Another 250 yen pick up from a day or two ago. A version of the game I'd always thought about picking up because of the gimmick of the Rumble Pak compatibility, and here I am without a Rumble Pak to actually test it with XD. Though this is technically a game I thiiiink I've finished on the N64 before, it's been SO long that other than my memory of most stages, I don't feel that familiar with the game. My most recent memory of it is the DS port that I played along the time it came out, and it's difficult to separate the memory of the two versions in my head XP . It's definitely a game that PLAYS way different than I remember, and this is the first time I've ever actually gotten all 120 stars on the N64 version, so I feel an exception is warranted from being a * repeat completion like Banjo-Kazooie was.

As far as what the game is, it's Mario 64. Chances are, you know what that is. A major pioneer of modern 3D movement in games and especially the 3D collectathon genre as a whole. 15 courses with 7 stars each, a castle hub area with 15 stars hidden in it as well, and 3 big Bowser fights before you reach the end. One of the all-time classics of the N64 that really doesn't need any serious introduction.

That said, the game certainly plays more like a pioneer in the genre and less flawlessly than I remember. This game is HARD to control after going through Banjo-Kazooie a few days ago, and even harder since it controls so differently from any other Mario game I've played recently. It honestly made me kinda wanna pick up a GameCube and Mario Sunshine just to refresh my memory on how well that game controls compared to this, because while I certainly remembered always preferring the Banjo games to Mario 64 as a kid, I definitely didn't remember exactly why. Now I have a pretty good idea: The controls.

Mario 64 is somewhat of a victim of its own success. All the other great 3D platformers that have come since, largely from Nintendo, have refined Mario's move-set in a way that has made his platforming far more forgiving. However, in this originator, a factor of three things make this game pretty difficult to go back to:

1. The camera is sometimes alright, but if you want to control it you're gonna have a BAD time. You GOTTA try and play like you can't even control it, because it doesn't wanna be controlled.

2. Mario's turning circle is HUGE. If you wanna turn around, he's gonna make a huge circle in front of him unless he's at a dead stop and you turn a very specific way. This means you're gonna be falling off of the game's MANY tiny platforms A LOT (into its uncountable bottomless pits), especially when the camera isn't behaving and forward is suddenly making you go right.

3. Swimming and flying are terrible and annoying. Not too related to #2, but it makes getting around that much more annoying in a game with tons of water to swim through and enough stars that involve flying to really rub it in your face how irritating the flight controls are compared to something simple like Banjo-Kazooie's flying.

All those gripes aside, they only REALLY come into play, I think, when going for a 120-star run. The game only actually requires you to get 70 out of 120 stars, of course, but I never really appreciated what that meant until I played through it this time. Each of the 15 courses has 7 stars in it, and the main castle has 15 stars hidden in it (some more difficult to get than others). That means it's technically possible to beat the whole game while only visiting 8 of the 15 worlds! This combined with the fact that it's so easy to sequence-break the order you get stars in in stages really gives the player a degree of choice and freedom in choosing which challenges they want to take on and which they don't. You don't even really get anything for getting them all other than some slightly different final dialogue from Bowser at the end and the ability to go and meet Yoshi on top of the castle. It frames getting EVERY star as what it really is: A challenge only to be taken on by the truly daunting that is a reward in and of itself.

Given how many prior Mario games allowed you to skip large swaths of content through things like warps and the Star Road, it certainly wasn't a huge design choice-leap to give the player such choice in which stages they want to play in Mario 64, but it's a design choice I've really only truly appreciated this time through. Nintendo really has always been trying to give players the agency to play through their games in the way the player would prefer. It isn't some super recent revelation with the era of the Wii and such.

As far as differences from the original N64 release of Mario 64 go, I guess you could say this is the "definitive" edition in a certain way for Japanese players. It apparently irons out some bugs and glitches present in the original release, while also confusingly enough removing Japanese dialogue and replacing it with the English voice overs from the international release. All of Peach's dialogue, for example, is in English with Japanese subtitles. It's an interesting curiosity if you just want a rumble gimmick added to the American version of Mario 64 you're more familiar with, as far as importing is concerned (granted all the text is still in Japanese, so I hope you don't need to read anything to get through this if you did wanna import it XD).

Verdict: Hesitantly recommended. The hesitant part of my recommendation is really down to my personal tastes. This isn't really a game I'm dying to play more of after my often frustrating experience going through it this time (especially with some of those later 100 coin stars XP), and the DS port adds SO much content and tightens up the controls so much that there's even a simply better (in many ways) version of this game I can far more easily recommend. It is an interesting historical piece that is very notable for the innovations in 3D platforming it presented, but Nintendo's many refinements on its formula have really made it start to show its age on its original hardware.