Genre: Platformer, Action-Adventure
Year: 2010
Developed by: Nintendo EAD Tokyo
Published by: Nintendo
Platforms: Wii
#8
Feeling Like: Warp Ten / Ten
For some games, like Octopath Traveler or Ori and the Blind Forest, they’re so enjoyable in every aspect that I’m flabbergasted how their respective sequels are even superior. I didn’t think there was all that much wiggle room for advancement, but that’s why I’m not in charge of such things.
Super Mario Galaxy 2 is an improvement on what was already considered the best Mario video game to date. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for them to have any tricks left in the bag, that there couldn’t possibly be any more ways to showcase to the player how gravity, physics and space could be morphed into a brand new playground for Mario. But in the words of Lewis Black….
“But I was fuckin’ wrong, wasn’t I?
What originated as a one year turnaround using the same engine turned into a three year gap as Nintendo kept adding and refining the experience. There isn’t as big a story this time; Peach wants to bake Mario a cake, Bowser wants cake too and uses his newly ginormous body to kidnap her. I’ve heard of worse justifications, my mother’s birthday cake is a treat I’d commit a small crime for.
But Mario games aren’t about story, even if the dialogue and conversations are fast paced and a delight. There are very little hurdles here, there’s no Comet Observatory hub world to pad things out. Here, there’s a 2D selection of levels, old school. You can still wander around a Mario shaped spaceship to practice your moves or speak to the various creatures you’ve met on your journey. But the star of the show, as in all Mario games (except Super Mario RPG, where it’s Mallow & Geno), is the level design. The superb, professional, creative, wondrous, amazing level design.
The loop of introducing you to a new world or power, then ramping up the difficulty, then iterating on it, making it more challenging, or more surprising and then quickly ushering you onto something completely new is bewildering. I felt drunk more than once. There are no stereotypes on display ; even if you get a stretch that looks like a “normal” Mario level (whatever that means), it’s usually beside a collapsing star, or crowded with giant Yoshi skulls, or switching to a 2d perspective, or a REMAKE OF THWOMP’S FORTRESS from Super Mario 64 ahhhhhh!!!!
This is a moderately tricky entry on the 500 simply because my instincts are screaming to just list every single stage, and what the corresponding hook is. There’s a bowling section, where you are the bowling the ball (in boulder form). There’s an area where you have to clear boxes with your fire flower. There’s a motion control stage that feels like something out of a Super Monkey Ball combined with Rainbow Road from a Mario Kart. You can transform into a goddamn cloud, which gives you the ability to create platforms out of nothing. This isn’t just a neat aesthetic, it literally changes how the challenges can be presented. The ability to leap across vasty empty spaces now makes those tiny little asteroids in the distance possible. What kind of game has this kind of level variety, but also quality of puzzles and platforming challenges? None. There’s a reason it’s the top of its class on the 500.
Having Yoshi along helps an already masterful game achieve heights I didn’t think possible. Primarily, Yoshi (and dinosaurs) are awesome, automatically and always. Secondly, Yoshi himself is great – who doesn’t like riding a smiling green raptor who can dash up verticals with a hot pepper and eat anything in sight? Yoshi gets his own power ups here! Is that a first? Probably, but it doesn’t matter how innovative it is, it matters because it adds a tremendous boost to the experience.
Many games on the 500 are here because of a deep personal connection. In no way is Super Metroid a far worse game than something like Super Mario RPG or The Walking Dead, it’s just because I had a better time with them. Or a LAN party, or something I got competitive at, or something I wanted to challenge myself to completing.
Others get a respect pass. I barely have any specific memories of Super Mario Galaxy 2. I madly rushed through it in a few days, forcing JP and Kim to retreat to their rooms if they wanted to watch something. The fundamentals of this new kind of Mario were already familiar, so I could exclusively focus on how to wrap my head around the planetoids of peril, or the mind bending gravity stages, or how far Yoshi needed to balloon up, or how hard to flick the Wiimote to get a strike. It’s not as exploration heavy as something like Super Mario 64, or as fresh as Super Mario Galaxy, but it exceeds both when it comes to raw imagination and level design and that is REALLY saying something.
Does Nintendo miss? Sure, not every game they’ve made is perfect. While I haven’t played a bad Mario game myself, I know they exist – usually as some obscure educational game. Super Mario Sunshine doesn’t count, not by a long shot. But when they put their minds to it and bring out a mainline Mario game, you know what to expect. The shocking part is, they keep one-upping themselves. They make games that last and are based on the fundamentals of what we find about video games fun, not necessarily just the “trend” at the time. I guess motion controls count as a fad, but I don’t consider either Galaxy games as anything but traditional-esque platformers with some motion controls on the side.
But they don’t release a new Mario game out every year. They bide their time, usually waiting for their new console, or an innovation in hardware, or a shift in player desires, or even their own creativity to burst through with a new idea. They’re no interested in just re-iterating what they’ve already done. You could argue Galaxy 2 is the “same” as Galaxy, but to perfect upon a game that had a 97% MetaCritic score is just astonishing.
And they keep doing it! Super Mario Odyssey was next, then Super Mario Wonder, both incredible titles in their own right. I’m mildly relieved that they were both released after my 500 cut off date because I’m running out of superlatives to describe an experience like Super Mario Galaxy 2. What else is there to be said? It may be the best Mario game ever and there are so few franchises where several gamers can make a claim like that regarding six or seven different choices and all have legitimate claims. It defies expectations to the point of it being cliche to say a new Mario game is in a class of its own, in every sense of the word.
The 500 