This is a game full of unique ideas and mechanics that remain fresh all the way until the credits roll. This remaster has brought the graphics to a point where it may as well be modern - an animated art style will always hold up better than realism but this game came out in 2007 and you would not think it to look at it. I could gush about all the ways this game is great but in the fairness of my time I'm going to mostly highlight the small negatives I have with it.

The biggest issue that holds back true love for this game is just how much it wastes your time. A level in this game will take around 5 - 10 minutes to complete, but each and every time you get a star (of which you will be getting many) the game kicks you out to the Observatory. End of level animation, animation of coming back to the Dome, score trackers going up, ask if you want to save, wait for it to save, use the blue star to access level select, choose level, confirm, watch animation of Mario flying to level, wait for stars to appear, select star, confirm, camera pans over level, Mario flies in - now you can play. This happening for every single level means you spend collective hours in this meaningless downtime. It seems a small thing to harp on but this game at minimum requires 60 stars to complete, and you are going to go through that process every single time - even longer if the level you want to do is in a different dome.

The other time wasting issue comes from the dialogue; it's overall a smaller issue but the text boxes being unskippable for several seconds is annoying to someone who can read quicker than the target demographic of 8 year olds.

The game's soundtrack is majestic, the graphics awe inspiring and the gameplay is varied and challenging. I would give this game my highest recommendation, but unfortunately it is locked behind this obscenely over-priced bundle on the switch. I get that these games (64, Sunshine and Galaxy) make up some of the most important titles ever released, but £70 for three games that are decades old is a crime.

This is sorta a replay, sorta not. I've beaten Mario Galaxy before, but not only have I never beaten it with 121 stars (let alone also getting 121 stars on the Super Luigi Galaxy mode as well), but this was also played on the Switch's Super Mario 3D Collection. There's enough difference there (and it's also been like 13 years since I last played this) that I figured it was fair enough to call this one not a repeat playthrough, certainly given other things I've also qualified as "not repeats" XD. I don't know the exact time, but I reckon it took me around 25 or so hours to 100% both the Super Mario Galaxy and Super Luigi Galaxy modes in the Japanese version of the game.

The premise for the story is that it's the star festival, where a comet that passes by every century drops tons of shooting stars down onto the Mushroom Kingdom. Bowser and his fleet of airships crash the party, steal Princess Peach's whole heckin' castle, and disappear off into the sky. Mario tries to give chase up the castle, but Kamek blows him away into the stars. He's found by Rosalina (or "Rozetta", as she's called in Japanese), and she gives Mario the power of a Luma ("Chiko", in Japanese), baby stars, in order to defeat Bowser and save Peach. Bowser already stole the Grand Stars that power her spaceship, aka the "comet" that causes the star festival in the first place, so she has a vested interest in helping kick Bowser's butt outside of just helping our hero.

The story and premise are very light, as with most Mario games, but compared to Sunshine, there's a bit less overall character to the game. The Lumas and little aliens you meet are charming, but are more or less just set dressing or tutorial-giving machines rather than little characters you can briefly talk to. I don't think that's an awful thing (it's not like Isle Delfino was a well of well-written narrative, after all), but it's something worth mentioning. The writing does what it has to to set the tone and the stakes and push you along to your adventure asap.

Mario Galaxy's overall design is, I feel, a clever response to the poor mission design that bogs down so much of Mario Sunshine. Rather than invest so much time into creating these larger maps that will change slightly for six or eight different missions there, there are instead a bunch of groups of planetoids that house these sets of missions. Mario goes from planetoid to planetoid, messing with gravity and spin-jumping around, to do each mission, and this helps easily create variety in even the same "world" since very often the three main missions of a world won't even visit most of the same areas in each. It keeps each mission feeling different from the others, even in the same worlds, and helps to keep up the pace of gameplay.

Also present in each of the larger worlds are (usually) three extra stars. One is a hidden star that the game will tell you the mission its present in after you beat the main three, one is a wandering comet, and one is a purple coin comet. The hidden stars are usually an extra little side-area you get by feeding a hungry luma, and they aren't often that hidden. They're often easily spotted or stumbled across playing a level normally. The wandering comets are special variants on a mission you've already done. They range from a time attack, to a sudden death (one hit and you're dead) challenge, to sped up enemies, to a race against Shadow Mario (or Luigi). They're a fantastic improvement to the secret stars in Sunshine that were so often simply red coin trials in the formerly Fludd-less areas, and it's one more thing to help keep the action fresh.

The purple coin comets only appear after you beat the game, and they're this game's take on 100 coin stars. They give you a section of that world (sometimes somewhere you've been, sometimes somewhere totally new) where 100 purple coins are scattered around in and you've gotta collect 'em. There are untimed ones, which are largely scavanger hunts for all 100 purple coins, and they're endurance tests of your time and skill (normal healing coins are quite rare in these, so 3 hits is usually all you get before you gotta start over). Then there are timed ones, which usually have 100 or 150 coins spread out over a perilous obstacle course, and those ones were my favorites out of all the comet challenges. The comet challenges do create a kind of haze/filter over the screen corresponding to the color of the comet (like the galaxy is passing through the comet's tail), which can be quite annoying at times, but that's nothing major. The purple coin challenges aren't always the best thing in the world, but I think they're a good idea to try and spice up the otherwise not terribly exciting 100 coin challenges of the previous two games.

Control-wise, Mario is much more back to his Mario 64-self, but not entirely. First and foremost, Mario moves noticeably more stiffly than he has in the previous two games. It's hardly a game breaker, and it's something I adapted to very quickly, but there are a few things that make this a tough transition if you'd just played another Mario game. Most notably, you need to wait until you're actually skidding on the ground to do a backwards flip jump, and it takes a while to re-learn that timing from just how immediately they can be performed in Sunshine and Mario 64. The planetoids can also cause their own unique issues, especially on the smaller ones. Occasionally you can get stuck in little circles and you'll need to stop moving and start again, because between the camera angle and gravity, Mario can't quite figure out which way you want him to go.

Outside of those infrequent problems, Mario controls great. No more Fludd, so you can once again do things like long-jumps, and those are really fun to do on the smaller planetoids. Just launch yourself forward and get FLUNG with gravity X3. Mario also has his new spin-attack from the Luma helping him out, and this is both a kind of AOE punch move as well as a tiny double-jump you can perform in mid-air. It allows you to do some fairly silly platforming at times if you combine it with high jumps and/or wall-jumps, and it makes platforming around and trying to sequence break lots of fun.

Once you get all 120 stars (that last one is a final secret) in Mario's mode, you can unlock the ability to replay the game as Luigi, who controls slightly differently. As is so often the case with Luigi, he has less ground friction but moves faster and jumps higher. All of the game's challenges are designed with Mario in mind, with some exceptions, which means those higher jumps and speed can make some levels way easier, but the lower friction on your feet means it can also make some challenges a fair bit harder. The only levels outright unique to Luigi's mode are his Shadow Luigi levels, where he races a Shadow Luigi, and those levels are often quite a bit harder than the Shadow Mario stages, since Shadow Luigi REALLY knows how to use Luigi's move set to the best of his ability, and you'll have to learn to as well if you wanna beat him~.

In terms of the Mario 3D Collection on Switch and how that plays and changes things, I think it's the best piece of that collection. Mario Galaxy looks really nice up-scaled to run properly in HD, and the way they've made the game work on a Pro Controller is great too. You can still shake the controller to spin-attack, but you can also simply press the Y button instead. The pointer is also just bound to the gyro inside your controller, and you can press R whenever to recenter that to the middle of the screen. For someone like me who really doesn't like using the Wiimote and Nunchuk to play games, this is an excellent upgrade to Galaxy that is very much appreciated.

Finally, there's the presentation, which I absolutely adore. I love how colorful everything is, I love how cute the Lumas are, and I especially love the music. The pretty orchestral soundtrack really grabs your attention in a lot of tracks, which my personal favorites being the main theme, the theme for the purple coin collecting missions, and both of Bowser's themes during the final boss fight. Yet another mainline Mario game that absolutely does not disappoint in the graphics and sound department <3

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Before this replay, I thought Galaxy was just okay, but this has really given me a huge re-evaluation of the game. It's certainly no Odyssey, and it's also no Mario 3D World, but it's definitely my favorite of the Mario games that had been made up to that point. The 3D Collection is also a fantastic way to play it that I highly recommend (if the price point doesn't shy you away from it ^^;).

This was the first all around great 3D mario. I'm surprised it took 2 gens to get all the rough edges sanded off, but maybe it was still extremely strong around the time for the prior 2. It feels like a good balance of sunshine and 64's best strengths, and even shows some portions of the DNA that became Odyssey, the still hands down best 3D Mario.

The added story wasn't anything to write home about, but it is nice you can either delve into it a bit or wholly ignore it(save for the opener). The spherical motion of the game doesn't break often, and though it can be frustrating when it does, not nearly as much as the frustrating parts of the prior 2 3D marios. and it's a blast to traverse. The motion controls were entirely unnecessary as the port proves, but there is some added fun in using them to some degree.

The level design which boils down to "what if space were collections of planetoids that feel like a mario level", but frankly this plays to the strength of what you find in sunshine. A lot of the design in sunshine is really good, except for the minor side stages, but this combines these together a lot more succinctly with few odd or overly frustrating choices. And it was really smart to use the comets to modify conditions on levels for some extra challenge you can totally avoid.
It's not -the- perfect 3D mario game, but it's definitely in the upper half of the ranked list.

Still one of the greatest 3D platformers of all time. Both Galaxy 1 and 2 are great, but what I think puts this one over the edge of its sequel is the more exploratory design in its galaxies.

Freezeflame, Sea Slide, and Melty Molten are my personal favorite galaxies. And the Purple Coin missions are my favorite part of the game, especially the ones where you have to explore across the whole level to find all 100.

Peak Mario.