set aside takes on whether the game is good or whatever. the rating is tied to how much i loved it as a kid, i havent finished replaying and there are more important things to discuss anyway:

mario goes to fucking JAIL. you ever think about that? i mean sit down, and really think about it. i think our society has normalised the fact that mario goes to jail in super mario sunshine. dude literally gets taken to court and handed a sentence. this would NEVER happen in a mario game today. and here it is, in the first 10 minutes. then he has to do community service??? THEY EVEN MADE WANTED POSTERS. i think if you suggested this as a plot for any big nintendo IP you'd get laughed at. can you imagine the next pokemon game starting like this? this game came out in 2002, and truthfully, i am nowhere near old enough to remember people's immediate reactions to it. but i think more games should send their protagonists to jail. ignoring that the plot here is a retread of one of the greatest written games of all time, sonic adventure 2, which came out a year before sunshine, this was a very bold move for the series.

i had to look up the name of the wonderful writer who decided to send mario to jail - makoto wada. interestingly, this is his only writing credit for a mario game (besides 2000's mario artist for the 64DD). can you imagine the state of the mario canon if it was left in his hands? you know those joke games with fake box art with like, "Yoshi Commits Tax Fraud". you ever think about how mario sunshine was officially that, way back?

the rest of the game no doubt delivers on its bizarre premise, as mario is made to clean up psychedelic goop for a good 20 hours, ride a soluble yoshi, become an eel dentist among many other things, before finally topping it off with flipping bowser out of his bathtub. but really, mario sunshine deserves to go down in history as the game that dared send gaming's biggest icon to the slammer.

classics in unbalanced source mod design. all you do is scream at your boys and then try to knock people flat on their ass because more difficult kills result in higher notoriety, which is the actual point value placing you at the top of the leaderboard. walk into a shot-up tavern expecting white knuckle duels where each bullet shot is a costly time expenditure and instead some drunk slurring 'pass the whiskey' starts playing the piano and with great poise dodges every one of your fired rounds just to get in your face and crush your windpipe. eat your heart out rdr2, this is the real wild west