It's clear that with Bowser's Fury, Nintendo decided to use assets from 3D World and experimented. When viewed through that lense, Bowser's Fury is not only a great Mario game but also an exciting indicator of what's to come.

Turns out that the 3D World mechanics (especially with the added speed of the Switch port) work wonderfully when applied to a larger open world. Collecting all the Cat Shines was a ton of fun. The level design lacks variety and it feels like there's no single "holy shit that was awesome" moment. And while that's not a huge deal, it's noticeable simply due to the high bar set by Nintendo's other 3D Mario titles. The only truly "new" things are the Kaiju Bowser fights and those got old pretty fast especially since controlling Mario (and the camera) feel pretty bad during those fights.

I could not possibly have more faith in the next Mario title. It's gonna be a banger.

Replayed this in anticipation of Wonder. Like 3D World, the first time I played Bowser’s Fury I was pretty cool on it. I found at the time that it felt like a weird, barebones, frustrating prototype.

Going back to Bowser’s Fury was a more positive experience. Mario platforming in an open world structure is a treat — those individual levels make me feel like I’m on a jungle gym at the playground or something. Nessie likewise reached her (his?) final Fun Form here. I also liked the Bowser stuff where the world turns into the last level of a Katamari game, though the idea feels a bit exhausted by the end of the 3-4 hour runtime.

The biggest weakness here is the lack of checkpoints…more than once I got frustrated because I fell off a level for a dumb reason or failed a challenge and had to backtrack to restart. A checkpoint flag would make a big difference. I also don’t think this exact structure would suit a $60 Mario game — I think it works far better as a smaller format. Maybe a Donkey Kong game or a slightly different franchise could do the jungle gym setup for a full runtime.

Either way, fun time!

This compact Mario adventure was just the thing that pushed me over the edge to re-purchase Super Mario 3D World on Switch. The platforming and obstacle-based challenges scattered across the archipelago are bite-sized enough for younger players to enjoy, while veterans will have a blast finding the bountiful secrets hiding around every corner. While some overarching elements of its design wear thin by the end, the brief runtime contributes to an “all killer, no filler” fun factor.

Full Review: https://neoncloudff.wordpress.com/2021/02/27/now-playing-february-2021-edition/

I love the idea of taking assets from a game and doing something more with it, and Bowser's Fury is a wonderful little experience. I wouldn't call it open world as not everything is available from the start, but the island exploration is very interesting and there's some well hidden collectables. Playing while dodging Fury Bowser's attacks is crazy and I like how it even opens new paths and possibilities, the gameplay cycle is much appealing to me, the possibility of storing your power ups and exchanging freely between them feels very good and enhances the experience. I was amazed at how much personality everything has, the animations, the music, it just feels good. Having said that, I never had problems with the camera in Mario games, even Sunshine didn't bother me, but this game having a run button and also having to adjust the camera with the right stick is just... weird. Lastly, it is a very short game and I don't think the price is worth just for Bowser's Fury, specially if you already played 3D World.

🎮 Platform: Switch OLED
⌚ Time to finish - 8.5h
🏆Trophy completion - 100% (fun to complete!)

I really enjoyed Bowser's fury. It felt to me like super mario odyssey lite + Super mario 3d world lite mashed together. If you like either of these, there is no reason you would not like this. Its a full 3d version of SM 3d world. Some of the challenges and levels remind me of what you see in SMO and SM 3d world. Go play it!

Pros:
Charm and graphics are still top notch
Platforming is fun!
Fun to 100%
Bowser Jr. is so silly :)

Cons:
Big Bowser fights camera is hard to control
Variety (though I didn't mind the repetetive rabbit, plessie runs)

This is a nice side-game that has me looking forward to the future of 3D Mario games. I love how well 3D World's gameplay mixes with Odyssey's, and I am glad that this doesn't have any of the uninteresting objectives (such as simply groundpounding a hill) included in the latter. Each objective feels fun and engaging, and it's a wonderful idea to have areas change slightly if you leave and come back.

I did find the Fury Bowser mechanic to be extremely annoying, however. It's a cool idea at first, but it doesn't take long for it to become more bothersome than interesting as it interrupts whatever you were doing. Fury blocks are a smart way to make Fury Bowser helpful, but I didn't like that you had to wait for him to spawn instead of just being able to make him appear at any time.

I also wish each area felt a little more natural with obstacle courses built into them rather than obstacle courses with a theme added later, but it's not too big of an issue.

Overall I really enjoyed my time with this despite the few annoyances along the way and I hope a future 3D Mario game adopts a similar gameplay style to this.

What a fascinating confluence of ideas is Bowser's Fury. The traditional 3D Mario formula has always striven to present a feeling of a holistic world, with each stage being an interrelated part of a whole, but runs up every time against the constraint that stages must exist in separate hermetically-sealed bubbles. Bowser's Fury suggests a new way to make good on that promise by placing the player in a single conjoined open world (in the sense that became so popular among 2010s AAA games) and allowing the player to move between these worlds with neither a menu nor a separate overworld interposing itself.

But at the same time it falls on its face in doing so because each of the stages is itself nothing like the fleshed-out living worlds of Odyssey or even Galaxy. Instead, the islands Mario visits are more akin to the game's cartridgemate 3D World: mostly-linear platforming challenges highlighting specific mechanical ideas rather than broader worldbuilding concepts. Although the structure of the game (to say nothing of its use of Shine Sprites) suggests the possibility of something like Mario Sunshine but even moreso, the actual play only captures that vibe in the ancillary moments when you forego the primary quest and wander the liminal spaces of the map looking for quiet little secrets.

I hope this foreshadows a Mario game that casts off the mechanical myopia (as well as the incessantly mandatory boss fights) and makes good on the ideas embedded within. But I wonder sometimes if Nintendo's increasingly egregious conservatism will inherently edge out the worldbuilding I'm looking for. Mechanics are safe, because mechanics don't need to mean anything. If a world is to be interesting, it has to bear some relation to our world and the heady semiotics that come with it, and more and more that seems to be anathema to Nintendo—particularly in their flagship franchise, where every moment Mario or his friends are onscreen must adhere to a perfectly sanitized style guide and may under no circumstances reflect the messy realities of human existence.

Bowser has been a part of the ‘Super Mario’ franchise since it’s inception in 1985. He is a large, silly turtle man who wants to kidnap Princess Peach. His rationale for kidnapping Princess Peach is typically undefined beyond a general sensation of being evil and potentially having some form of ruling over the Mushroom Kingdom. This is never effective for the course of a full game, as Mario will always kill Bowser, usually by dumping him in actual lava. Yet Bowser somehow always revives. You literally fight his skeletal corpse in ‘New Super Mario Bros.’ Bowser is truly the ultimate Eldritch horror. There needs to be a deep analysis on the lore of Bowser and his interaction with the world of the ‘Super Mario’ franchise.

But Bowser has always been a goofy villain. He gets mad, but it’s never intimidating. However, this time is different. Bowser isn’t coping with something in a healthy manner. Bowser is furious. In his inability to cope, likely with the trauma of being brutally murdered by Mario on numerous occasions, Bowser has become something terrifying. A blackened ooze coats his body, causing him to swell into a gargantuan titan, the excess sludge dripping and sticking to a once beautiful landscape, Bowser’s emotional state is far more aggressive and primal, as he has regressed to the reptilian brain, seeking only survival and dominance as he scorches the earth with meteoric flames. It is up to Mario to atone for his past misdeeds, and save the man he once gleefully terrorized. Bowser Jr. is even here, and the trauma he is suffering from his father’s anger has now officially put Bowser in the ‘Sad Dad Club’. ‘Bowser’s Fury’ is high art, just as ‘The Last of Us’, ‘The Walking Dead’, and ‘God of War’. Two of those games are actually good, and ‘The Last of Us’ is not one of them. Fortunately, ‘Bowser’s Fury’ is good.

Nintendo have been slowly making efforts to put every marketable Wii U title onto the Switch. ‘Super Mario 3D World’ is in the top half of the series in terms of quality, but to increase it’s marketing appeal, Nintendo tacked on the short 3-hour campaign which utilized the mechanical simplicity of ‘Super Mario 3D World’ with the large spaces of ‘Super Mario Odyssey’. The result is an open-world where each area functions under the unique platforming challenges and gimmicks which the ‘Super Mario’ franchise is known for. As a singular unit, it is non-stop fun with very few flaws.

Though flaws do present themselves. Primarily, ‘Bowser’s Fury’ feels like a taste to something bigger. It doesn’t feel incomplete per se, just evidently a project which could be better when expanded into a full game. When Bowser becomes furious during exploration or platforming, this can both add fun challenges and be incredibly annoying, depending on where you’re at in the game. It’s never detrimental to the high standards the game set, but there were exactly two occasions I remember where I had to stop progress in a level and do absolutely nothing, just to wait for Bowser to stop being a massive asshole. You can also turn into a giant cat and actually fight Bowser, but these sections blow. Sorry, ‘Bowser’s Fury’, maybe you should think about some of these crucial negatives before we are introduced to ‘Bowser’s Fury 2: Bowser Harder’. 5/6

In early 2021, Nintendo dropped the first trailer for the long-awaited Switch port of Super Mario 3D World, a game that was critically acclaimed, yet… no, that’s a story for another review. Anyways, when the trailer dropped, we were given a glimpse of the new Bowser’s Fury side mode. I didn’t really know what to think of it other than “hehe big furry Mario fights Bowzilla”.

Fast forward to late 2021 when I got the game, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Bowser’s Fury was actually another 64/Sunshine-inspired collect-a-thon, now with an entire open world that masterfully utilizes 3D World’s mechanics, assets, and toy-like art style.

So let’s start with negatives.

The “game” is too short, because it’s more of a side mode than anything. There’s no triple jump, which feels weird in this setting. The missions get repetitive fairly quickly. The handheld performance is strangely lacking, with lower resolution and a shoddy frame rate, which is even more noticeable when comparing it to the main 3D World campaign (one of the absolute best looking games on the Switch). Finally, the Fury Bowser events get super annoying in the post-game, when I just wanna keep collecting Cat Shines in peace. They should’ve just given Bowser Jr. some new item that could break Fury Blocks and thrown out all those stupid Lucky Isle Shines.

Now for everything else.

Bowser’s Fury is a fun little experiment for what Mario could look like in an open world, and it absolutely shits on the similarly-inspired Sonic Frontiers. Despite the disappointingly short length, the game still effectively does what it needs to do and then leaves, with the player likely having a big ol’ grin on their face afterwards.

The open world is surprisingly well-executed. It’s a beautiful, pristine lake with individual islands that serve as levels. In turn, those levels utilize 3D World’s mechanics and 4-step design philosophy, so… they’re very well-designed. What a surprise. In particular, Crisp Climb Castle and Mount Magmeow are fantastic and stand out above the rest. Plessie makes traveling between islands an absolute blast, avoiding The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker’s issues with its giant ocean and slow sailing.

Collecting Cat Shines is inherently satisfying, and the small number (only 100) helps them feel and distinct and well-earned, unlike my precious Odyssey, where Power Moons were handed out like candy.

In docked mode, everything looks phenomenal. Lake Lapcat is gorgeous, colorful, and almost entirely cat-themed, right down to the enemies. The entire world feels like an offshore part of Isle Delfino from Sunshine, with its aquatic setting, mission structures, and “Shine” collectibles. The game also controls well, allowing for full 360-degree movement and bringing back almost every power-up from the base game.

The story is cute, if simple. Bowser Jr. kidnaps summons Mario to help him beat the crap out of Bowser, who has gone crazy and turned into a giant kaiju that corrupts the entire lake. The dynamic between Mario and Junior is surprisingly funny and heartwarming, making me wonder if, perhaps. Junior would work better as an anti-hero in the future…

Speaking of Junior, he’s a helpful, yet unobtrusive companion. I liked Cappy, but he was a little too chatty sometimes, whereas Bowser Jr. is completely mute outside of cutscenes and a few grunts. He’s also pretty fun for co-op mode, in contrast to Galaxy and Odyssey, where I flat-out forgot multiplayer was a thing until just now.

Oh, I almost forgot about the soundtrack! The soundtrack is absolute fire all throughout, mixing the cheerful, jazzy tunes of “Scamper Shores” with the frantic, heavy metal of “Chasing Down Bowser”, among several other musical styles. The theme for Roiling Roller Isle and Mount Magmeow is particularly epic, letting you know that these are the game’s hardest levels.

All in all, Bowser’s Fury is a short and very flawed experiment that nevertheless succeeds due to its faithfulness to 3D World and Sunshine, as well as its experimental, open-world format. The positives far outweigh the negatives in my book.

A conceptually very interesting game that's a lot more enjoyable to play than the main game of the bundle. Bowser's Fury is more of a continuation of the more mission-based levels of Super Mario 64 or Sunshine. In this game, it's just one big world with zero loading screens, but the structure is more emergent, as the world opens up more areas to play in. On top of that, each area changes depending on how many of the Cat Shines (this game's Power Stars) are found. Essentially this means there's always something to do because there will always be another Shine to collect, that was previously unavailable until the player revisits areas from before.

The downside is that there are only like 6 types of 'levels' to get each area's specific Shine. Those are recycled throughout the entire game. However, it only has 100 Shines in general, which means the game can be completed on a weekend maybe. Also, the world is very drab and basic-looking. Remember Lethal Lava Land from 64? Yeah, like that, just self-contained obstacles with no rhyme or reason.

Now, I can't quite put my finger on it, but I believe I have seen this sort of gameplay before, where in-game progression also has visible alterations in the world itself, buuut... I can't remember. The closest I can think of is maybe Banjo-Tooie or Conker's Bad Fur Day.

However, I do believe this is can be seen as a Tech Demo of what is to come for another Mario game and I hope the emergent gameplay will be ramped up in bigger and more cohesive levels in the future.

That said, Bowser's Fury alone isn't worth the 60€ price tag. Super Mario 3D World is fine as it is, but Nintendo's stance on re-releases and price policy will forever be a thorn in my side.

The game was short, but I don't mind this because it's clear Nintendo was testing the design space for an open-world Mario game. I believe the experiment paid off, but I do have some concerns.

Like Mario Odyssey, the objectives for Cat Shines (the equivalent to Odyssey's moons) were repeated too often. It's a bigger problem here since Bowser's Fury is a lot shorter than Odyssey. In addition, the Fury Bowser gimmick wasn't fully fleshed out. It was an interesting idea, but he wasn't as threatening as I imagine Nintendo thought he would be. This is because his attacks are very easy to avoid, the penalty for dying is only 50 coins, and Bowser goes back to sleep after only a couple minutes. Also, screw those Cat Shines behind Bowser blocks! There are nearly a dozen of these (out of 100 total Cat Shines) and they force you to stop doing what you're doing unless you want to wait for Bowser to destroy them. These issues turn Fury Bowser into an annoyance rather than adding suspense to otherwise familiar Mario proceedings.

There is huge potential in this open-world setup, but Nintendo needs to ensure that the novelties don't wear off after a few hours.

It's ffffffffffffffffINE!!!!

Like, seriously, it's just fine. It's good and nothing amazing. It's very much the MGS Ground Zeros or KH 0.2 of the Mario series, something very short as an appetizer for something (hopefully) much better down the road.

I really liked the platforming challenges and the game flows really well since you never stop collecting shines, and the fact that every level inhabits one space means there is never any down time. It's like if Odyssey didn't have a story and let you explore the entirety of each world from the get go, except with some actually good platforming challenges unlike Odyssey.

The whole thing with Bowser waking up to interrupt your progress every few minutes had me miffed at first, but there's always something to do, some things requiring Bowser to begin with, so it began to bother me less as the game went on

It's cool to see that there are elements of every 3D Mario in here, but it's disappointing to see it fall short when compared to every other 3D Mario in one key area: the setting. This world is such a bland and lifeless place to inhabit and explore. Every other 3D Mario game, even 3D Land and 3D World on occasion, stand out because of their imaginative locals, and this game doesn't even scratch the surface of the creativity in the entire rest of this series.

I will likely still go back and collect all of the cat shines, but this is not a game that captured my imagination in any way.