Super Mario Galaxy was always one of my favorite games growing up, but over the years I've drifted apart from that notion for reasons outside my understanding. Any time I would attempt to revisit the game, it never quite stuck the landing like it did during my magical first playthrough. Recently however, I think I realized what made this game stick out at the time, while falling short under my current standards for 3D Mario games.

It's honestly really simple, the game loves to show you impressive things, while never letting the player do anything interesting on their own.

Now I understand to a point why this may not bother a lot of people. Nintendo themselves have described 3D Mario games as falling under two categories: linear course clear games like Galaxy and 3D World, and sandbox games like 64 and Sunshine. The former dropping the player into one-off level concepts that railroad the player, with the latter letting the player find the fun for themselves within smaller playground-like levels. While these are both going for vastly different approaches in design, it's hard for me to look at them in a vacuum when one thing ties all of his games together regardless of dimension, and that's the joy of moving Mario around an environment.

Simply put, Super Mario Galaxy just does not control as well as other 3D Mario games, or many other 3D platformers for that matter. When talking about what Galaxy does well, people often lean on the level design, which is true to a point. While these levels take the planetoid concept and do really interesting things with them, the player doesn't have many options to make their own fun while completing these samey linear objectives. At least in a game with movement as simple as 3D World, the developers crafted an identity for every single stage, while Galaxy tends to send you down paths that only slightly differ in structure.

Now, an argument can be made that the levels are built around what Mario is capable of so it's foolish to complain about the controls, but to me, the levels can only be so fun when the playable character feels so sluggish. After all, a game is only as interesting as the characters that inhabit it, regardless of the genre. Even a game with levels as barren as Devil May Cry 4 houses some of the most interesting combat in the entire action genre. Developers should ideally strive to find a good middle ground between interesting movement and interesting level design, but I'll always personally prefer games that allow the player to make many interesting choices during gameplay.

I do not hate Super Mario Galaxy, the universe exploring concept still holds so much potential Nintendo has yet to tap into, but if they were to make a Galaxy 3, it may be in their best interest to rethink some of the fundamental design choices they made during the first two games. For now though, I'll just stick to 64 and Sunshine.

Reviewed on Jun 09, 2021


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