Super Mario Galaxy

System: Wii
Release Date: 2007
Published By: Nintendo
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

Are you the type of person who thought Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine would have been much better games if they'd had more platforming and less puzzley scavenger-hunt nonsense? Was your favourite part of Super Mario Sunshine the sub-stages where you jump on lots of boxes and don't have the FLUDD? This might be the game you're looking for. This is the first 3D Mario game that's actually unabashedly a platformer; it's superficially similar to Mario 64 in that your goal is still to collect stars, but instead of hunting for them in a wide-open area, you're generally presented with a more-or-less linear course. The difficulty comes not from trying to locate the star, but from successfully jumping over all the pits and turtles in the way.

There's a fair quantity of game here if all you care about is beating Bowser, and a whole lot more if you're in to getting all the stars and all the secrets. Since this is a 3D platformer, there are certainly some regrettable minigames to deal with along the way. Interestingly, though, I think the game benefits in this area from being on the Wii; they may be minigames, and they may be regrettable, but at least they're not the exact same awful minigames I've played in every 3D platformer ever. They're fresh, and some of them would actually be fun if they weren't interrupting my jumpy pit game to make me surf on a manta ray. I don't believe it's necessary ever to play a minigame if beating Bowser is your goal; you do have to play them all if you want all the stars.

Plotwise, where Super Paper Mario was Mario theology, this one is Mario cosmology. There's a whole lot - by which I mean a whole lot - of expository dialogue explaining how stars are actually created by little stars when they get enough star power from big stars. It seems a little circular to me, but, honestly, I'm still stuck on the part where they started putting actual backstories in Mario games. I don't really need all this origins-of-life stuff to convince me to jump on a damn great turtle until he falls over, but, hey, there it is. In typical Nintendo fashion, there is an odd amount of voice acting; most of the dialogue is screen-text only (including the cutscenes), but occasionally there will be one spoken word in the middle of a block of text. I don't really understand why they did that, and it's sort of unspeakably odd in practice. Oh, and. I might not have thought it was possible, but evidently one can be a shitty voice actor even if one has to say only one word. So there's that, too.

The game looks fantastic and sounds great, rendering a typically diverse selection of Mario worlds and giving all of them plenty of character. The control is accurate, but Mario retains the high degree of inertia he exhibited in New Super Mario Bros., and it may be a while before you get used to it and stop sliding off the edges of things. The camera can be a bit difficult at times, but is mainly fine. The only real gripe I have in the "make it go" category is that sometimes when the gravity is doing odd things the controls become... strange. I've had it happen where I hold one direction constantly on the stick and Mario runs in a circle. I know this sort of control scheme can be handled in a more fluid and usable manner, since I've seen it done in other games; still, this is almost a nitpick. Control mainly works fine, it's just the oddly-shaped planetoids that have issues.

If you like platformers at all, I strongly suggest picking this game up, even if Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine turned you off. It's a much more traditional jumpy-man game than either of those, and has a whole lot of quirky fun in it. Besides, you have to hand it to Bowser; so what if his last big evil plot was something as sinister as "wreck Mario's vacation" and still failed? Guy has enough self-confidence to dust himself off and create a mad scheme to conquer the entire universe for the next round. You have to admire that.

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