About the coconutter, if you have a bunch of honey syrups with you (or high enough FP), and stand on the bridge, you can fireball him to death without taking any damage. Wink
You can essentially do this without wasting money on FP items if you follow my video. Overall specials are not that good except for the healing ones for extra health and for PvP since trying to hit other players with your basic attack is a huge pain.
And I have tons of level 10-ish alts that I can play on. We could party farm and exp share while beating bosses and doing quests or something.
Also as a tip, you typically don't want to invest in stache or speed. From what I remember they only raise your crit/block chance by 0.4% each, and later you can get a badge which lets you run for days on out without running out of SP for like 3 minutes. In the future you do get some badges which give you minor crit and block chance boosts, which might be helpful if you already have some, but your core stats should be mostly HP and Attack, with enough defense to take only 1-2 damage from enemies.
If you ever get stuck in a maze or something you can always reference this guide, but be wary of looking at equipment charts and the world map if you don't like spoilers:
http://www.smf4free.com/forums/supermariobrosonline/index.php/topic,915.0.html