GAME REVIEW: Super Mario Odyssey (2017)
If you’re a classic Nintendo gamer and you have a Nintendo Switch, you would be loathe to not have tried Super Mario Odyssey by now. While there have been plenty of 2D/3D multiplayer adventures in this series of late, there hasn’t been a proper 3D platformer since the Super Mario Galaxy series on the Nintendo Wii. Now, I love me some 3D Mario platforming adventures, as Super Mario 64 is probably my favorite Mario game, more so even than Super Mario Brothers 3, right up there with Super Mario World. As such, I’ve been waiting for it to go on sale since last summer and have now finally had the chance to check it out.
Premise
Super Mario Odyssey starts with Bowser kidnapping Peach with the clear intent on forcing her to marry him. We’ve all known that Bowser is a regular princess thief, but I’m not sure if his intention to marry Peach was ever laid out so blatantly before (my memory could be faulty, of course), which I perhaps found disappointing. I preferred the ambiguity over why Bowser wanted to take Peach captive. It’s less… stimulating to the rule 34 people, for example.
Mario gets punched so hard in the opening scene that he lands in a planet of hats and meets Cappy, who becomes his hat-changing buddy for the game, since his own hat is destroyed by Bowser. The game centers around Bowser taking his airship from world-to-world, getting famous things from worlds that are strangely on-the-nose for his big wedding, like a (sentient) tiara named… Tiara! [insert eye roll here] from the hat world, a dress from a water world, a cake from a snow world, and so on, ultimately heading to the moon for the big event, with Mario and Cappy following behind him, trying to stop the wedding.
Gameplay
There was something really delightful about picking up this game and instantly knowing how to play it because I’ve played Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy, and other games with the standard Mario mechanics. Though there were still tutorial bits that explained any of the moves I might have forgotten, the backflips and long jumps are all such a deep part of my muscle memory at this point that I was able to traverse the game quite easily right away. Plus, the game did still add new mechanics, via Cappy, to keep things fresh, so overall, this was a nice setup. Admittedly, some of Cappy’s moves required you to play with detached joycons (not my preference), so I didn’t end up using a lot of Cappy’s better or more useful moves. I’ll assume that they were playing with the new capabilities for the Switch and I can see the appeal, even if I prefer playing with stationary controllers myself.
Camera Angles
On the whole, the controls are sensible and well-enough crafted for the game. If there’s one complaint that I have though, it’s that the camera never moves with the character, meaning you have to constantly manually adjust the camera and sometimes it’s very inconvenient to do so if you’re in the middle of a boss or tricky climb, for example.
Boss Battles
Sometimes Mario must fight a bunch of rabbit-like enemies called Broodals, who were apparently Bowser’s hired wedding planners—I hated them in every way and wished they had been Bowser’s children… why recreate the wheel for every game when what you’ve got was working just fine (and generally underused, to boot)?—while other times he was up against various boss monsters, like the mechawiggler or the mollusque-lanceur before facing off against the final boss himself. Pretty standard Mario business, though without all the castles.
Regarding the bosses, they were fun enough, but relatively same-y. Of course, as an experienced Mario gamer, there weren’t many hefty challenges in there, but the final Broodal battle did take me a few times to get through. Most enemies followed a pretty typical pattern that requires you to dodge and use your hat before going in for your own attack. They all require three hits to go down, with expanded challenges to the difficulty each time. There were a few repeating bosses and I do confess that I just really wished they were Bowser’s kids. It’s his wedding after all, so why introduce these (overly child-friendly) new characters?
Collecting Moons
They seem to have changed the format from fewer trophies that are harder to get, to many trophies that are easier to get, in the form of power moons rather than power stars, which are used to power the Odyssey, aka Cappy’s airship. While the standard in Mario 64 and Mario Galaxy was about ten stars per level, Super Mario Odyssey’s levels have baffling numbers of power moons, from less than ten in one level to over one hundred in another. The OCD part of my brain definitely dislikes that inconsistency and also doesn’t really understand why there’s a need for so many in some places (and so few in others). It’s a bit of a weird thing when you just… find power moons laying about all over. It makes the levels feel really unbalanced. This isn’t really a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but when you’re playing a game like this, you do sort of have a certain level of expectancy and this game threw that out the window at times.
Some of the power moons are pretty consistent. For example, every level with a shop has a moon available for one hundred coins, and most levels have a female goomba who’s looking for love that Mario can assist with the help of Cappy. Some are found through doors that can only be opened by throwing Cappy at them, while others require Mario to abandon Cappy outright to get his moons. There’s a very cool part of the game, where Mario turns 2-dimensional by going through a pipe and has to play in original NES style, though they do keep whatever outfit Mario was wearing intact, which adds a little something new to the something old. There are even a couple of throwbacks to Mario 64 when you have to jump through a picture frame for a challenge, which of course tickled me just right. The overall level design is generally very fun and requires a lot of exploration. I’d say the game is pretty balanced between chasing down Bowser and the potential to just run around the levels and explore.
Child-Friendly Gaming
The game does veer a bit more into the child-friendly territory than everyone-friendly, which is perhaps a bit of a bummer, insofar as it would be nice to have something that makes you think just a little bit, or it would have been nice to have a genuine challenge here and there (if children could play the original Super Mario Brothers, I don’t think we need to dumb down gaming for them… those old games were hard!). Mario stories are generally pretty shroom-induced on the whole, but this universe filled with worlds of sentient cutlery, hats, and so forth, is pretty bizarre and child-oriented even by Mario standards. It doesn’t seem like the Mario devs are actually interested in creating a sensible lore to the world, which is fine, but as someone who likes lore and worldbuilding, it’s a shame that they don’t put much effort into it either way. That said, despite the worlds looking like they were almost all inspired by Super Mario Kart levels, they are quite beautiful and fun. The game nicely combines the literal worlds of the Galaxy games with classic NES gaming… there’s a bit of something from all of the Mario gaming history in there, which is straight-up awesome.
Couch Co-op
I will mention that there is technically a 2-player mode to this game where one person can play as Cappy, but it’s pretty complicated… if you were ever a kid who tried to play a video game by outright sharing a controller with someone (you control the left stick while they control the right buttons, for example), this feels like exactly that. Unless you get into a very deep sense of communication (which, hey, could be a good exercise for couples), it just doesn’t work that well. But, if you’re looking for multiplayer Mario gaming, I’d send you in the direction of Super Mario Wonder, which I’ll be reviewing at some other point in time (we’ve been playing casually since fall 2024).
Art & Music
Nothing to complain about here. The modern graphics are still holding up 7 years later on the Switch and the music, while not especially outstanding, does exactly what it needs to do. I appreciated the creativity in this new world, as Mario games are generally very child-friendly art-wise, and cutesy, so throwing in worlds where you are encountering things in a completely different style from the usual Mario games was a nice artistic juxtaposition. And, as I mentioned, the game nods to previous Mario games pretty regularly, which is always nice.
Story (Spoiler Zone)
While Japan still has much to learn about the ways of feminism on the whole and while I didn’t like that everyone was very outright trying to marry Peach in this game, ultimately Peach tells both Mario and Bowser to cut it out and she and her new friend Tiara go off to travel on their own in the end (thus neglecting her country and… wait, shh, you’re not supposed to think too hard about Mario game plots, remember?). So it was nice that Mario isn’t entitled to marry Peach just because he rescues her, even though she does ask him to come back to the Mushroom Kingdom with her, while Bowser’s punishment is to be stranded on the moon.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, Super Mario Odyssey was a really fun, solid inclusion into the Mario series and one of the best 3D platformers in the series to-date. While I am overall sorry that it feels like they still don’t put a lot of thought into things like plot and character (common issues with Japanese storytelling), the overall updates to graphics and mechanics make Odyssey a really fun game if you don’t mind games that have clearly been steered into the “children’s gaming” category. While Odyssey does indeed suffer from a bit of a lack of challenge on the whole, the game is vast and diverse enough to largely make up for that with its quirky worlds and funny characters. Recommended for family gamers!
Enjoy Bear’s writing? Consider joining her mailing list to keep up-to-date!
