Wow, this is one of the best jazz Mario cover albums ever! From Super Mario Galaxy's Boo Waltz, a 6/4 version of Airship, to Slider of all things? The original songs are all good too!

I really love how the Starman theme is totally reimagined here - it's like how Sonic final boss themes tend to have a Phase 2 representing Sonic's strength, usually in Super Sonic form. I could go on and on about all the songs I really love from this album. I wonder who the remixers were?

...wait, what? this is a soundtrack to a game? what game?

If a review is a reflection of one's experience with a game, then it only makes sense that my review of Feather Park is a retrospective of my role on it as the sole composer and sound designer.

Since 2012, my raison d'etre was "I want to write music for video games!", and despite hanging around hobbyist circles around it for years, I never really had a real finished game to my name. I could name multiple factors - mental health, poor family life, most likely undiagnosed conditions, so on - but I've watched friends, acquaintances and strangers start from the same sort of place I began at and move on to do the very gigs I would have dreamed to score.

It always crushed me, and I'd be lying if I said I've overcome it for good with this one game. Still, the fact that I can say with complete integrity that "I wrote music for a game!" means a lot to me, as does the fact that Feather Park was the first thing to really break me out of my shell, my mental blockade of not being able to write and complete original music since my last gig, one October ago.

I'll get the gameplay out of the way first. It's a simple game jam game made in two weeks for the 2022 Cozy Autumn Game Jam - you explore a simple overworld (about eight screens), control this hat-wearing bird around to meet other animals, play their minigames or solve miscellaneous tasks to cheer them up and make friends with them. There's no text, and everything's conveyed through audiovisual context, meaning that my role as sound designer was probably a tiny bit more important than usual.

The rock-paper-scissors minigame, for example: you're supposed to figure out which the other animal is going to choose, then deliberately lose to them and give them the win.
With the deadline looming ahead of me (I'd put off sound effects for the most part until the last day of the jam) and reusing sound effects across multiple contexts being the only seemingly viable way to get everything done, maybe it was a little ham-fisted that I gave a stereotypical "incorrect" sound effect for when you, the player, win the game of rock-paper-scissors. Or maybe it's not, and maybe it was helpful that I laid it on thick that actually, winning against this creature is a bad thing.

There aren't any real answers when it comes to sound design, I think - just personal opinions and justifications on how you think your opinions will impact others' experiences. That open-endedness definitely stumped me for a lot of the more abstract sound effects: how do you represent a heart icon popping up, for example?

Music being my primary avenue, not sound, I ended up representing most of the abstract sound effects with musical elements - a jingle on mallet percussions for the heart icon, a guitar slide for question mark popups, and so on. I tend to do this kind of psuedo-Mickey Mousing a lot (my original plan was to have the main character's footsteps sync in time with the music to play a little xylophone sound, but it was too complicated), and it worked out for a silly, cozy cartoony game like this, but I wonder how I'll fare for a game that needs less of that and more synthesized, sci-fi sounds.

Getting to implement the sound effects myself within the game engine definitely helped, though, and it was a learning experience I value a lot. The developer, Jon Topielski, was happy to get me set up with the engine he was using so that I could go into the project myself in order to implement, test and tweak the sounds without going through a game of telephone. (He's a swell guy, really! I can't thank him enough for how everything turned out in the end!)

Not only did this save a lot of time avoiding said telephone game, but it meant I got to be a lot more hands-on in deciding how exactly these sounds were going to play. I felt like a real part of the game development experience, and - if I could do it once, I definitely can and would love to do it again!
Being able to say "I can do sound effects and implementation for your game" is bound to be an asset.

I guess that leaves the music. Following some mental health crises between September and March, and burnout both as a person and as a musician that had accumulated since all the way back in 2018, I spent most of the past year not really directly working on music. Most of what I did do was small experiments, tiny transcriptions and arrangements, mainly to justify the questionable amounts of money I was putting into music creation software as a means of coping with my ennui and anxiety.

It relieves me that just about every single purchase went a long way into helping this soundtrack come to life. Besides some stock percussion, and my live instruments, every single instrument in the soundtrack was from a purchase within the past year: the alto flutes in the main theme; the brush drums in both overworld and minigame themes; the jazz guitar whose sheer character lent itself so obviously to interesting chords that ended up being the backbone to the main theme; the horns on the minigame theme that I still think was the best possible value for something of its quality; even notation software I chose to write the ending theme on instead of on Logic to save myself from writing an entire grand staff piece solely on a piano roll; all of it.

It contextualizes my purchases as an investment, something I've committed to so that I can now just focus on getting the music written the way I want to instead of coveting over tiny, negligible upgrades because I'd chosen to cheap out on my equipment. As long as music's being made with them, I think I'll be alright - and especially as long as I'm writing music for video games with them just like I have here.

I guess I could tell my ten-years-ago self now:

"Hey! You know how you've always wanted to write music for a game? I've done it!"

"It took you so long? And it's just a non-commercial game jam game?"

"I know. I fear I might have taken too long to get here all the time. But I've gotten at least to where I have so far, so from here, I might as well appreciate what progress I've made and promise to myself to go further, as far as I can, and be proud of where I get."

"..."

In April 2013, my nine-years-ago self recorded a record scratch sample. I don't remember where I recorded it from, but I know that I could dig for a higher-quality version of the same sample in one of my virtual synths. On September 22th, I briefly considered doing that - but it would take too much time to look for when a version of the sample was right there in my hands already.

Was this a present I made to myself nine years ago, like a time capsule? A little something to make my life just a tiny bit easier down the road? Who knows. I had no idea where my life was going to be in nine years, and I definitely couldn't imagine it would be where it is now.

"Thanks, Can of Nothing," I said to myself, and inserted "KorgRecordScratch.wav" into the FailedMinigame node.
"I won't let your efforts go to waste. I'll write for more games, I promise."

Breath of the Wild. I don’t think I’ve ever been this conflicted on what angle to approach a game from. There’s so many aspects I could start with, each of them encompassing an important part of the game that’s worth critique. And that makes sense - Breath of the Wild is easily, definitively the largest game I’ve ever finished in terms of scope.

I understand that I sound like a bit of a casual gamer video game player, a normie, a Nintendrone, and… well, in some ways I definitely am, and if I had a bit more experience with open world games (my only other time with the genre was having tried Assassin’s Creed 2 shortly after I started and fell in love with Breath of the Wild. I got frustrated that the game would present such a beautiful, expansive map with such gatekeeping, hand-holding and comparatively superficial parkour and exploration; I have yet to return to the game), I probably would have a better understanding of what triumphs and missteps Breath of the Wild makes for a game of its genre.

But… I think I won’t worry about that. I’ve experienced this game on its own merits, as who I am. I think by writing about this game on a site where people occasionally check in on my writing (hi, everyone who dropped by to wish me well. i can’t thank you enough; i’m doing better for now, though the road ahead is still rocky), I’m proclaiming that I have something worth saying, so I suppose I might as well make it a little personal.


Breath of the Wild had me absolutely hooked when I first experienced it blind in 2020, near the onset of the pandemic. Somehow I’d remained completely oblivious to the Nintendo Switch’s two signature games for years, and just like with Super Mario Odyssey, my reclusiveness found itself rewarded. Up until very recently, I’d thought that there hasn’t been a single Nintendo console for which the flagship Zelda was better than the flagship Mario - in fact, Zelda in general is a franchise I’m pretty mixed on, with most of the games in the series seemingly completely misunderstanding what I like about Zelda and becoming bloated, tedious experiences that in my opinion didn’t respect my time.
In that regard, Breath of the Wild was a breath of fresh air.

So when my cousin who lives with me told me that she’d borrowed a copy of Breath of the Wild from her friend, didn’t gel with it at all and offered me to try it, I approached it with a cautious optimism at best. What followed was me becoming absolutely glued to my Switch for hours on end. I still remember little moments here and there, like the first time I’d gotten Link up to the Plateau tower and couldn’t tell the various other towers and shrines apart; or when after finally marking the four shrines, I accidentally had Link walk off the tower like an idiot and frantically paused the game to warp him back to safety (I think Mirror’s Edge had left me pretty acrophobic in video games; though I want to think I’m over it now); or how I completely failed to pick up the hint when the Old Man would try to teach you about how to cut down trees to use their trunks as makeshift bridges, instead stocking up on some stamina foods and having Link climb around the abyss that separates the Old Man’s house and the Stasis shrine.

But I loved that that was a possible solution at all! The impression I’ve always gotten from Zelda puzzle design post-1992 was that there was only one solution ever intended by the developers for any one puzzle, and that players would (or, at least, I would) get punished for not thinking and approaching the puzzle from exactly the same angles as the designers intended. It’s a suffocating kind of design that’s always turned me of from the Zelda series as its temples transitioned from dungeon crawling to puzzle solving; it’s not that Breath of the Wild is completely exempt from it, but so much more of the game lets you solve it any way you can find within its own rules than any other Zelda game, and video games in general in my experience, that Breath of the Wild was genuinely wonderful to play.

I don’t think a Breath of the Wild review would be complete without a mention of the Great Plateau - it does so much right to set the game up in a bite-sized piece that’s exactly big enough to feel big, especially coming off of Mario games. Not only are individual objectives within the Plateau just as open-ended as the rest of the game is (just look at speedrunner stasis launching Link and bomb shield jumping him all across the place), but the sheer sense of minimalism it provided was amazing, with the Old Man giving the bare minimum of handholding and exposition.

It’s kind of like a great reset manifested as a soft exhale: aside from the Bokoblins (who look so different so as to be unrecognizable), the only familiar Zelda elements I noticed from the Plateau was Hyrule Castle, way off in the distance, and the Temple of Time, left in ruins, its melody fragmented, to prove a bold point.
Not a rupee, not a town or even a single human soul besides Link and the Old Man; I didn’t even encounter Koroks until Link had left the Plateau. In terms of sheer utopian post-apocalyptic atmosphere, the Plateau is simply unparalleled by the rest of the game, and like Pikmin, it’s a sort of beauty that’s unfortunately a little too good to last.
Still, even then, I’d say Breath of the Wild is a sort of rarity for modern Nintendo in how little it relies on rote nostalgia, how it takes an iconoclastic approach to a lot of Zelda tradition, and makes use of what it keeps mostly for deliberate impact and effect.

All these experiences, not to mention the two hundred hours that ensued once I actually got Link off of the plateau, were probably perfect to experience for the first time during the pandemic, being offered a sense of freedom and outdoors exploration that I craved more than ever in a particularly suffocating period of my life, for more reasons than just the novel virus itself.
I know a handful of my reviews across the past year have said “I liked it because I played it during the pandemic”, but Breath of the Wild might be my most sincere, most unreserved nomination for that title.


Which is not to say that I don’t have any reservations about Breath of the Wild. Bear with me, you’ll hate me after I say this: in some ways, I think the 2017 Zelda game is all breath… but no depth.

I feel a little bad saying that about Breath of the Wild on account of what it does accomplish, honestly. But there are a lot of small issues I have with each individual nuance of the game that add up and creep in as a sort of mild dissatisfaction that detriments from my overall experience.

A lot of them will sound like familiar nitpicks - what’s with rain and climbing being so at odds in such a clumsy way, and why does Revali’s Gale remove half of the complexity provided by both mechanics? Is the way they handled weapon durability really the best way they could have gone about it? Don’t the infinite material limit and expandable equipment slots incentivise hoarding? Are extra temporary health/stamina foods not straight-up better than restorative foods? Does the Master Sword (and Urbosa’s Fury) make weapon durability pointless once unlocked?

But I think you can agree with me that in 2021, these seem like pretty uninteresting thoughts to explore. So maybe let’s not do that, and look at the bigger picture once again.

On paper, I really love the idea of how Breath of the Wild decides to paint its story and central conflict, where most of the story has already taken place, and you’re mostly going through the post-mortem of everything and slowly building up Link’s power until he’s ready to go and set things right. With the conflict against Ganon being looming but never present until Link actually goes to confront him, Breath of the Wild presents itself as the most peaceful and beautiful apocalypse ever.


But, as much as I resonated with Zelda’s struggle to keep her composure under overwhelming impostor syndrome, being forbidden from exploring her true passions, how much responsibility was put on her to the brink of straight up breaking, and how her father clearly struggled himself throughout the entire ordeal, how much grief there is to be found if you look around in aspects of Breath of the Wild’s story, especially family-related grief…
I couldn’t tell you I actually cried through any of it - and I’m a person who’s moved to tears by the slightest instance of family-related loss in fiction.

On one hand, I think it’d make sense to be able to approach all these events from some distance - a hundred years’ worth, in fact - but the thing is that with the memories, Nintendo wanted players to be able to experience these key moments themselves. And maybe this was better than going through the entire story and having to bear watching Zelda under so much anxiety through every moment of uninterrupted storytelling? I’m not sure.
And I don’t think Nintendo was entirely sure about how much show and how much tell they wanted, exactly how detached or attached they wanted players to be from the events of Hyrule’s past. It’s the Super Mario Galaxy issue again: Nintendo not being sure how minimalist or maximalist they wanted to be.

A lot of these issues communicate an underlying unconfidence to me as to how Nintendo felt about moving past a lot of Zelda conventions. I feel like the swordplay and weapon-based combat is a big sign - neither Flurry Rush nor Sneakstrike feel like actually interesting mechanics, and while it’s clear that Nintendo wanted to revolutionize swordplay in Zelda, the impression I get is just that… it’s shallow breathing. I would honestly have liked to see them go even further. Ditch the idea that Link has to be a swordsman. It’s called Breath of the Wild. Maybe let Link be the breath of the wild - the wind. Maybe his rune powers could revolve around controlling air flow and wind, and become a mainstay of his kit. Maybe combat could involve deflecting enemy projectiles and blowing them back into them - kind of like an equivalent of perfect shielding for physical projectiles, and less inconsistent.

Maybe they could even (gasp) let Link be anything other than a white blond boy. I’ve literally never understood Nintendo’s thinking regarding Link as a player avatar, and a lot of related points affect how I enjoy games in general (not even just Zelda) more than I honestly care to admit.
Am I ready to completely tank my credibility as a video game critic? I am. Let’s do this.


“You’ve acquired the legendary Master Sword, that which seals the darkness. You feel that the sword itself delights to be in your possession…”

...what?

”You scurry back to the Pokémon Center, protecting your exhausted Pokémon from any further harm…”

huh?

”YOU GOT A MOON!
Bench Friends”

I think you get where I’m getting at with this. Who is you? Who is this you that video games talk to? Is it the player character? Is it the player? Do video games know how to tell the difference? Do video games even recognize that there is a distinction to be made?

There are basically two examples I can think of that are consciously exempt from this, both by the one same person dog: Undertale and Deltarune. A lot of other games seem to conflate the concepts of the player character and the player in how they address them, even in cases where multiple player characters are involved. And honestly? It frustrates me quite a bit.
I have a bit of an irrational obsession against the original Dragon Quest, for example - and that’s because the NES script constantly refers to the Hero as “you”, in a position that I have no connection to whatsoever. I’m a bit more comfortable with Pokémon games by contrast partly because the older games at least have the courtesy to refer to the player character only by the name players choose for them, letting them detach from the player character if they wish; and the newer games at least make the process of relating to the player character more natural by letting players customize their characters to better represent how they wish to present within the game world.

But by far the worst case I have about it is with Zelda, because of how the series insists that Link is a one-for-one representation of the player: making him silent so that players can supposedly imagine what he says, and what his personality is like; coming from humble backgrounds so that players can imagine themselves being the underdog just like Link, triumphing despite not having any inherent advantages; his name (customizable in most entries, even those with Link in the name) is at least partly based on his role in connecting the player to the game; Eiji Aonuma even making the extremely audacious claim that they intended him to be gender neutral in various incarnations.

To which I will always quote the single reason why Romani insists Link should train with her to fight off the aliens in Majora’s Mask:

“You’re a boy, won’t you try?”

Breath of the Wild does break a lot of conventions regarding Link. Link’s chronological earliest appearance is after already having been knighted, with the Master Sword in his possession; his name is fixed, though that probably has more to do with the fact that cutscenes are fully voiced now; and his dialogue options display more character than ever, and even provides monologue at times (the Japanese and Korean scripts present the Adventure Log entirely from Link’s own point of view, in fact). In a lot of senses, Link is more of an autonomous character than ever before, and a lot of the snags in player/character incongruence that remain can be bypassed with how much choice Breath of the Wild provides.

So it feels all the more incongruent when an essential part of the Divine Beasts quest has Link thrown out from Gerudo Town for being male, only being allowed entry under the specific understanding that he engages in crossdressing, doing something he shouldn’t be doing. Comparing it to Super Mario Odyssey, where Mario literally only tries on (a version of) Peach’s wedding dress because he feels like it, and the only two responses he gets are a “You’re getting married and you didn’t tell me?!” from Luigi and a “You look amazing! Love the outfit!” from Bowser, it feels particularly out of touch by contrast.

You might have noticed I’ve referred to Link specifically as himself throughout this review without conflating him with me or you. Call it a nitpick, call it worse things, but this matters to me, you know?

I think Breath of the Wild is definitely going in a direction where I want to see the Zelda franchise going, and even as a snapshot of a work in progress, I’m hooked. It’s just that I think Zelda is capable of a lot more, and I think it’s capable of being even more meaningful to video games than it already has been in the past four years. I’m not worried about that. The sequel already looks like it’s checking a lot of boxes that I’m really excited about, so let’s wait and see.

I’m holding my breath, Nintendo. Your move.

In October, Nintendo opened a limited-time buffet.

"589,00 Norwegian Krone to enter!" they said. "Come now or miss a chance to try some of our best hits!"

Nintendo? They had always been a pretty good chef. I'd always enjoyed their dishes, even if I've had a bone to pick with many of their newer recipes.

"Say what you will about their lows," I thought to myself, "but their highs have always been some of the highest I've ever tried. All right, I'm interested."

I walked in, thanking my boyfriend for being willing to get the reservation as a Christmas-turned-Valentines-turned-Easter-turned-birthday present for me.

"Thanks for waiting. Here's your spaghetti, served with mushrooms and alfredo sauce just like you remember it!" Nintendo said, getting me settled at a table. "And the tropical fruit salad, and one of our most beloved specials: the black forest cake!"
And they served it all up on one big plate.

I froze for a second, and looked up at the corporation serving me my plate.

I asked: "Um, wouldn't it have been better if you worked on how you'd serve this up just a bit? I mean, it's kind of weird to imagine eating spaghetti, salad and cake all out of one plate, and I thought a chef like you would know better."

"Not at all!" Nintendo immediately responded, so quickly they almost snapped. "This is the most direct way of serving you our classic recipes just how you remember it, isn't it? No nonsense!"

I blinked. "Maybe? I mean, it still all tastes good. But shouldn't I get to pick my own plate at a buffet? It's how you used to do at The VC."

"Oh, we decided that we know what's best for you." Nintendo casually said, waving their hand with confident nonchalance. "It's like our Switch Online cookbook, right? You get to try our repertoire exactly the way we decide you should!"

"...sure. but why are you closing down in April?"

"I, well, you see... it's to encourage everyone who wants to come to get their reservations!"
And with that, Nintendo walked away.

I get it, Nintendo. You've had a rough year, and you probably wanted to make sure your fiscal year would end on a profit, even if it involved resorting to pretty desperate measures.

But we've all been hit by recent events. We're all getting quite impatient with a lot of things, and I'd like to think our tolerance for hostile decisions is getting lower by the day.

I liked the spaghetti and the salad, right? And the cake was fine, I guess. I don't necessarily regret that, but if this is the kind of ventures you see fit to do more regularly from here on, I think I'll be happy looking for my noodles elsewhere, even if nobody makes spaghetti like you do.

It's funny how both of my All-Stars review ended up being food-themed.

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, better known as Stardust Road in Japan, 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 Japanese idea that I've found that I feel Galaxy uniquely tackles unlike the other games in the series is mono no aware: (物の哀れ) 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.

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

What if like, Pokémon was... actually good?

What if they made use of species' traits directly within the storytelling, and what if they make it so that each Pokémon really is a clearly emoted character with its own characteristics based on its species - something that the main games just don't seem to have the capacity to do?

What if they actually made strategy, moveset management and team optimization an important aspect of single-player gameplay while getting rid of the awful aspects to raising Pokémon in the main games, like EVs/IVs?

What if they actually used the idea of endurance and attrition within dungeons as a legitimately well-thought out gameplay mechanic instead of being something you could just grind around by going in and out of the Pokémon Centers?

What if they actually got you to care about all the NPCs you met by making sure you know what they have to say at all times, instead of just the main cast being shoved into your face the whole time?

This is my preferred way to engage with the Pokémon franchise these days. It may not be perfect - I don't like not being able to evolve my starter, or not really being able to pick it, for that matter; the story is ultimately a little contrived to make up for the fact that gameplay gets a little stale unless there's plot development shoved into your face at every moment to give you a reason to keep playing; there are a few quirks about the gameplay in general that I think could be ironed out...

But this has so much going for it that it's actually willing to explore within the main, single player campaign - both in terms of how it handles the actual Pokémon, and in how complex it takes its gameplay by the end of it (and I haven't even started the postgame yet in this run!)

The music's good, the story's enjoyable if you don't think too much about it, it's fun to put more thought into battles (especially when you bring in an Escape Orb and get the option to bail and try again), the music's good...

I'm looking forward to completing the postgame and one day moving onto Explorers, probably Sky. It's a shame this series hasn't quite taken off after the first two.

(I think the main Pokémon games aren't bad; I really like Gen 4 and 5 as games, but I think the general Pokémon formula just isn't for me, and I feel like they've stayed a little too stagnant in their game design in all the wrong ways.)

For once, I'm entering a review with zero idea of what final score I'll give the game. Sonic R's flaws and oddities have been dissected like an open book, not that identifying them takes much work: the controls are slippery and weird for an on-foot racer, the course design is surprisingly labyrinthine, made worse by how the game makes use of tank-like turning, there's an embarrassing lack of content compared to other racing games, and the soundtrack is definitely love-it-or-hate-it.

If you walked up to me and told me that you dropped the game immediately over each one of these points, I'd definitely see where you're coming from. This isn't my first playthrough - I've already been somewhat acclimated, even though my last playthrough was probably a decade ago at this point (oh no, how the time has flown).

Sonic R is clearly not perfect, and I'm not going to even attempt to make a case that it's anything but absolute 90's jank. But I'm the kind of person who adores Super Mario 64, and defends Super Mario Sunshine, games with their fair share of jank that people these days find themselves split on.
And you know what? If you're willing to give this game a chance to speak for itself, I think it's possible you could see like I do how much of its oddities can be charming.

You might call me crazy for attempting to defend the loose, imprecise controls (especially considering both Sonic's reputation up to this point as a series with immaculate control, and my love for Super Mario 64), and honestly, you should. But... hear me out, if you will - and I assume you will if you've gotten this far into this review.

Like I mentioned earlier, Sonic R is extremely thin on content. With only four initial courses, one unlockable course and six unlockable characters that either have overly pathetic or overly broken stats, Sonic R would be exhausted in about fifteen minutes if it were structured like any other racing game. But Sonic R sprinkles in collectables within the first four courses: one or two Chaos Emeralds, and five coin... token... Golden Circular Things With Sonic's Face On Them.

But why on earth am I describing game mechanics? Wasn't I supposed to be making a defense for controls that don't deserve defense?
It turns out that in order to actually retain the Chaos Emeralds you collected, you need to finish a race in first place, and in order to challenge (not unlock!) an unlockable character, all five tokens need to be collected within a single race. These two objectives can be done separately, but this means that Sonic R asks for players to demonstrate a grasp on both execution and navigation.

Even if you hypothetically knew where all the Emeralds and tokens were from the start, it's quite possible that you might slip up on getting one your first time because of the controls, and by the time you've circled back to get it, you might have fallen quite behind on the competition. That doesn't mean it's a wasted run, though - by freeing yourself from the thinking that you have to win this race, it opens you to explore the whole map without the pressure of competition. And that's when Hirokazu Yasuhara's mentality of Sonic-like multiple paths shine brightest, turning these places into playgrounds to explore and find details, discovering how to get to a part of level in the distance, figuring out what's the fastest routes for the unlockable character races and... even taking in all the scenery in.

Did I mention Sonic R is a brilliant, impressive game for its time? Its graphics are gorgeous, having fully modeled 3D environments and characters in contrast to Mario Kart 64's rather basic geometry and pre-rendered character sprites. The fog and fade-in is done with excellent taste, allegedly all the more impressive considering that the Saturn had difficulty with effects like fog and transparency.

It's this level of visual fidelity that lets each individual route and the entire vast, open track as a whole breathe. And on the topic of the sheer amount of alternate paths that exist in Sonic R's tracks: you know how Mario Kart 64 doesn't show you racer positions in Yoshi Valley because the game can't actually determine it alongside gameplay? Sonic R manages to pull it off with every single track, while still keeping the visuals pristine and the gameplay smooth.

And no review about Sonic R and letting it speak to you would be complete without a mention of the music. Super Sonic Racing, Can You Feel The Sunshine and Living In The City are simply anthemic - there's no way denying that.
Funnily enough, I started this playthrough with the vocals disabled, only to get this nagging feeling that something was missing. Upon switching the vocals back on, I found myself singing along to the three songs above, and even to bits and pieces of Back In Time and Work It Out that found themselves lodged in my brain.

(I should note that I initially wanted to include a section of why I think Can You Feel The Sunshine is great, actually, but it basically ended up turning into a script for a video essay. I'll link it here if I ever complete it!)

For one short, janky mess of a game, all this adds up to something that's honestly really fun to complete, to go back to tracks multiple times to find and unlock everything. What Sonic R doesn't have in breadth, it offers in depth - it only makes me wish it wasn't as horribly rushed as it was because of the Saturn's lifespan.

...Wow. All this sounds like I love Sonic R to death. To be clear, I don't - I haven't played this game in a decade for a reason, and I probably won't play it again for another decade for those same reasons.
But the more I think about it, the more I feel like Sonic R is a classic example of my video game hypothesis that feels all the more relevant with each passing day:
That a key factor that's essential for games to remain interesting over time... might be a little bit of jank.

I should note that as a proofreader credited in the game, my perspective is inevitably a bit biased. Still, I think Post-Disclosure, Devil's Night is full of colorful writing, good imagery, and a really good grasp on depicting emotion in every scene.

It's a short read, and I think it's cozy and with much to relate to one way or another for many of us whose friendships are forged online more often than off these days.

All in all: I'm glad this exists. If you're reading this, whoever you are, go create some art! I'll love to see it.

Spyro the Dragon's biggest strength appears to be a certain minimalism to its design and kit. It's in stark contrast to the other 1998 collectathon, Banjo-Kazooie: where that game clutters your moveset up with tons of abilities that mostly fail to impact the platforming, Spyro manages to use the glide, charge and flame in interesting ways that often directly impact the platforming experience.

The result is an extremely laser-focused 3D platformer that offers an experience on par with, but stands out against Mario's best moments, yet feels modern and innovative in ways that Crash Bandicoot was too traditional to be.

Where Super Mario 64 strived for sheer mobility and options for fluid, nuanced movement, Spyro goes for geometry, and using that as part of the player's kit as much as the controls themselves.

Picture a ledge that Spyro couldn't reach with his jump: Mario would find a way onto it no matter what, be it through a triple jump into a wall kick, a well-timed turbo nozzle jump, or a cap vault roll chained into a cap bounce.
Spyro would have to explore the rest of the level, examine its geometry and determine the best point to jump off of and glide onto in order to find a way onto this very trivial platform...

But that's what makes it work so well. What would be small distances in the other most acclaimed 3D platformers is so meaningful - Spyro the Dragon achieves more with less, making the most out of its sense of space in a way that feels inherited straight from Sonic the Hedgehog.

Maybe that's why I feel like this was the true contender for Mario's most formidable rival in the late 1990's.