I should get back into it. I never beat 3D land, and if it wasn’t for playing Mario kart 7 like crazy when I had the norwalk virus, I’d probably be collecting dust on my 3DS!
Bwahaha… you think Super Mario 3D Land is hard NOW? Wait til you see the special Crown level.
Then you can tell me Special 7-3 is hard.
You won’t be able to keep a straight face though. 
I am no slouch at platformers, and 100% finished every other aspect of the game, but I could not finish the Crown level. I couldn’t even get 1/4 of the way through it. It is INSANE.
There’s a Crown level? How do you unlock that?
I beat the game, but I’ll be damned if I’m going back and finishing each level with both characters. I don’t want to 100% it now.
I’m so bad at 3d land it’s not even funny. And yet I’m still trying to 100% it. I ragequit about once every ten minutes i’m not even finished the special world yet…
I think in order to have a 5-star game (and unlock the crown level) you must unlock and complete each level, with Mario AND Luigi, getting each flagpole, and all 3 star coins for each level.
And then you are rewarded with the most ridiculously difficult level you’ve ever seen in any Mario game.
Just YouTube it. LOL.
Here’s the video of the crown level if anyones interested.
Oh, *that *level! I youtubed it before. It doesn’t look all that bad, but I’ve said that before on levels that were super tough. It’s not that I can’t play the levels again easily, (now that I have all gold coins for each), with Mario and Luigi… it’s that I don’t want to. At least not now. I’m burnt on SM3DL. It really is a great game though… so maybe one day I’ll be faced with the crown level, just not now.
For the record I finally upgraded to the XL and it is a vast improvement over the original model, in case anyone was wondering which one they should get.
I didn’t find out the crown level was so notoriously difficult until after I finished it. It only took me a few tries so I really don’t understand what all the hype is about, I find some of the star levels in SMW to be way more difficult. I didn’t even find it to be the hardest stage in this game, I had way more trouble with one of the later special levels in the huge lava field where the star coins required some true daredevil tactics.
I’m sure you’ll want to go back later and beat all the levels with Luigi, it’s a fun game replay anyway and the levels are really short and breezy when you don’t have to worry about star coins and golden flagpoles.