Playing this in short bursts during downtime at work was a really sweet little treat. Logging in at lunchtime and seeing all my fellow home-working pals pop up around the same time with "ONLINE: SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD + BOWSER'S FURY" notifications was a heartwarming bit of parasocial friendship - it's nice to think of a bunch worn-down Microsoft Teams Miners were getting an injection of joy in the form of Mario flapping his stupid happy little legs in the Tanooki Suit to the jaunty tunes of Pounce Bounce Isle.

I think despite the fact we've all come to take the Nintendo Switch for granted, Nintendo themselves are still actively thinking about the docked/handheld interplay of the console - Bowser's Fury has a gameplay loop that works very similar to Breath of the Wild, where you can leave Mario sitting anywhere in the world when you hit the power button and still have a reasonable chance of standing right next to a new adventure or challenge when the screen next comes back on - or at least see (and quickly get to) the next bit of fun on the literal horizon. No loading in and out of a redundant SMB3 menu or watching of 'lets a go!' animations for the thirtieth time - everything in the game zips right by.

Much has been made of the 'continuous world' idea here, and I think Nintendo did a skilful job of making 3D World Mario's toolkit into something briskly mobile without really changing anything about that game's mechanics - it all just seems to be down to very generous and thoughtful placement of that game's power-set. There may be a little too much time spent wearing the propellor box, but those ad-hoc sequences where you come leaping off Plessie at 80mph, transform into a cat to scale the wall you're about to crash into and then shift to a tanooki to take a quick shortcut feel very very very good.

The only complaints I can really make about this are things that are decidedly anti-Mario in ethos - it's aliased to shit and the frames chug like hell during the (very impressive) Furious Bowser sequences (though weirdly these issues are far less pronounced in handheld mode - again suggesting that Nintendo still give a real shit about how handheld players enjoy games on their console), but I feel weirdly... guilty? about pointing out dry technical flaws in a game where Super Mario is running about having the time of his life. I just wanna join him in the fun instead of counting the grains of polygon around his cap.

Reviewed on Feb 17, 2021


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