The conclusion to Odyssey's story is easily my favourite moment in any Mario game I've played, an incredibly creative, exciting love-letter to the franchise that also acts as the perfect culmination of what the game had been building towards. I don't love Super Mario Odyssey, but the very best moments in it really are excellent when the game is focused on throwing cool new ideas at you one after another. Odyssey also arguably controls the best of any of the 3D Mario games I've played, though the cap-bounce has a habit of making a lot of your move-set feel redundant and you have to nurse the camera a lot more than the control scheme can really accommodate for.

Despite all of this, wow does all the filler drag on me. Of the 999 power moons in the game I'd guess that over three-quarters of them are either inane (just sitting there out in the open, hiding inside random rocks, for purchase in stores, talking to some random npc), frustrating, or copy-pastes of moons you've already collected. There is just far too much content in this game, and far too much of it kind of just sucks. This is mostly fine throughout the main story where there's no need to return to a world once you're done there and the moon counts needed to advance are fairly tame, but the post-game started to really get to me towards the end of my 500 moon playthrough. It's hard not to feel like this game, whilst still good, is a bit of a casualty of the belief that if a game is bigger that must mean it is better.