My Top 10 Hardest Clears of 2025

Happy New Year! To celebrate 2025 ending, I made a list of my hardest clears in that year. I had an idea to make this type of video a few weeks ago, but didn't feel like doing it until yesterday, January 1st, when I saw Baishi's video of his top 10 hardest clears. Even though my list has much easier clears, I thought making one would be a fun way to commemorate my achievements in 2025.
Baishi's Top 10:    • My Top 10 Hardest Kaizo Completion in Supe...  

I should elaborate on how I ranked levels. Was it by how difficult they were for me, or by how difficult I feel they are objectively (i.e. how hard they would be for someone equally good at every type of level)? Well, it was a mix of both.

The second method doesn't sit right with me. Partially because it's difficult to rank levels objectively, but my main reason is that some rankings would feel very wrong. For example, a new soup speedrun rated 5.5 using the JP speedrun scale is apparently as hard as a 7.5 shell kaizo in team shell. However, I can clear 5.5 speedruns much faster, and I refuse to treat them the same.

On the other side, I also didn't want to judge difficulty only by my personal experience either, because I still wanted overall difficulty to be the biggest factor. If I feel a level is very difficult, I don't want it to be ranked low just because I'm good at that level's type (and vice versa). So I may think "SMW kaizo A was slightly harder than NSMBU speedrun B for me, but I'm better at NSMBU speedruns, so I'll rank B higher". I'd say #2 is overall harder than #1, but the latter was harder for me because it's very technical and I wasn't experienced with fire flower kaizo, and I'm also not very good at shell kaizos, so I put it higher.

I think 2025 is the year in which I improved the most. If I were to include other years in this list, there would be only 2 levels from 2024. If I were to include SMM1 levels, I would probably only put U-Break, but I have no idea where, because I cleared it in 2018 when I was much worse. I don't know how difficult it would be for me now. But anyway, most of my hardest clears are from 2025. July especially was very active for me; I have 3 clears from then, 2 of which are in the top 2.

I already have videos of most of these, but I never posted numbers 10, 6 and 4, so I'll talk about these for a bit.

DieVine Garden (number 10) is the U-Break of SMM2, probably the first level that comes to my mind when I think "very hard classic SMM2 level". It's my first hard 3DW clear. It made me like 3DW kaizo a lot despite disliking it previously. I still don't like general movement in this style, but kaizo can be very fun. Garden was one of the most enjoyable levels I've played, with the exception of the ON/OFF block part, which was inconsistent and annoying. I should have cleared it an hour or two earlier, but overall, great level.

・・・(number 6) is an easy-looking level with a lot of hidden difficulty. I explained it in the 0% server just why it's so difficult, but the explanation has 3.6k characters, almost as long as this description LOL.

Bright Green (number 4) is less known than DieVine Garden but still very popular. It's made by one of the best makers ever. Seriously, look up 5Lemma, it's peak cinema. Everyone says the hardest part is the yoshi spit trick, and while I agree it was the hardest to learn, the hardest to get consistent at for me was the dry bone midair bomb jump near the end. The level is super fun, everything feels fair.

I'm looking forward to grinding more hard levels in 2026. Currently, I'm almost 34 hours into my bomb level, a preview of which I have on my channel. I've buffed it a bit since then, though, and will soon make an updated video that shows relevant changes and my progress. It will be by far my hardest clear.

0:00 Number 10 (LM6-TM7-VKF)
1:30 Number 9 (V8W-CT5-39G)
2:54 Number 8 (P78-RV1-0GG)
4:20 Number 7 (TXP-Q5R-LVF)
6:28 Number 6 (HK7-QCC-23G)
7:18 Number 5 (QHD-5J5-GVF - deleted)
8:13 Number 4 (71P-F58-QPG)
9:12 Number 3 (35K-L0N-VHG)
10:15 Number 2 (T3M-0YS-TJF)
11:27 Number 1 (13D-X8P-3LG)

Song: Persona 5 - Beneath the Mask
   • Persona 5 OST 09 - Beneath the Mask -instr...