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 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.