My dark secret is that I'm a Mario fan who's never previously played the Gameboy Mario Land games and this is my first play of one. I was pretty impressed! Tight levels with smart concepts throughout. While I think the minigames themselves are pretty garbage (especially the 999 coin one), spending coins on things in-game seems like a better use of them than just 1-ups. Visually, this is surprisingly expressive and unique, the scrolling pipe animations caught me off guard.

I know that none of the Land games are anything like each other but I'm looking forward to playing them soon! (Side note: It's crazy that we've had GB on NSO for over 6 months and still no Land 1. Not sure why Nintendo is doing that.)

This is maybe my fifth playthrough or so of Odyssey. After playing a couple 2D Marios and telling everyone that Pikmin 4 felt just like a collectathon, I felt like it was right to return to the biggest Mario collectathon.

I still greatly enjoy it but my ability to wring surprise out of this game has dwindled significantly. That's fine, in fact its impressive how much fun I've had after this many plays, but especially after playing Pikmin, I am laser focused on collecting as much as I can in as little time since my familiarity with the game is pretty high.

After some time, something that stood out to me was how much of this game is minigames. That isn't a serious dock on the game, especially because they are rock solid minigames, but so often the time with a capture is either just a quick instrumental object (think power lines or the stanchions in Metro) or in much more contained mini-set pieces. It's a bit of a let down that you rarely have a capture recontextualize navigating a larger space that Mario also navigates or has already navigated. While at this point its clear we are not getting an Odyssey 2, it would have been really nice to have that potential get explored.

This is still one of the the best, most well refined 3D platformers to ever exist with (in my opinion) not nearly as much bloat as this could've had, but I feel like there's still the slightest room for it to have been a more interesting game too.

I last played this a couple years ago and went in with floor level expectations because of how negatively the discourse surrounding this game is. I remember being pleasantly surprised, especially with some of the side content like the mission mode and Luigi U as well Starworld being decently fun. Unfortunately on this play, which was on the heels of playing SMW, I was so off-put by just completing the main game, I just wanted to bail after the credits. I'm giving this an extra star just from my memories of last time. I have to believe its at least this good.