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
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
2 Comments
Really good review. I'm in a similar boat where my first playthrough of Odyssey was utterly magical but a lot of the game's structure has prevented me from wanting to revisit it much.
BansheeNeet
3 years ago