Super Mario Bros

Super Mario Odyssey

/ skoce / 1 Comment

This is going to be a short one. I don’t have a lot to say about Super Mario Odyssey that isn’t unrestrained gushing about how much I loved it. Because I did love it. The Mario series has more stone cold classics than disappointments. And even the disappointments are only disappointments in comparison to those classics. While it might be a little early to judge, Super Mario Odyssey seems to be squarely in the classic category.

There are two games that most prominently come to mind when playing Super Mario Odyssey: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario 64. Like Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey shows Nintendo looking backwards and finding a new path forward. Super Mario 64 is the game that Super Mario Odyssey is clearly looking backwards to. Breath of the Wild turned away from decades of increasingly restrictive Zelda titles to find something that strongly reflected the exploratory origins of the series. The original Legend of Zelda was a game that dropped the player down in the middle of a relatively large world and let the player explore at their own pace. Breath of the Wild does the same thing, but without bringing along many of the good things the series had done in the intervening years. (This is not the place for this argument, but I would say the moment to moment gameplay of Breath of the Wild is very similar to Skyward Sword.) Super Mario Odyssey does something similar. It eschews the more limited levels of the last couple of decades and deliberately fashions its game after its earliest 3D adventure.

While this might be interpreted as a jab at Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario 3D World, I don’t think that is accurate. Super Mario Odyssey is very much a product of that lineage. Super Mario 64 burst onto the scene with this big, immersive playgrounds, but Galaxy its successors honed those into smaller, more focused levels. They also honed things like the controls, the moveset and the challenge structure. Super Mario Odyssey takes all of those things, and brings back the more expansive levels. There are only a dozen and a half stages here, but each one is big and varied. Each one is a world of itself, and provides a broad and interesting set of challenges. Each of these stages is beautifully realized. There are classics like the ice world, the water world and the fire world, but even those are done in an interesting way. The fire world, for example, is set up as a cooking world, and the lava is fire beneath the pot. The rest are highly inventive, from the prehistoric world to the slightly unsettling New Donk City.

Super Mario Odyssey is, in pretty much every way, the realization of everything that Super Mario 64 tried to be. Super Mario 64 is the first great 3D platformer. Super Mario Odyssey is the latest and greatest such game. I have nothing to criticize; not the way it looks, not the way it sounds, not the way it plays, nothing. I am sure there is more to say about this game, but I am still too overwhelmed to say it.

Super Mario Replay: Super Mario Bros 2

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I started and lost a version of this blog post and I don’t really feel much like rewriting it. Especially since I’ve already said just about all I have to say about the game in my 25 Years of NES entry on it. So this one is going to be short; just a few observations from my recent play through of the All-Stars version of the game.

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Super Mario Bros. 2 is a still great, and the All-Stars version just makes it better. It is already a game notable for being bright and colorful, this version just adds to that. There is just something so inviting about this game. It doesn’t have the game changing importance of the first game or Super Mario 64, nor is it as virtuosic a display of game design as Super Mario Bros 3, Super Mario World or Super Mario Galaxy, but Super Mario Bros 2 is one of the most pleasant games in the series to play. With the Mario series that is really saying something. Nearly all the games are pleasant, but this one stands out in that regard.

That’s it. Shortly it will be time for Super Mario Bros. 3, which might turn out to be as short as this one. It depends on how much I have to add to what I’ve already written about that game.

Super Mario Replay: Super Mario Bros

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My big project here this year is going to be a replay of the Super Mario series, mainline games only. That means no spin-offs or sports titles. Like previous projects like 25 Years of NES, the Wheel of Time Reread, Second Quest and 25 Years of SNES, I expect this year long project to take me at least 15 months and become a hateful chore by the end of it. Right now though, I am hoping the ending of this will coincide with the release of Super Mario Odyssey and I can play that game with the character’s history in mind. No promises, though.

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So we start with Super Mario Bros. Not the 1985 NES game, though; this time I am playing the Super Mario All-Star version on the Wii through the 25th Anniversary Edition. I decided to play it, and the other NES games, in this format because it gives me something else to say about them. There really isn’t much left to say about Super Mario Bros. I’ve already written about it once.  The All-Stars version gives me at least two things to talk about. One is the newly added save system. I am in favor of saving my progress and not being forced to complete a game in one sitting. Super Mario Bros is not designed with this in mind. In fact, it is designed to facilitate playing through quickly. I am avoiding warping so I can see more of the game than I usually do, but all the different hidden Warp Zones that were built into this game are a thing of beauty. Assuming you know what you are doing you can get to just about any stage in a matter of minutes. Saving robs the game of most of its challenge. You still have to get through without dying, but you can take it one World at a time and methodically take this game apart even if you aren’t any good at it.

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The other thing is interesting thing about the All-Stars version are the new graphics. It makes the characters look like SMB3 characters, but with SMW detail and color depth and fancy backgrounds. The original version of Super Mario Bros looks good in a primitive, familiar way. You’ve seen this game and those sprites for 30 years; that is what they are supposed to look like, the lack of detail notwithstanding. The All-Star graphics take some getting used to, but they actually look really good. It does create some dissonance with a game that looks like a SNES game but definitely plays like an NES game.

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As for the game itself, I don’t know what to say about it. I don’t think a game exists that has been more thoroughly discussed and dissected that Super Mario Bros. I’ve already written about it once. It is the ur video game, its primordial essence is a building block for nearly every game that came after it. Honestly, even all these years later it is still a lot of fun to play. It is perfect in its simplicity. Everyone should play it.