The last Mario game I played was ah, a time, but this is exactly the kind of cozy Mario game I was looking for. Instead of the “you can’t go any further unless you head back to this world and do more chores” design of 64 or Sunshine, we have a whole world full of things to collect, with the minimum required to progress readily available and and a massive amount of them for completion’s sake waiting for you if you want to find them. Maybe if you pile up goombas then this down-bad goomba lady will give you a moon, maybe if I smack this rabbit with my hat he’ll, etc. And unlike my last experience, plenty of reasonable checkpoints and a whole slew of coins to pool from if you happen to lose a life, so now you can jump into pools of lava and poison sludge, or bump into a goomba or koopa shell, completely consequence-free. Oh sure, by all means do whatever you can to The Graduate Bowser’s latest forced-wedding service with Princess Peach, but now it also includes sightseeing, occasionally looking for collectibles if you want to, giving up if you really don’t, and amassing a huge wardrobe.

And after the difficulties I suffered with Mario last time, the costumes in this was an exercise in pure retributive sadism. How much physical and psychological harm can I inflict on this goofy little man by making omnipotent decisions on what he is to wear? Oh, are you in a desert land with blazing sun above and hot sand as far as the eye can see? I’m putting you in a down parka and winter boots. A frozen wasteland of ice and biting wind? Well, you better enjoy your fingers and toes while you still got em, cause you’re only in your skivvies now. And if you need to swing by a bustling metropolis full of modern cosmopolitan men and women in fancy dapper suits, I’m putting you in a poncho and sombrero, everyone’s going to think you’re a freaking racist. I’m going to make you stare down certain death at the hands of a hulking electric dragon in flippers and a floatey tube and a snorkel, very good for mobility those, not to mention good conductors of electricity. What a beautiful beach resort land full of bubbly sparkling clear water. Would be a real shame if someone were to make you wear full samurai armor. I have deep closets, I have clashing golf ensembles, French chef outfits, even the ugly purple and yellow work uniforms from the retailer that all the costumes come from, even, quite literally, a clown suit. You hurt me once, Mario, and now I’m going to make you look fucking ridiculous

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

It's the Mario game that most understands the character's status as the ultimate video game icon. The structure is simple and has been repeated since 1985, but the decision to transform Mario's "world to world" visits into a trip around the globe (with a tour guide) is brilliant.

While I was playing Super Mario Odyssey I couldn't stop thinking about how it's a game similar to One Piece (it'll make sense, I promise). Firstly because: it's a lot about recognizing that the strong feelings you have while playing come much more through the journey than through any conclusion that may exist (and One Piece may end someday, but Mario never will).

Secondly, because like the Gear 5 transformation, it's a game almost entirely about the malleability of Mario's body, how he reacts to the environment, and vice versa. One of the best feelings you can have playing Super Mario Odyssey is catching one of the many Moons and thinking "was it supposed to be done like that?". It doesn't matter how you arrived at the goal, it matters how you played with the geometry of the levels and Mario's moveset.

It's bizarre to write so many words about the thematic importance of a Mario game, but the fact is that this game is very concise and rounded in what it wants to discuss about the character. It's a celebratory game about recognizing Mario's place in the global media canon, and in doing so it needs to recognize the most primal aspect of the character: he's an actor, a jack of all trades; He's a plumber, a kart driver, a tennis player, a doctor, he's Mario.

In this game, Mario is Bullet Bill, Goomba, Hammer Bro, Yoshi... Mario is whoever he needs to be when the situation demands his messianic presence. At first glance, the mechanics of transforming the game into 2D (several times) may seem out of place, but it is building precisely towards this point of adaptability of the figure of Mario.

Mario saved video games with Super Mario Bros., of course, but Mario is also Jump Man; his first appearance is not even in his own game, it is in the Donkey Kong franchise. How could THE video game icon, who was born in a franchise that is not his own, not take the freedom to visit any place? to transform into whoever he wants?

Super Mario Odyssey is a manifesto about freedom, it's a game full of expression and charisma in every corner, it's there to remind you to always be or do what you want. The game ending on the Moon is especially symbolic, because if for human beings visiting it was a moment of great evolution and celebration, for Mario it is another Monday. But it's another Monday that he can only have thanks to having grown up and matured with humanity. Mario has already had two games exploring planets, but the Moon's ambition is palpable; after 32 years Mario was finally able to see planet Earth from there. It's time to realize how great his achievements are, how many people he reached over during his journey.

"Thank you, Mario. It's been an honor walking a mile on your head".

I was actually set up and ready to play Super Mario Sunshine for the first time, but it came to my realization that my Mario 3D All-Stars collection was missing out of its case. It turns out that the likely reason why it’s gone is because my nephew swiped it while he was here last, meaning that my LIMITED RELEASE 3D All-Stars copy was stolen. Look, he’s just a kid and I’ll probably see him again later so I may have a chance to get it back. I’m really not mad or anything, it’s just that the next time I see him I’ll probably be whipping Kung Lao’s hat at him instead of Mario’s. Until then though, I needed to find something else to play…

With Mario still on the brain, I had Odyssey basically screaming for me to finally let it out. It’s supposedly nothing like Mario Sunshine but I wouldn’t know anyways. The only 3D Mario I’ve played is Mario Galaxy, so I wagered it would play similarly in that direction instead. What I do know is that when I said I would be playing Mario Sunshine, it was met with tomatoes and thunderous BOOOOOOs. After changing plans to this, the mood instantly shifted to cute rainbows, hugs, and smiles. hotpoppah will remember this. Not sure what caused the hate in their hearts, but I guess I’ll take this situation as fate dealt to me by God himself.

I could be wrong, but this has got to be the most unhinged game in the entire series. Bowser has hit an all-time rock bottom, destroying civilizations in order to force a wedding onto a non-consenting Princess Peach. Mario’s whole gimmick is possessing the bodies of enemies, demolishing their bones in order to platform through natural disasters and discarding them into the ocean. This game has huge TikTok energy. It starts at a 100 right at the gate, then tosses you into the first world where the mechanics are kinda just thrown in your face. The camera’s whipping around like a CCTV monitor. The game’s just giving Moons out like it’s Halloween candy. Holy shit, is that a realistic DINOSAUR? I have so many questions and not enough answers, but it doesn’t matter baby, we’re cruising like it’s NASCAR. I don’t know what the fuck all the rush is, but boy is it cool as shit flicking your way around Metropolis.

New Donk City? This game made me feel like I could Donk anything. It was very easy. Sorry kiddies, I’m the better Super Mario Odyssey player. It really says something when you’re 3,654,844th place in Jump-Rope and yet there are still thousands of children behind you on the leaderboard. Maybe try a little harder next time! But real talk though, why are some levels like 4 seconds long? We can discuss and argue battle mechanics or bosses all damn day, but just the slightest diverging path will net you so many extra Moons for nothing that you can just straight up leave the level as soon as the boss is defeated. Sure, you don’t have to leave as soon as possible, but once you’re 3 worlds deep trying to absorb the area for what it is, you kinda realize that a lot of Moons are just the same puzzle or mini-game in every World. It slightly makes up for it in the post-game where you can re-fight the bosses and run around in Mario 64’s version of Disney Land, depending on who you are. I bet this was awesome for long-time fans, but for me it was like I was invited to the retirement party of some guy I barely knew.

I finished the game with 180 Moons though, 220 with some Mushroom Kingdom exploration. If you think I’m collecting 500 total just to unlock what I assume will just be a cock and ball torture level, you’ve been Donked one too many times. I’m sure it’s easier than it sounds with how the game just gives you Moons for breathing, but it’s the easiness of the collection that made the whole process sound so mind-numbing to me. It’s fantastic and amazing when the set pieces and bosses are all coming together, but boring as shit when you’re just buying Stars in bundles or looking for spots to ground pound. I don’t want to do that shit!!!

On another note, the music in this game slaps but it’s weird that there’s so many long stretches of levels where there is no music at all. Mario is half naked, nipples out on the beach but all you can hear is the sound of seagulls and waves hitting the coast line. It was a very surreal experience that I don’t ever want to feel again. Other than that, fine. It was fun. I finally have another Mario game under my belt, and it was mostly just as good as everyone says it is.

I gotta go though, someone just popped my balloon. When I fucking get you, Splatoon profile picture.

ingame screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/cE30mYy.png

A joyous blissful hydrating nourishing follow-up to Rez, but I'm not the keenest sadly!! Child of Eden is a rly gorgeous example of that latestage Frutiger Aero Sharp Quattron Tech Advertisement aesthetiq, fully encompassed by Mizuguchi's spacey yoga house band, Genki Rockets. It's just a little loser of my own personal battle of appeals because none of this really hits my palate in the same way anything from Rez did. There's this lack of energy I can draw from Child of Eden - whereas Rez's thumping techno OST that blossoms in complexity across the span of a stage, alongside the Char Davies wireframe anthropology artstyle.... I just have a very clear fav, and Rez quite simply doesn't have the nerve to ask me to replay a stage with better scores to progress to the next one. Incredibly corp behaviour 🥲
Well worth a play/emulation for anyone who loves Rez though, there are like three games in this genre if i'm generous and Mizuguchi made most of them.

Certainly not lost on me how shallow my revisit of LBP1 was. This was something of a childhood fave of mine I threw countless hours at; be it in couch co-op with fwiends or alone in my room exploring the avalanche of user-created content people spun together. Neither of which was a factor in me revisiting it for the first time in well over a decade now (jezus farckin christ!!!!), the servers are long gone and I’d need to be the richest man alive to bribe someone to play this with me over a cocktail of Parsec + RPCS3 input lag. Nobody will ever understand the joy of slapping the aztec cock motif on your co-op partners’ faces siiiighghhh…. Still, an illuminating experience that rekindled something in my heart about what LBP1 stood for!

Admittedly, I was always more of an LBP2 kid, these games being modular meant there was very little reason to revisit the first game once the sequel came out. There is a very strong difference in vibes between the two games though, if LBP1 excels at anything, it’s in encouraging the player to go off and create for themselves. It’s kind of wild the extent to which LBP1 offers and explains its tools to the player - its relatively simple levels make no effort to hide the gadgets that make ingame events work. Stages are littered with visible emitters, tags, switches, stuff like only-slightly offscreen circuitry that you can watch move around to inform a boss of its attack patterns and phases. It feels like a child’s art project or something, a simple array of pulleys and string animating rudimentary creatures and swings. It’s all so laid bare, I kind of adore it, and is certainly a handcrafted energy that LBP2 loses in its explosion of visual polish. The constant delivery of decorations, objects, prebuilt things you can make your own edits of, it’s no wonder this game blew up in the way it did - it’s with you every step of the way and always acts as a shockingly good teacher for its own mechanics.

Anyway this was a lot of fun. Unquestionably a hilarious platforming title to insist upon having no-death run rewards when so much of your survivability hinges on Sackboy’s physics-based astrology. You don’t realise how much nostalgia you have for something until the first thirty seconds of a song makes you tear up. This kind of williamsburg scrapbook aesthetic is hard to stomach nowadays but it really works here. Holy shit I can’t believe the racist caricatures this game has in every corner, this truly is a quintessentially British game.

I’m not a climber. I’m not even a hiker, really, which makes living in Utah less appealing for me than it is for others. But in college, in an effort to step outside my comfort zone, I joined a group of my roommates and their friends on a “hike” of Angel’s Landing in Zion national park (aka Honest Hearts).

For some reason my little sister also tagged along, and neither of us knew what we were getting into: it starts like a hike but at the end you have to climb chains on cliff faces! You could easily fall off and die, and people have. But I think I was wearing jeans, so that might clue you into my level of preparation.

You don’t hit the stretch with chains unless you decide to go to the very tip top, and there’s a large flat area where many people quit. Several of our group, even some of the athletic ones (they apparently did outdoor things for fun. Outside where it’s sweaty and dangerous. Let’s just say I doubt they’ll be playing Jusant any time soon) got scared and didn’t go to the top. I figured if I had to be there anyway I’d give it a go.

It was extremely scary for me. I’m sure some would say it’s not that bad, and that it’s a baby’s first hike situation, but to me it was one of the most dangerous things I’d ever done. This may sound silly but I legitimately thought “What if I let my little (adult) sister come on this hike with me and she fell to her death?” Well, my sister and I got a picture at the top, so I basically never need to do that again.

So Conman, what’s with the long anecdote replete with filler words your 7th grade English teacher said were off-limits?

This game reminded me of that memory, and it’s a happy one. It made me reminisce, bringing back feelings of climbing something so tall for so long that it felt like the top was running away from me. A time I felt a little braver. Forget the text log story, forget the textureless indie art style, forget the mid cave chapter… this game made me feel good. Criticism? What’s that? All I know is gut-level emotional reaction.

Oh, I also adore the gameplay.

I’ve loved the ‘triggers as hands’ climbing mechanic since I first played Grow Up, but there it’s just one of many disparate mechanics. In Jusant that mechanic is the game; this is a focused and effortlessly intuitive climbing experience with none of the drawbacks of actually going climbing, such as having to talk to people who rock climb.

Wait, also the rope - my beloved. Oh they also took the vine-growing mechanic from Grow Home/Grow Up which totally worked. And in Star Trek V, Captain Kirk free solos El Capitán. Well, he falls off and Spock catches him with his rocket boots. Ok ok alright

Open Roads is a game that has had a very rough development history. Back in 2021, Fullbright's Co-founder and Open Roads' creative director stepped down from his role on the game following allegations of mistreating employees and fostering a toxic work environment. Many employees ended up leaving the project due to the co-founder's terrible actions/behavior. The remaining employees ended up restructuring the project, and last year, the dev team and the game itself ended up splitting from Fullbright entirely! As someone who was interested in the game following its initial reveal back in 2020, I wondered how the game would turn out or if it would even see the light of day. Now the game has finally released and there's a lot to talk about.

The game is centered around 16-year-old Tess and her divorced mom, Opel, as they set out on a road trip across Michigan to uncover the mystery behind Tess's recently deceased grandmother, Helen. While the mystery serves as the driving force for the journey, the game puts a lot of focus on Tess and Opel’s relationship and how they handle Helen’s passing, and their current circumstances. The voice acting is amazing and helps both these characters feel authentic. I liked the game's portrayal of generational trauma and familial bonds but it could’ve been executed better.

It’s very short, I clocked in at around 3 hours and the game really doesn’t make the best use of its runtime, especially in the later part of the game. There are a few moments that just don't go anywhere and it just felt very abrupt near the end. It definitely would've benefitted from a slightly longer runtime.

For most of the game, you're walking around an area, interacting with the environment, and picking up objects, leading to dialogue between Tess and Opel. This is very usual walking simulator stuff, but what makes it stand out is how the game blends a 2D hand-drawn art style for the characters and a realistic 3D style for the environment around them. It works very well in the game's favor and helps make the world more immersive and the characters very expressive. This is one of the things this game did best and a main highlight for sure.

Despite my issues with how some parts of the story were handled, I enjoyed it. It's short and on Game Pass, so it wouldn't hurt to give it a try!