As I pursued my self inflicted torture that was post-graduate education in the United States of America, the comically lengthy reading assignments that were a nightly occurrence completely destroyed any energy that otherwise could have been used to socialize publicly. Thanks to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, I was able to socialize every evening with angry, maladjusted gamers across the country in the comfort of my pajamas. This game and my teammates certainly didn’t need me, but god did I need them.

Distracting yourself from the unease of "normal" life and its creeping potential to break down your barriers of comfort. Easygoing without being overtly cutesy to the point of condescension and defined by subdued visual splendor and a gorgeously dreamy soundtrack, A Short Hike immediately felt like one of my favorite open worlds and front to back remained a care-free joy to play through the two hours it took. Total freedom without feeling overwhelming and efficient design that caters to the depressed and impatient explorer inside us. Reader, I was moved.

Super Mario Odyssey is a big game with lots to love, with two tiny problems that ruin the game if you keep thinking about it for too long.

I should make it clear that my first time through was absolutely magical. I'd stayed almost entirely blind on it until my first playthrough in 2019, and many of the game's biggest twists (you're teased the Metro Kingdom before being thrown into the Lost Kingdom, only to find out the Mecha-Wiggler is invading New Donk; Bowser's Kingdom is Koji Kondo's love letter to traditional Japanese music with a surprising horn section blend; the entirety of the Underground Moon Caverns and endgame; the existence of the Mushroom Kingdom and the fact that you don't hop onto Yoshi like usual - you capture him) absolutely subverted my expectations in all the right ways, like Nintendo actively knew what I expected at every second and chose to twist it around every single time.

But I've 100%ed the game five times now. One of those playthroughs were marathoned in four days flat. Slowly, a game I'd considered on equal grounds as Super Mario 64, the video game of all time, one that's time and time again defined my entire relationship with video games... started to expose itself as the most fundamentally flawed Mario game.

Let's start with the controls. Mario's moveset is extremely, extremely streamlined in this game: jumping does almost half of all the actions, cap throwing does the other half, and diving and rolling are the extras that even the moveset out.

In doing so, there are two pretty obvious ideal traversal solutions that are almost never a bad idea. The standstill variation involves ground pound jumping, cap throwing, diving and cap bouncing; the longer variation involves rolling into Cappy and vaulting, then cap throwing, diving and cap bouncing.
There are almost no platforming solutions that cannot be solved with at least one of these two maneuvers, be it the Frog Skip, getting to the Forest Charging Station early, the Klepto Skip or even the Moon Skip.

This stands in stark contrast to Super Mario 64, where almost every jump has a distinct purpose of its own. You want to go for a long jump to skip Shocking Arrow Lifts; a wall kick into a jump dive to get onto Bob-omb Battlefield's floating island; a triple jump wall kick is the only thing that gives you enough height for Owlless, while a sideflip wall kick is what you want for Shoot Into the Wild Blue; even the twirl you get from a Spindrift can be what you need to bypass the cannon in Wall Kicks Will Work.
If Super Mario 64 at its best makes Mario feel like a versatile athlete with countless options and immediate reactions to any situation, Super Mario Odyssey eventually makes him feel like a fat guy with a magic hat - the magic hat itself is extremely fun, but almost in spite of the fat guy. Perhaps that's the reason Cappy-less side areas are left to a minimum.

This is further compounded by the Captures themselves being some of the most one-dimensional movement ever seen in Super Mario. Sure, Pokio could make for an amazing, if compact game all on its own, but the only other enemies offering anything resembling interesting movement are the Yoshi, Gushen, Lava Bubble, Tropical Wiggler and Uproot, in that order: all of which are heavily underutilized. The rest of the captures are one trick ponies, used to solve a predictable puzzle, (a horde of Goombas? You better stack them to reach something high up!) or minigames, like the Bound Bowl or RC Car.
Compare this to the Wing Cap, the various FLUDD nozzles, even the Galaxy powerups, and... this was honestly a letdown in all but concept.

I don't have a transition into the Second Big Flaw. Super Mario Odyssey touts itself as the third game in the hakoniwa (walled garden)-style of 3D Mario games, following Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine. Yet it comes immediately after ten years of course clear-styled 3D Mario, spanning four games between Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario 3D World. Nintendo did not want to alienate these people, so what did they do?
They compromised.

Super Mario Odyssey may follow 64 and Sunshine's sense of scale when it comes to big, intraconnected environments, but the rest of it follows a course clear mentality, just shuffled in different ways. Not only are the main story quests - which are necessary to complete in order to unlock a majority of the game's Power Moons - all linear romps, (Wooded and Bowser's Kingdoms are the most egregious about this; at least kingdoms like Lake or Nighttime Metro offer the player the ability to decide how to get to the destination) necessitating that at least half the Kingdoms are designed to match; all the side areas are often just as linear, mostly being akin to small self-contained levels that at their best offer an interesting spin on a capture... but at their worst feel like rejects from 3D Land and 3D World.

But even in the bigger picture, the game progression is also quite linear, each Kingdom acting as a sort of macro-course to complete to whatever capacity the player desires before moving on. Super Mario 64, Sunshine and even Galaxy didn't do this: they all offered the player the ability to choose the order they would play courses to some greater extent than Odyssey's two instances of split paths that both eventually converge. Sure, you could always go back to previous kingdoms to hunt for Moons before you're done with the main game if you want, but what's the point? It doesn't give you the option to skip Kingdoms, or even unlock anything meaningful before the postgame.

Super Mario Odyssey's biggest flaw in its game progression is that most of its Power Moons have zero value during the main game, especially since the story objectives put players extremely close to meeting each Kingdom's quota (seven of Bowser's Kingdom's mandatory ten Moons can be obtained from the linear story quest; four of Cascade's five from the Madam Broode fight and the mandatory first Power Moon) - they have almost zero impact to the progression of the game, compared to other games like Super Mario 64, or even Banjo-Kazooie or even, humiliatingly enough, 3D World.

Finally, the lack of a hub world like Super Mario 64, Sunshine or even Galaxy 2 (yes, I'm a big fan of Starship Mario) mandates Odyssey to provide players with a sense of security elsewhere... and Odyssey responded in quite possibly the most baffling decision I've ever seen from the Super Mario series:

The Kingdoms themselves are the hub worlds.

Think about it. Metro Kingdom is the most obvious example, having literally zero harmful obstacles in Daytime aside from bottomless pits; but other kingdoms apply this sense of design as well. The Cloud and Ruined Kingdoms are literally only used as gateways into other side areas, as is the Dark Side of the Moon; almost all of the Power Moons provided from breaking the Moon Rocks come in the form of Moon Pipes, accessed from within the kingdoms themselves but set in the same linear sub-levels as other warp pipes and doors.

In order to compensate, the Kingdoms remain fairly basic in navigational complexity - the linear design in most of them being a boon in this specific instance since players can just make their way across Kingdoms and chance upon the Moon Pipes as they go.
But in doing so, Super Mario Odyssey trades away so much of its capacity for demanding, interesting, challenging moment-to-moment platforming - not that the Checkpoint system wouldn't have trivialized it anyway.

(EDIT: I wanted to include my thoughts on Super Mario Odyssey's approach to 100% completion:
"I think Odyssey has an internal conflict about the idea of 100% completion. As a companion game to Breath of the Wild, which made a point to de-emphasize 100% completion and prompted players to find their own satisfaction and enjoyment, Odyssey seems to offer the players the option to choose where their ending, their completion is.

But it falls flat on its face when you consider that BotW worked in that regard because it never gave you a list of how many shrines or Koroks there were - the sheer fact that pressing Minus gives you a list of how many Moons are present in each Kingdom, collecting Purple Coins shows you a counter of how many you have left to find, going into the shop post-game shows how many Moons you need to unlock more costumes, the Odyssey itself telling you how many more to unlock the Dark and Darker Sides of the Moon... it's all so counter-intuitive and almost two-faced.")

I want to make it clear that I don't think Super Mario Odyssey is by any means a bad game. It's not as fundamentally flawed as many other platformers I've seen and played; it's not even as tonally confused as something like Super Mario Galaxy was.
Super Mario Odyssey has provided me with some of my favorite moments in video games, at a time where I needed something like it, something to make some very bad situations better. Its best musical moments are some of my favorites from the series, even if Break Free (Lead the Way) makes me cringe about the time I brought it to my college band to play - I must have done so because I loved it at the time I decided to do that.

Snapshot Mode, alongside the various outfits, is easily the best understated innovation in the Super Mario series, and Luigi's Balloon World is the actual best post-game found in any Super Mario game ever - but these amazing features live to keep the game afloat, when it could have been the cherry on the cake on another, really focused Super Mario game.
But this might be the first generation in a long time where Super Mario floundered due to being built on a weak foundation, whilst Zelda triumphed in its cohesive, holistic sense of design - the first generation where I can easily say the Zelda of its time was stronger than the Mario of its time.

It's... it's just a little misdirected. It's stuck in the middle of two mentalities to Super Mario that didn't quite know how to commit, in an almost mirror image of Super Mario Galaxy's fatal flaw. It doesn't land quite as well as any of the games that committed, for better or for worse (my list would include 64, Sunshine, 3D Land and 3D World), but I want to see Nintendo commit. I've heard Bowser's Fury might be getting close. I'll look forward to it... one day.

Oh, but why did I give this game a 5/5 if I have so many issues with it?

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/624717617999118349/829867114080501780/unknown.png

Uniquely among the Mario games released prior to Galaxy 2, I have no nostalgia for Super Mario Sunshine.
I wasn't around for its reveal and initial release, and I had no way of playing it as a kid - my first playthrough of Sunshine was in 2015, emulated on a computer that could barely run the game at near-full speed with the audio disabled.
But I really enjoyed my time with the game - far more than I did with the Galaxy games - and I've come back to replay it a handful times since, including this playthrough on the rather unfortunate 3D All-Stars collection.

Sunshine is often treated as the black sheep of the series, a janky, unpolished mess compared to the rest of the games - and especially Galaxy right after it, which vastly surpassed it in its aesthetic and supposed scope.
When I say that it's this game that's actually one of my favorite games in the series, I acknowledge this reputation Sunshine has gathered over the years.

In other words, I don't mean to deny the aspects of Sunshine that are noticeably less well thought-out than the rest of the franchise. Let's go on an obligatory quick roll call: the lilypad stage is near impossible to complete normally, adding insult to injury in how long it takes to get there; the watermelon festival is clumsily designed; the Corona Mountain boat is hard to control; the missions are overall too dependent on Shadow Mario chases and red coins... We've all heard these a million times if we've ever discussed Sunshine on the Internet. Let's move on.

It does beg a few questions, though. Why do people complain so much about the lilypad, the pachinko, the watermelon, and all that while conveniently leaving out the fact that most of Super Mario Sunshine's supposed worst shines are completely optional?
The secret shines found around Delfino Plaza, the two bonus shines per course, the 100-coin shines, and each of the twenty-four shine sprites obtained from trading them in at the boathouse - accounting for 70 of Sunshine's 120 shines - are almost completely inconsequential to the game (at most, they let you unlock courses earlier), and a player could easily complete the game with 50 shines collected from the Airstrip, the first seven missions of each course and Corona Mountain.

It seems all too obvious to suggest to anyone who doesn't enjoy those aspects of Super Mario Sunshine: just leave them be!
100% completion seems like the default in 3D platformers ever since games like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie emphasized the collection aspect of the genre, but in a world that's increasingly moving towards acceptance that we will never finish every game, even those we start, I don't see the harm in letting those extra shine sprites go, even if someone could argue that some of them are badly made or designed.

I'm not that someone. For context, I've enjoyed my time 100%ing this game far more than I did with Galaxy, and if I were to go back to a 100% playthrough of either it or Odyssey, I would pick Sunshine in a heartbeat.
I will first briefly give credit to the pachinko and say it gets far more hate than it deserves, and that some of Galaxy and Odyssey's more gimmicky missions are not only more obnoxious, but more drawn-out and exhausting—
With my reputation ruined with that one sentence, allow me to explain.

Super Mario Sunshine's biggest strength that no other Mario game accomplishes except for brief instances of Odyssey is its environmental platforming - how it manages to make each location feel like a genuinely believable place within Isle Delfino.
Ricco Harbor and Pinna Park are some of my favorite levels in the entirety of the Mario series in how they manage to naturally bring out Mario's platforming while making everything look like it exists for a purpose beyond being there for Mario to jump on.
While bigger than most Mario maps except some of Odyssey's larger Kingdoms, the courses generally do a good job in dividing themselves into smaller sections within a cohesive map (albeit Pinna Park might go about doing this in a somewhat ham-fisted way), where individual missions can focus on one or two of them each.

One issue I had with Super Mario Odyssey's level design was how too many of them felt like floating landmasses over a bottomless pit: twelve out of fifteen of its main kingdoms followed this design to some capacity, with only the Wooded, Lost and Luncheon Kingdoms really providing an interesting twist on this idea. Sunshine almost completely avoids this issue, with Pianta Village being the single place being designed this way. In exchange, Sunshine often uses its verticality as consequences for failing platforming challenges, with conveniences like tightropes and the Rocket Nozzle being placed to ensure players never lose too much progress for falling down - it also often ensures that players won't suffer from too much fall damage by placing water around the map, which ties into the aesthetic of the game quite brilliantly.

Speaking of aesthetic - I wouldn't give Sunshine's environmental design as much praise if it weren't for their overarching nature: there's a lot of detail put in to make it feel like (almost) everything exists within the same landmass, like how you can see Ricco Harbor from Bianco Hills. There hasn't been this much cohesion in a Mario game since Super Mario World, (another game that debatably suffered for it compared to Super Mario Bros. 3's diversity in locales) and it really goes a long way to sell the idea that Isle Delfino is a living, breathing place compared to the abstract, bizzare themes later found in Super Mario Galaxy that attempt to separate its environments as far apart as it can.

It's because it feels like a living place that I feel incentivized to explore the courses and comb every part of the island for coins, both blue and yellow - less because I'm expecting a reward like in the other Mario games, and more because it lets me live out an inherent feeling of exploration that I couldn't really have when I'd go on holidays as a kid and have my hand held the entire time, the feeling that Mario games seem to have a complicated relationship with.
It's because it feels like a living place that I can forgive the wacky Delfino people from having weird customs like the watermelon festival, blooper races; that I don't mind the fact that Mario's being scammed into helping the Sirena Beach hotel, that everything really is a little bit jank, but maybe it's fine...

Because that's how things are meant to be in Isle Delfino.


So in Rome, I'll do what the Romans do,
and enjoy it all.

Super Mario Galaxy is the most beautiful game that has ever disappointed me.

I should make it clear that I didn't always feel this way about this game. I'd never owned the game until the unfortunate 3D All-Stars collection, but it was always around me with an air of wonder to it: some of my first memories on the Internet include watching pre-release footage of this game and getting absolutely stunned that video games had the capacity to be so breathtaking; the few times I was able to play it at friends' houses was nothing short of magical, and as an early teenager who unfortunately refused to listen to anything but video game music, the Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack was a mainstay on my music library.
This isn't my first time playing this game. I emulated it back in 2015 alongside Super Mario Sunshine and enjoyed my experience enough, but the more I've thought about it ever since, especially with the release of Super Mario Odyssey, I've found my feelings on it shifting around in somewhat cynical ways.

But that's enough trying to force parallels out with my Super Mario Odyssey review. It's true that I feel that Odyssey and Galaxy are mirror images of each other, most of their strengths being the other's shortcomings and vice versa, but Super Mario Galaxy deserves a slightly different approach. It may be my least favorite 3D Mario game in the series; it may be close to being farthest removed from the formula that Super Mario 64, the video game of all time, one that's time and time again defined my entire relationship with video games, had established... but that could have been its strength.

So let's not start with the controls. Let's not start with the game progression or pacing. Instead, let's talk about the single galaxy in the game that I understand the least:

And that's Buoy Base Galaxy. It's a pretty unique galaxy, with a fully orchestrated theme unique to it, complete with an underwater variant that brings out a pipe organ, with a really intense atmosphere to it that's only rivalled by a few other galaxies in the game. It also only has two Power Stars to it, oddly enough.
Have you ever stopped to think about why it exists before? Have you ever thought about why this galaxy only houses two Stars?

I've come up with two different interpretations of this Galaxy, if you'd care to let me speculate. The first is that as an old, unused fortress, it makes sense that there's not a lot of missions left to do in this place. Its stories have already been taken place long ago, its battles already fought, and Mario is visiting a relic of the past, a constant reminder of the battles that continue to go on in the world, and the vigilance he ought to maintain in a time of current conflict, just as Buoy Base continues to be maintained in the slight chance that it may be important in battle again one day.
The other interpretation is that the developers intended it to be a full-sized galaxy with six full stars (which the Super Mario Wiki also believes), but backed out, maybe because its tone was a little too intense, to focus more on more conventionally themed galaxies like the Sea Slide, Dusty Dune and Gold Leaf Galaxies.

I assume my intent in bringing this up should be pretty apparent: Buoy Base is a perfect metaphor for the dichotomy I feel Super Mario Galaxy suffers from, its Two Big Ideas that are completely at odds with each other in the specific way Galaxy goes about executing them.

So let's get a bit more direct as we explore the First Big Idea. In its best moments, Super Mario Galaxy has some of the most interesting concepts, tones and themes ever explored in the Super Mario games.
If you really like thinking about this game, you may have watched a video titled The Quiet Sadness of Super Mario Galaxy: it's a fantastic, sentimental essay that gushes about one of (in my opinion) the best parts of Super Mario Galaxy, and watching it will undoubtedly help in understanding what I mean here, but I'll provide an interpretation of my own, using a quote from the long-time Super Mario composer, Koji Kondo:

"I try to evoke something in the silence, in the absence of sound. Rest notes are very important to me, and the connecting space between sounds." - 2001 interview from Game Maestro, translated by shmuplations

Let's think back to the opening of Super Mario Galaxy. The assault on Peach's Castle is easily the most exciting, cinematic intro to any Mario game ever, and the stakes have never been higher, with the castle uplifted far out of reach, and Mario flung out into the reaches of space - all hope seems lost.
It's at this moment Super Mario Galaxy takes a moment to breathe, to take a step back and zoom out from the Gateway into showing a vast space encircling it. Constellations and stars visible in the distance but very much currently out of Mario's reach represent a sort of Mu (無) that I think is best represented by a quote from One with Nothing:
"When nothing remains, everything is equally possible."

This sense of space between sounds, space between sensations is something that pops up every now and again in Super Mario Galaxy. Space Junk Galaxy, which I prefer to call Stardust Road, is a standout example of this, serving as a bit of a comma in the game's pacing and somehow making the idea of random objects strung together in space into something beautiful, almost introspective. Rosalina's Library can serve this purpose as well, but there's more thematic cohesion to it than just this aspect that I'd like to bring up later.

This sense of space is perhaps more important to Super Mario Galaxy than it might be for any other Mario game if only because of the intensity that's spaced apart by these moments of quietness. Super Mario Galaxy is quite maximalist in its louder moments, with an odd emphasis of war and battle; warships are common imagery within this game more than any other in the series, boss battles are found in almost every major galaxy and many minor galaxies, Bowser and Bowser Jr are fought six times compared to 64's three and Odyssey's two, and the Battlerock and Dreadnought Galaxies serve as mascots of this aspect of the game, representing the almost sci-fi militaristic aesthetic that the game adopts every now and then. The contrast makes for a very interesting tonal balance that I wish was explored in more depth, and more consistently.

I've ended up doing a lot more reading for the purpose of analyzing Super Mario Galaxy's themes than I'd expected to, going into this review. A specific theme that I've found that I feel Galaxy uniquely tackles unlike the other games in the series is treasuring the ephemeral: seeing beauty in the transience of everything, accepting change and letting go, but simultaneously holding those memories of the past close to your heart.
Rosalina exemplifies this idea through and through, in both her backstory, and in the ending. The storybook is one of a small (but growing) list of video game moments I've cried to, and I can't really do it justice except by saying it represents these ideas very well.
The ending literally sees the end of the universe as we had known it for the entire duration of the game, and lets it go, embracing elements of it in every new galaxy created from the ashes of the old one, accepting that this is the true purpose of stars and lumas, to constantly undergo growth, change, evolution and rebirth.

There's a lot of really fascinating ideas reflected in Super Mario Galaxy that I admire very much, themes that mean so much to me represented in such an approachable fashion. With all this said, you'd think I would adore Galaxy just as much as the other 3D Mario games, elevated just as high as Super Mario 64 and Sunshine, wouldn't you?

But transitioning into the Second Big Idea, Super Mario Galaxy came at a slightly tumultuous time in Nintendo and Mario history, after Super Mario Sunshine failed to live up to expectations, and the GameCube itself landed in third place behind the PlayStation 2 and even the Xbox. Nintendo needed the Wii's new Mario to be a solid, indisputable win, one that didn't suffer from the excess complexity that the late Satoru Iwata speculated was a contributor to Sunshine's failings. Super Mario Galaxy, a game that so far aimed to subvert Super Mario, now also needed to define it, be completely identifiable as what people envisioned a Super Mario game to be while also presenting something beyond what Super Mario had done. So what did they do?
They compromised.

I'd started talking about Super Mario Galaxy's themes by highlighting a couple of fantastic galaxies that emphasize the game's biggest strengths, so I'll start by talking about a galaxy. One that's my absolute least favorite course in the entire franchise that is Super Mario, in fact. I look at it, and I question why on earth Nintendo saw fit to include this in the same game as the Battlerock.

And that's Toy Time Galaxy.

Toy Time Galaxy feels like a personal insult, the representation of the tragic compromise found in Super Mario Galaxy's vision. The part that stings more than any other is its music: an ironic echo of the Super Mario Bros. Ground Theme plays, stripped of all its stylistic context, its original latin, reggae and jazz fusion-inspired roots, recontextualized into something offensively juvenile as Mario jumps across a pixellated version of himself collecting Silver Stars, as though the developers are saying "Yeah! Isn't this the Mario you remember from the good old days?"

And, well, no. It's not. Super Mario Galaxy drenches itself in Mario iconography (particularly that from Super Mario Bros. 3) to keep itself grounded - digging up the airships last seen in Super Mario World complete with a fantastic orchestration of their Super Mario Bros. 3 music, resuscitating the same game's athletic theme, bringing Fire Mario into 3D for the first time, and even constructing parallels between it and Super Mario 64's Bowser courses by using the Koopa's Road music once again - all for the sake of doing something the series had rarely done quite so blatantly up to that point: appealing to nostalgia.

I'm okay with nostalgia, don't get me wrong. After all, I am a Kirby fan, and that series likes to bring up connections between and across each and every game almost as much as Pokémon does. But I find it so dryly amusing that this careless self-referential attitude makes for the most ironic imagery in the franchise, such as a moment in Good Egg Galaxy's Battle Fleet where some of the most raw depictions of an open battlefield that Super Mario would allow is juxtaposed by the bolted block platforms from Super Mario Bros. 3 thrown around haphazardly all around the field.

It's moments like that that make it clear that Super Mario Galaxy felt obligated to be a video game, and especially a Super Mario game. Cliched locations like Beach Bowl, Melty Molten and Ghostly Galaxies feel like Super Mario Galaxy checking off a list of things that it contractually needs; its star-based structure seems taken from Super Mario 64 and Sunshine without really understanding what they did for the games' design, and musical moments like Bunny Chasing and Ball Rolling just feel embarrassing to be in the same game as the rest of Super Mario Galaxy's soundtrack, which often borrows harmonies and musical language from the deeply sentimental French world of musical impressionism like no other Super Mario game had really done before or since.

Maybe I'd be okay with this if it at least was a good game, one just as solid as Sunshine and 64 in its design when stripped of its thematic elements. But I'm sorry, I just don't think it is.

It's finally time. Let's start with the controls. Where Super Mario Odyssey gave Mario an extremely streamlined moveset that's almost too smooth and optimized to trivialize the platforming it throws at the player, Super Mario Galaxy's controls are by contrast a bit too fixed, with momentum all but missing, the spin serving as a one-dimensional extension to Mario's jump and most moves having zero synergy with each other except for the wall jump and spin.
It's streamlined, but in an opposite direction; there's very little depth to Super Mario Galaxy's movement, and the level design ends up being built around it to a fault. I know this is from the sequel, but think about the Throwback Galaxy for a second, and how much less interesting of an experience it is now that Mario can no longer dive all around and play around with the momentum that the slopes give him compared to Super Mario 64.
If Super Mario Odyssey makes Mario feel like a fat guy with a hat, Super Mario Galaxy just has that fat guy, and... I'm sorry, I'm just not a fan of it.

The controls were probably streamlined for the sake of the spherical, gravity-based platforming, and I feel like that's a case of compromising your game to force it around an ill-fated gimmick. Although I don't think the Course Clear-style of level design was inherently bad, the planetoid aspect messes with my sense of depth and spatial awareness far more than any other Mario game does, and the camera angles that are even more limited than Super Mario 64 (how do people defend this, again?) absolutely do not help in that regard.

Certain stars can be done in courses out of order again, but at a deadly price: only three out of six stars in each major galaxy is a properly story mission akin to Super Mario Sunshine's eight episodes per course, and the rest involve a single hidden star each that are sometimes found through clever exploration, but far too often handled through a painfully conspicuously-placed Luma that demands your Star Bits, and two Comet-based stars that you can't really predict when you'll have access to.

This throws any capacity for detailed, long-form environmental storytelling that Super Mario Sunshine had right out of the window, and the missions are instead distinguished specifically by mechanical changes and sometimes just sending you to different planetoids altogether and removing the last bit of possibility Super Mario Galaxy had of showing how its worlds would change with time.

And honestly, much of the comet stars are flat-out padding. I concede that some of the missions, mainly the Cosmic Mario races, can be interesting, but redoing certain missions again but faster? Collecting a hundred Purple Coins all thrown about an unnecessarily large map? No damage runs of certain sections of levels without any checkpoints whatsoever? Count me out.
People complain that Sunshine is full of padding and red coins, but honestly - Galaxy is no better in this regard whatsoever, and I'm sick of putting up with this hypocrisy, the blindness people seem to have about this aspect of Galaxy just because... I don't even know, honestly.

I could go on. I think 100% completing Super Mario Galaxy is a tedious experience, especially doing it a second time with Luigi and fighting the final Bowser fight a total of four times; the Grande Finale Galaxy is another example of Super Mario Galaxy choosing function over form by ignoring the fact that there's no way it could canonically take place, since the Toad Brigade being promoted to Royal Guards would have no reason to happen in the New Galaxy welcomed at the end of Super Mario Galaxy; I hate Star Bits, having to make sure I have enough to give Lumas both within galaxies and in the Comet Observatory, especially using the Switch Lite's touch controls; Super Mario Galaxy has an extremely bizarre conflict on how much it wants to be function-over-form, and vice versa... but I've taken up so much of your time already, and I've taken up so much of my own time in writing and researching for this, (preparing for this review involved an entire re-read of The Little Prince for example, and I never actually ended up directly referencing any of it in this review... though there are some slight aesthetic and tonal parallels) and I don't wish to keep the both of us here much longer.

After all, we need to move on. Isn't that something this game was talking about?
I want to make it clear that I don't think Super Mario Galaxy is by any means a bad game. It's far more interesting than many other platformers I've seen and played; it's not even as confused in its gameplay progression as Super Mario Odyssey was.
Super Mario Galaxy has provided me with some of my favorite ideas in video games, and has influenced me significantly as a musician and as a creative in general. Its best musical moments are some of my favorites from the series, even if the Bunny Chasing theme will make me cringe any day of the week.

Super Mario Galaxy's thematic vision is easily the best in the Super Mario series, but it's undermined by the dichotomy it created for itself, and ends up with a very diluted focus that I wish had really gone so much farther than it had the freedom to go. This might be the only Super Mario game whose biggest problem I would consider is that it had to be a Mario game. I want it to go harder on the themes it introduced, series image be damned.
But this might also be the first game where Super Mario found itself unconfident, and glossed over it with a shiny, cinematic aesthetic while it figured out where the series was to go next, just like Super Mario Odyssey would find itself doing exactly ten years after it.

It's... it's just a little misdirected. It's stuck between subverting Super Mario, and defining Super Mario, and didn't quite know how to commit, in an almost mirror image of Super Mario Odyssey's fatal flaw. It doesn't land quite as well as any of the games that committed, for better or for worse (my list would include 64, Sunshine, Galaxy 2, 3D Land and 3D World), but I want to see Nintendo revisit these ideas. Odyssey tried in some ways and played it safe in others, but maybe we might be getting close. I'll maintain hope for the future.

But now, it's truly time to move on.

Farewell, Super Mario Galaxy.

Somehow a more ambitious story than 999. It'll blow your mind wiiiddddeee open. Mixed with some decent characters, and some of the best VA in anime games. BUT the dialogue and prose can feel repetitive and stretched out, filled with long explanations that are only semi-relevant/useful. I found myself skipping a lot of it. The game should be shorter.

2/3 of the game is story. The remaining 1/3 is a series of escape rooms, which is my favorite part (as someone who likes logic puzzles). VLR's puzzles presented a decent challenge and stumped me a few times. I loved diving headfirst into these rooms.

Zero Escape is the best series of VN games Ive played. I cannot decide if I like 999 or VLR more. VLR has harder puzzles and better endings/reveals. 999 has better characters and has LESS (not zero) needless dialogue.

‘DOOM’ is a title I’ve played on many occasions, but never as an adult. It was one of the couple of games installed on a PC that my Cousin had, and I enjoyed it every time, even though I sucked terribly at it and never got to the end.

To go back to this game as an adult, having played the 2016 reboot and many other FPS games that owe a debt to this game, I’m surprised that it holds up so well. Of course, it’s dated mechanically and graphically, but not many FPS games made today have a comparable atmosphere, it’s just dripping with it, from the music to the labyrinth level designs. It all comes together to create the feeling that the game gives you. Not to mention the sound design for many weapons, that have such a weight and kick to them that they feel extremely satisfying to use. I imagine playing this back in 1993 and having my mind blown by the level of quality on display for the time.

On a less enthusiastic note, there were periods when I was playing where I felt that there was a lot of repetition, particularly with the abundance of the same enemy types and the copy/paste quality of some of the textures and areas. Additionally, it’s pretty short, but you could argue that if it were longer then the repetition would be even more detrimental.

Furthermore, the jump in difficulty from the first 3 episodes to the 4th titled ‘Thy Flesh Consumed’ is really stark. This could be seen as a benefit for the gamers who have mastered the previous 3 episodes, but in my opinion, the best games gradually take steps towards being more difficult. If each episode felt incrementally more challenging and then ‘Thy Flesh Consumed’ was exactly as it is now, it would not stand out so much as a negative of the game for me.

‘DOOM’ is often credited with creating the FPS genre, and although that is debatable, the impact that this game has had on the entire industry is not up for debate. This game is as important as Pong, Tetris and Super Mario Bros.

If there is a game for our time, this is it. Through the efforts of standout writing and the sum of the repetitious actions you undertake, Spiritfarer will usher you into a rhythm that viscerally contemplates the mortality of humanity and the lives we live. Every aspect and mechanic is in service to this goal. Even when specific parts of the game, if isolated, seem under-baked, they often still build to inspired moments.

The knock against it is found in those lacking elements. The handling in the platforming sections are far too loose and unexciting, the clicker/base building aspects can become tedious and don’t progress enough in and of themselves, and the endgame, if the player indulges in it, is effectively an amalgamation of all the worst parts divorced from the game’s guiding thesis.

However, when you hit the seas, exploring the secrets of the map and its islands with the transcendent score accompanying you, scurrying to finish projects on the boat during the voyage, all the while building relationships with your passengers, it all comes together to make a wonderful miniature ecosystem that is simply hard to put down.

Make time for Spiritfarer. It will surprise you and pull you in. And you won’t be able to leave unaffected.