Despite 3D Land's apparent quality, one important element implied by its title seems to be missing: the balls-out game-changing weirdness of Nintendo Research & Development 1 -- now known as SPD Group No. 1 -- the in-house development studio responsible for Super Mario Land, Wario Land, WarioWare, Rhythm Heaven, and many other Nintendo classics. While their games didn't take an explicitly revolutionary tack from the very beginning, subverting expectations eventually became the studio's M.O., all thanks to the creative minds of directors like Hiroji Kiyotuke (Super Mario Land 2 and 3), Takehiko Hosokawa (Wario Land 2 and 3), and Hirofumi Matsuoka (Wario Land 4 and the original WarioWare.
Of course, the creative team of Super Mario 3D Land aren't exactly second-stringers at Nintendo; Super Mario Galaxy and Sunshine director (and longtime Nintendo employee) Yoshiaki Koizumi acted as producer during development, while 3D Land director Koichi Hayashida served the same role he held on Mario Galaxy 2. 3D Land takes the same approach as the Galaxy series, dropping the sprawling worlds of Sunshine for more compact and tightly-focused challenges. And to go along with their back-to-basics approach, the power-ups of 3D Land actually empower Mario, rather than give him a limited set of abilities needed to clear a specific area tailored for the use of said abilities, as was the case with the spring, bee, and boo suits of Galaxy. The game even retains the antiquated lives system, an expected Mario trope that stopped making sense with the advent of battery-powered backup.
This attachment to tradition isn't necessarily a bad thing, and those who've played 3D Land can tell you that Nintendo clearly knows what they're doing. But jump back in time 20 years, and you'll see that the Land franchise once existed as a sandbox for crazy ideas -- not a place for traditional Mario elements to coalesce. The first Mario Land stood more of a proof of concept than anything; while the game dramatically simplified Mario's antics, it also showed that a 2D side-scroller could be made on Nintendo's blurry green portable -- and besides, in a world with single-screen launch games like Alleyway and Baseball, it didn't take much to impress us.
With three years and a great deal of Game Boy mastery behind them, R&D1 returned to the Mario series in 1992 with Super Mario Land 2 -- and that's where things started getting weird. While Mario always toured fantastical worlds, this beefed-up Mario Land sequel brimmed over with a sense of madcap energy not found in the main series. Land 2 marks Mario's most varied adventure to date, and sends our chubby hero to outer space, inside of a giant turtle, and through the inner workings of a colossal Mario statue; and within each of these levels, Mario encounters a legion of oddball enemies that haven't been seen before or since. Wario makes his first appearance in Land 2, as does R&D1's first inklings of frustration over certain sacred cows; while lives exist in the game, saving up 999 coins -- admittedly, not the simplest of tasks -- gives Mario the opportunity to play a slot machine with 99 lives as the ultimate reward. Of course, savvy gamers could always savescum the system, transforming lives into the moot point R&D1 would soon adopt as their design philosophy.
Source: http://www.1up.com/features/super-mario-land-versus-3d
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