Mkay, if you want a short description on how I felt about this game it's - better than the first game in every way with maybe one or two not so ideal gameplay choices. -

Otherwise I'll give my normal review below.

I remember playing the first game and remarking too myself how amazing the animation of the world and all it's characters looked at the time, that hasn't changed, this game is very beautiful looking through I think the magic is slightly less impressive because I can see a lot of it is using the model quality of Bowser's Fury, so it feels like I've seen the look recently. Granted it still looks amazing.

I may have said before that "turned based strategy" games aren't really my specialty and I often try to avoid them, this game doesn't entirely feel like one of those types of games, this almost feels closer to an RPG with movements in the way that Fire Emblem Engage felt because it doesn't feel like a grid, the movement feels free even if is still following the tactical grid rules. A pretty big improvement is every character feels different from each other and plays a role or has a purpose, no character feels over or under powered and different combos of characters can give very different results.

The music can't really be commented on besides the fact it fits and never feels out of place, but what I can comment on is the character's voices, while only a few characters have full spoken lines, every character has one-liners that give them much personality this also falls in line with the enemies and it honestly adds so much to the story.

Speaking of the story, it's actually pretty okay, it's like a step above the average Mario story, I think it's closer in-line to like a Mario & Luigi game or a lesser Paper Mario story, it's just there to give the gameplay a reason to go forward and does that well.

The only negatives of the game I can give are...when it comes to battle, midway through the game, the battlefields start to become really big, like the objective will be to take out 3 enemies but it takes like 5 turns for you both to even attack each other so it feels kinda like padding because I can't see why that much space.
The other part isn't really the game's fault of any kind, but something I noticed, it's not shock Mario has almost no personality, but surrounded the Rabbids as well as Luigi it REALLY shows how much he kinda doesn't fit, I think what makes it worse is Rabbid Mario has plenty of character and just overshadows him and it doesn't help he's my favorite.

That's about all I have to say, if you liked the first game or are a fan of turn based strategy games then I think you'll love this game, or if you wanna try something new and different, this fits the bill of being very different of a game.

I mean, WOW

I was pretty excited to play Odyssey after finishing most of the other 3D Mario games, but the sheer advancement in control, level design, and overall presentation make this THE defacto Mario game. I would've killed to grow up playing this game as a child!

I do have a few complaints, nonetheless. Outside of the ceaseless positives that can be thrown at this experience, Mario Odyssey suffers from a few too many progression rewards made in the sheer number of moons. Many moons are pretty fun to get, and it made progression feel super rewarding at first, but as the experience went on, I was feeling less and less fulfilled by nabbing moons I got duplicates of on previous levels. Thankfully, each level's audio-visual presentation makes up for some monotonous gameplay loops.

But otherwise, DAMN SON THIS WAS EXCELLENT!!!