Super Mario Sunshine is an odd game. It has a lot of good qualities and I could easily see it ranking alongside people’s favorite games of all time, but there’s also a lot of stuff holding it back, arguably more than any other 3D Mario. But, as a fair game critic, I should start with the positives.
Mario Sunshine’s biggest strength is in its personality. Right from the title screen, the game introduces an offbeat tone in both design and visuals, letting players mess around with Mario’s moveset and making them physically select a file. The aesthetics are beautiful, with vibrant tropical locales that still hold up visually. The soundtrack has a unique style that’s both catchy and fitting to the environment. It’s even the only mainline Mario game to feature voice acting! Bad voice acting, yes, but the voices are indeed acting!
There are some really good character designs here, too. Newly introduced series icons like the Piantas, Petey Piranha, and Bowser Jr join sleeper hits like Cataquacks and Electro Koopas to form an all-star cast. Also, I love how E. Gadd’s ties to FLUDD and the Magic Paintbrush connect this game to Luigi’s Mansion, showcasing a continuity Mario hasn’t really done since…Dream Team? Sunshine isn’t the most charming of Mario’s Gamecube outings; it’s outdone by the sports titles and especially TTYD, but the vibes are still as fresh as the water from Mario’s jetpack.
Speaking of which, FLUDD is a great addition to the gameplay. Not only does he fit with the game’s theming, but he’s a wonderful tool in Mario’s arsenal. The spraying mechanics are fun to use, serving as both a means of attack and of increasing momentum. Plus, the additional airtime provided by the hover nozzle is a nifty means of getting around. The rocket and turbo nozzles are also pretty fun to use, offering great vertical and horizontal utility respectively. And when you fully understand how FLUDD works, movement becomes an absolute thrill ride, where Mario hops, slides, and speeds along at an exhilarating rate…
…Which makes it suck when the game forcibly removes these options. Scattered throughout Sunshine are a series of self-contained platforming challenges over a great blue void. This might sound like a great chance to use that movement I mentioned, but here’s the thing: You can’t use FLUDD in these sections. Now, on paper this is a fine enough idea. FLUDD is the game’s central mechanic, and it’s only fair that it spends the entire game fleshing him out as much as possible. And removing that mechanic is a good way of doing so.
There’s just one problem: Remember that fluid movement I mentioned earlier? Yeah, see how much fluid you get without your fancy water bottle. Mario Sunshine’s movement really wasn’t built around not having FLUDD, at least not in the context of precise platforming, which is the exact situation where they remove him. It just feels awkward trying to get around without him, the game’s odd lack of a long jump especially making traversal a lot more frustrating. And on top of that, these sections harshly punish your mistakes. One wrong move and you fall into a pit and have to start the section all over again. Oh, and God forbid you lose all your lives and have to trek back through the level, wasting even more of your time.
Okay, so the no-FLUDD sections are frustrating, but so what? Every Mario game has at least a few bad levels. Just skip them! Oh, you sweet, stupid summer child, let me introduce you to one of Sunshine’s other major blunders: the change in structure. Now, Mario 64 was very generous with its completion requirements, only requiring 70 of its 120 stars in order to face the final boss. Plus, you could get a level’s Power Stars in any order. This meant that if you didn’t like a level, that’s fine. You could just do another one. Sunshine, for some odd reason, lays out an incredibly specific goal for the player: you have to do the first 7 missions in every level in order to reach the ending. All those sections that really suck? Yeah, they’re mandatory. So either slog your crusty, dehydrated plumber through platformer purgatory or give up and haul your ass back to Kirby Air Ride (Please note that I hold no ill will against Kirby Air Ride or its playerbase).
Another victim of the game’s structure is the optional shines. Now, optional content in games is cool, but usually there’s some kind of reward attached to it. Like, oh, I don’t know, something that helps you progress in the story. Mario Sunshine throws all that out the window, snapshots its corpse, and slaps it on a custom-printed postcard from the Land of Sensible Design. Yeah, I wish I was there, too. So many neat ideas in Sunshine are gimped by their complete uselessness in the face of the game’s ultimate goal. The shines you can earn in the overworld? Sorry, their purpose is in another castle. The secret shines scattered throughout the levels? The real secret is they’re a waste of time. The blue coins? Please, you’re better off buying crypto. Even the fact that shines help unlock levels (I think) is redundant because the main missions already give you more than enough to unlock all of them.
Let’s talk about those main missions some more, because Sunshine’s level design is…odd, to say the least. Remember when I praised Mario Galaxy for how its tight level design got the most out of its simple movement? Sunshine’s kind of the opposite. You have a lot of movement options, but every level either removes your access to them or plops them into an uninteresting layout. In what I can only assume was due to the game’s rushed development, Sunshine’s levels sit at an awkward midpoint between 64’s open-ended playgrounds and Galaxy’s linear, mission-based structure. The levels are technically open, sure, but you have to do all the objectives in a specific order, one at a time. Unlike the Galaxy games, though, the bulk of the level often remains largely the same, just with an objective tacked on at a different point, so you don’t really feel the variety. For a game all about cleaning, they paid shockingly little attention to polish.
But for what it’s worth, the missions you do within the main levels are fine. They reuse a lot of objectives, but they do a good enough job being engaging and the movement carries it a fair bit. Plus, this game features Yoshi’s first 3D appearance, even if it is by far the weakest and it portrays him as oddly soluble. And unlike Mario 64, the bosses don’t suck, even if the final stretch of the game is god-awful. That’s the thing about Sunshine. It’s not a bad game. Hell, I’m even tempted to call it good. But it really squanders a lot of its best ideas with an array of baffling design decisions and a development cycle that leaves it feeling less finished than the GameCube’s actual tech demo. It had the potential to reach the sky, but for every time it came close, it just got burned.
Mario Sunshine’s biggest strength is in its personality. Right from the title screen, the game introduces an offbeat tone in both design and visuals, letting players mess around with Mario’s moveset and making them physically select a file. The aesthetics are beautiful, with vibrant tropical locales that still hold up visually. The soundtrack has a unique style that’s both catchy and fitting to the environment. It’s even the only mainline Mario game to feature voice acting! Bad voice acting, yes, but the voices are indeed acting!
There are some really good character designs here, too. Newly introduced series icons like the Piantas, Petey Piranha, and Bowser Jr join sleeper hits like Cataquacks and Electro Koopas to form an all-star cast. Also, I love how E. Gadd’s ties to FLUDD and the Magic Paintbrush connect this game to Luigi’s Mansion, showcasing a continuity Mario hasn’t really done since…Dream Team? Sunshine isn’t the most charming of Mario’s Gamecube outings; it’s outdone by the sports titles and especially TTYD, but the vibes are still as fresh as the water from Mario’s jetpack.
Speaking of which, FLUDD is a great addition to the gameplay. Not only does he fit with the game’s theming, but he’s a wonderful tool in Mario’s arsenal. The spraying mechanics are fun to use, serving as both a means of attack and of increasing momentum. Plus, the additional airtime provided by the hover nozzle is a nifty means of getting around. The rocket and turbo nozzles are also pretty fun to use, offering great vertical and horizontal utility respectively. And when you fully understand how FLUDD works, movement becomes an absolute thrill ride, where Mario hops, slides, and speeds along at an exhilarating rate…
…Which makes it suck when the game forcibly removes these options. Scattered throughout Sunshine are a series of self-contained platforming challenges over a great blue void. This might sound like a great chance to use that movement I mentioned, but here’s the thing: You can’t use FLUDD in these sections. Now, on paper this is a fine enough idea. FLUDD is the game’s central mechanic, and it’s only fair that it spends the entire game fleshing him out as much as possible. And removing that mechanic is a good way of doing so.
There’s just one problem: Remember that fluid movement I mentioned earlier? Yeah, see how much fluid you get without your fancy water bottle. Mario Sunshine’s movement really wasn’t built around not having FLUDD, at least not in the context of precise platforming, which is the exact situation where they remove him. It just feels awkward trying to get around without him, the game’s odd lack of a long jump especially making traversal a lot more frustrating. And on top of that, these sections harshly punish your mistakes. One wrong move and you fall into a pit and have to start the section all over again. Oh, and God forbid you lose all your lives and have to trek back through the level, wasting even more of your time.
Okay, so the no-FLUDD sections are frustrating, but so what? Every Mario game has at least a few bad levels. Just skip them! Oh, you sweet, stupid summer child, let me introduce you to one of Sunshine’s other major blunders: the change in structure. Now, Mario 64 was very generous with its completion requirements, only requiring 70 of its 120 stars in order to face the final boss. Plus, you could get a level’s Power Stars in any order. This meant that if you didn’t like a level, that’s fine. You could just do another one. Sunshine, for some odd reason, lays out an incredibly specific goal for the player: you have to do the first 7 missions in every level in order to reach the ending. All those sections that really suck? Yeah, they’re mandatory. So either slog your crusty, dehydrated plumber through platformer purgatory or give up and haul your ass back to Kirby Air Ride (Please note that I hold no ill will against Kirby Air Ride or its playerbase).
Another victim of the game’s structure is the optional shines. Now, optional content in games is cool, but usually there’s some kind of reward attached to it. Like, oh, I don’t know, something that helps you progress in the story. Mario Sunshine throws all that out the window, snapshots its corpse, and slaps it on a custom-printed postcard from the Land of Sensible Design. Yeah, I wish I was there, too. So many neat ideas in Sunshine are gimped by their complete uselessness in the face of the game’s ultimate goal. The shines you can earn in the overworld? Sorry, their purpose is in another castle. The secret shines scattered throughout the levels? The real secret is they’re a waste of time. The blue coins? Please, you’re better off buying crypto. Even the fact that shines help unlock levels (I think) is redundant because the main missions already give you more than enough to unlock all of them.
Let’s talk about those main missions some more, because Sunshine’s level design is…odd, to say the least. Remember when I praised Mario Galaxy for how its tight level design got the most out of its simple movement? Sunshine’s kind of the opposite. You have a lot of movement options, but every level either removes your access to them or plops them into an uninteresting layout. In what I can only assume was due to the game’s rushed development, Sunshine’s levels sit at an awkward midpoint between 64’s open-ended playgrounds and Galaxy’s linear, mission-based structure. The levels are technically open, sure, but you have to do all the objectives in a specific order, one at a time. Unlike the Galaxy games, though, the bulk of the level often remains largely the same, just with an objective tacked on at a different point, so you don’t really feel the variety. For a game all about cleaning, they paid shockingly little attention to polish.
But for what it’s worth, the missions you do within the main levels are fine. They reuse a lot of objectives, but they do a good enough job being engaging and the movement carries it a fair bit. Plus, this game features Yoshi’s first 3D appearance, even if it is by far the weakest and it portrays him as oddly soluble. And unlike Mario 64, the bosses don’t suck, even if the final stretch of the game is god-awful. That’s the thing about Sunshine. It’s not a bad game. Hell, I’m even tempted to call it good. But it really squanders a lot of its best ideas with an array of baffling design decisions and a development cycle that leaves it feeling less finished than the GameCube’s actual tech demo. It had the potential to reach the sky, but for every time it came close, it just got burned.