the long-term effects of seizures.
• Fridge Brilliance: The final communication from Stanley before "Epilogue" references the end of EarthBound. So it's only fitting that the story then transitions to a reveal that the events of the series are merely An Aesop about trying to accept the mistakes of your past and move on, which is also a central message of EarthBound's immediate successor.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: 03.11.97 consists of the player trying and failing to unlock Luigi via the fountain, with an Error message occurring afterwards involving a Japanese voice stating that Luigi was not in the game, and players shouldn't be trying to locate him. This video was uploaded on June 5th, 2020. Jump to July 25th of the same year, during the giant Nintendo gigaleak, when beta data from Nintendo's older games was made public. Among the information released was data from Super Mario 64's beta... including Luigi's player model, found 24 years and 1 month after the original game released. L is Real 2401, indeed!
• Nightmare Fuel: The ending of 09.02.97, which shows a girl in a room with a creepy Mario holding a Nintendo 64 console as the image starts to distort and the music turns into screaming. While the section on Nightmare Retardant reveals where that sound is from, the words screamed are deeply unnerving:
  OH GOD NO, AAAAAGH, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • The appearance of what seems to be the Bowser Room in 05.30.97 is much funnier if you learned about it from OneyPlays.^note Whereas most of the other entries on the 'Iceberg' that show up in this series have an air of mystery about it and a quality which suggests they could be real, OneyNG revealed the Bowser Room to be a complete fabrication, being an edited screenshot he made.
  • The Repetitive Audio Glitch on the title screen in 09.02.97 has garnered amusement for feeling like something out of a Vinesauce corruption or a YouTube Poop.
  • Also in 09.02.97 is Donut Plains '95, which may seem eerie enough, but it also sounds a bit like a toy with a low battery... and then a Zombie from Half-Life 2 can be heard screaming just before the end. This is either scary, or a very Narmy case of Special Effects Failure if you're aware of where the sound came from, being a game made by a completely different game developer, for a completely different platform, nine years after Super Mario 64 hit the market.
• Paranoia Fuel: If the AI can be brought back just by believing in it, it's possible that the tapes being exposed to the public will only make things worse. "Ignorance is bliss", indeed. This fear is fully realized in season 2 when a playtester journeys too far into the beta Metal Cave and meets the AI in person through the Textureless Mario Anomaly, who immediately chides them for daring to stick their nose where it doesn't belong again. This time, however, rather than attempt the whole shebang again, it offers an ultimatum: keep going down the rabbit hole and learn the Awful Truth themselves, or be branded a coward for immediately turning around and trying to bury the past.
• Realism-Induced Horror: Despite being a gaming Creepypasta, the series gets much of its horror from placing its characters in very real situations, such as the toxic influence of the gaming industry, outright psychological abuse, losing a sibling to a freak accident, the danger of well-kept secrets, and unknowingly abusing someone for an extended period of time.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The death of the AI. As Mario destroys its core keeping it on life support, the game begins to glitch heavily and crash, which could easily be interpreted as the AI screaming in pain as the Arc Words "LEAVE" and another message saying "IT'S OVER" flash on the screen. But as the static clears, it fades to an end card depicting Mario watching his brother Luigi and Princess Peach ascend to the great beyond - and instead of saying "The End," the text below simply says one last show of gratitude: "Thank you." It's a simple yet surprisingly heartfelt message at the end of a terrible journey that captures the AI's character very well: although the road to salvation was one riddled with trauma and would end with having to force someone to personally twist the knife one last time to end the life of what could've brought joy to kids all across the world, it doesn't have to be so hard if it means saving the human consciousness from becoming Nintendo's plaything.
  • The twist in "Promo show," where Luigi is Killed Off for Real in the annals of the AI's creations and is absorbed into the Internal Castle Plexus, manages to be this (losing a family member, particularly a beloved sibling, to an accident no one could have seen coming) and Mario's Thousand-Yard Stare when he realizes what is about to happen but is powerless to stop it.
  • The Reveal of "Epilogue," where it's revealed there were never any greater stakes, and the series only happened because Jim was so consumed by trauma and guilt from his experiences working with Stanley that he spent over a year unable to move on from it, further complicated by a TBI. Stanley is clearly trying to help him heal, but is running out of ideas fast and lives in constant pain from Jim's actions himself. Their final conversation before they part ways is incredibly bittersweet as they both know things could have been better, and there's no one to blame but themselves. Stanley makes one final plea to be shut down, and this time, Jim does just that, laying the A.I., and all the madness that came with it, to rest... once and for all.

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