classycactus

Super Mario Odyssey is rightfully considered to be one of the greatest games of the past decade. Mario travels from somber, serene top hats to an expansive desert, bustling city, tropical islands, Peach's castle, the moon, and the mysterious dark side of the moon. Traversing these varied environments, Mario has a complex array of movement abilities, all operating crisply. The story, in typical Mario fashion, is mostly irrelevant, even if Nintendo put a little extra effort in making it more unique. The structure of the levels are relatively loose; power moons can be collected everywhere, and hardly any are mandatory. With over 800 unique power moons to collect, and purple coins to collect in most kingdoms, the game has a very high replay ability. However, the loose, sometimes repetitive, sometimes incoherent, structure of the game limits it from rivaling the amazing Super Mario Galaxy games, which is why the score given to Super Mario Odyssey is a 9.0. 

Audio / Visual Presentation

The visual presentation of the game is stunning -- sand dunes reflecting photons like static waves of the ocean, atmospheric rain pouring onto New Donk City, the magnificent desolation of the moon -- all making this the most artistic Mario game of all time. The animations are without any meaningful flaw. All of the details have been considered. If you leave Mario alone for several seconds, he lies down on the ground to take a quick nap. Each of Mario's costumes are designed with care. All of the metallic hats have a different sound when Mario bounces off of them. The sound design is great. The soundtrack, however, is only decent. There are no songs that rival the likes of the Gusty Garden theme from Super Mario Galaxy. Despite the amazing presentation of the game, it still lacks the same atmosphere and wonder of games like Super Mario Galaxy, Mario 64, and Sunshine. There are only brief moments where you travel to a new land and the atmosphere and scenery blows you away.





Gameplay

The gameplay in Super Mario Odyssey is flawless. Mario has a vast set of moves: rolls, dives, long jumps, triple jumps, ground pound jumps, spins, and more. All of these moves can be chained quickly and precisely. Mario can climb to the summit of every kingdom and roll off, preserving momentum, accelerating both from gravitational acceleration and strafing slightly for even more speed. Nintendo implemented Cappy into Mario's movement efficiently. The controls of some of the creatures that Mario can take control of can be a little clunky at times, however it does not detract from the fun of controlling them. Mario can control a colossal T-Rex screeching because of the many small legos he steps on, or he can control a speedy Sphinx, named Jaxi, that uncontrollably sprints across a vast desert. Mario can become a high flying frog or a determined bullet bill, an aggressive chain chomp or an elastic wiggler, or a mindless man driving an RC car or a cactus. The best component of Super Mario Odyssey is the gameplay. 

The Downfall

The only real downfall of the game is the structure. There are too many power moons, too many unnecessary power moons, too many unnecessary, redundant (and redundant) power moons. Some are obtained by kicking a rock, others by ground pounding random glowing areas in the ground. Many of them have no real rhyme or reason, and it seems that a lot of them are merely there to prolong the game unnecessarily. The game could have easily ended around 500 power moons and, at most, 50 purple coins per kingdom. If they wanted to have the game reach 999 power moons, they could have added more kingdoms. Another problem related to the structure of the game is that there are no levels that are set out in the main world. The only linear levels that can be played are found in pipes. It is very understandable that Nintendo didn't want Super Mario Odyssey to have the same static, linear level structure of the Galaxy games, and wanted to deviate to a more open Sunshine game, however they could have executed that style more effectively. They could have focused on the game being more open world by reducing the clutter of random binoculars and coins and toads and signs and pipes and potted plants and paintings. That would at least improve the atmosphere of the game and complement the loose progression of the game. The "found with ___ kingdom art" power moons were not very fun, and about half of them led to using YouTube as a resource, because they required precise locations. Removing all of those power moons would improve the game and streamline the experience. The final, relatively insignificant problem, with the game was that some power moons were impossible to find. Only a handful, but they were impossible. For example, the power moon in the Wooded Kingdom that required you to shoot a coin at a random leaf (essentially) was almost impossible to figure out. All of these small problems with the game add up and lead to the subtraction of one point from its score. 

Conclusion

Super Mario Odyssey is an amazing platforming and exploration game. It has some problems that limit it from being included in the best-game-of-all-time discussion, but it is still a very fun and enjoyable experience. At the start of the game, it seemed like it would be Super Mario Galaxy with the Cascade Kingdom (that resembles the Yoshi galaxy in SMG 2), but then it immediately destroys those hopes with the Sand Kingdom, which ended up being the best of all of them. Most of the rest of the kingdoms seemed to not know where to go -- expansive and atmospheric environments or small islands floating in the sky. New Donk City was also a very unique kingdom that revealed that Nintendo is not afraid to experiment in their games. Overall, Super Mario Odyssey is a game that all people can play across long periods of time, over many moons.