Word.ws English Dictionary

kaizo

/ˈkaɪ.zoʊ/

kaizo noun: a philosophy of game design distinguished by very high difficulty levels and hidden traps that can only be solved by repeated deaths and trial and error, especially associated with romhacks of Super Mario games.

Noun

kaizo (uncountable)

  1. (attributive, often) A philosophy of game design distinguished by very high difficulty levels and hidden traps that can only be solved by repeated deaths and trial and error, especially associated with romhacks of Super Mario games.
    • I like too, he stole kaizo. Like, that name, that's the ubiquitous term for romhacks that are more annoying to play. […] Is kaizo now just like an internet adjective for anything that's, like, mildly irritating?[2011 April 1, Michael "Slowbeef" Sawyer, That's so Kaizo!, archived from the original on 20 Jan 2023
    • I recently played the kaizo hack known as Invictus.[…]As my sore hand recovers, I’m left asking this question: is “kaizo” good game design?2019 May 5, Josh Bycer, “The Bizarre World of Kaizo Games”, in Medium (published in SUPERJUMP)

Examples of kaizo in a sentence

  • A kaizo trap is an obstacle that will kill the player if it gets triggered, but there is no way of knowing where a trap is unless it gets sprung.2020, Joshua Bycer, Game Design Deep Dive: Platformers, CRC Press:
  • Many Mario Maker 2 kaizo stages can take over 25 hours for a top-level player to beat.2020 January 20, Sam Greszes, “Waiting and watching: How brutally difficult Mario levels helped me through my mom’s stroke recovery”, in...
  • While the game doesn’t touch the main plot or structure of the original Pokémon Emerald, this Kaizo edition changes basically everything else. […]Pokémon Dark Rising: Kaizo.2022 May 27, Jesse Lennox, Digital Trends:

Origin of kaizo

From Kaizo Mario World, the name of an early set of fan-created levels in this style first released in 2007, where kaizo is from Japanese 改造 (kaizō, “revamp, remodel, modify”).

Words formed from kaizo

  • kaizo trap

Questions about kaizo

What does kaizo mean?
Kaizo means a philosophy of game design distinguished by very high difficulty levels and hidden traps that can only be solved by repeated deaths and trial and error, especially associated with romhacks of Super Mario games.
How do you use kaizo in a sentence?
A kaizo trap is an obstacle that will kill the player if it gets triggered, but there is no way of knowing where a trap is unless it gets sprung.
What part of speech is kaizo?
Kaizo is a noun.
How do you pronounce kaizo?
Kaizo is pronounced /ˈkaɪ.zoʊ/.

Words near kaizo in the dictionary

  1. kaizen
  2. kaizened
  3. kaizening
  4. kaizens
  5. Kaizhou
  6. kaizo
  7. kaizos
  8. Kaizu
  9. kaizuka
  10. Kaišiadorys
  11. kaj

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kaizo (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-kaizo.wav.

Cite this entry: “kaizo.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/kaizo. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.