Super Mario Odyssey is a game that I thought I’d like much
more than I did, and it’s puzzling, because I enjoyed my time with it quite a
bit. For all that it has, and it has a lot, it feels somehow empty, and the
experience, though memorable in its own right, was one I finished with fairly
mixed feelings. This has been a tough review to write, in part because of the
excellent quality and the high level of polish that Mario’s latest adventure
brims with at every turn. The eagerly-anticipated return of the Mario series to
an open world, sandbox-style game is something I greatly appreciated, and
there’s absolutely no denying that 3D Mario controls as excellently as ever and
that there’s no shortage of fun to be had. I guess I just expected it to be more
memorable. I thought it would push the envelope more for the Mario series than
it does, that it would evolve its storytelling, that the various kingdoms would
be larger, that they’d feel more connected to each other than via a static map, that the bosses would present just a bit more of a
challenge… that the game would be just a little bit more daring.
But let’s step back for a second and take a look at how the
Mario series has gotten to this point.
Though Super Mario 64 arguably helped to invent what we now
know of as open world gaming, the Mario games shied away from this
approach as time went on. Super Mario Sunshine kept its open world aspects
fairly intact, but then Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii and its sequel came
along. Both were incredible games, but both were unmistakably designed more along the
lines of the quickly-paced “start-to-finish” level style of Mario’s 2D incarnations.
This served as a major contrast to the more exploration-driven 3D series up
until that point. Galaxy 2 went as far as to eliminate the idea of an
explorable 3D hub world almost entirely, a direction more or
less maintained by the similarly linear Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U.
The return of exploration to Super Mario Odyssey was
much-celebrated, though it doesn’t entirely manage to re-create the scope of 64 and Sunshine, mainly because its world is broken up into various smaller
“kingdoms” which are separated by a repeating cutscene/load time after being
selected off of a 2D map. The locations themselves are of course fully explorable,
but the disconnect between them takes away from the feeling that this is a
singular world to play around in. There’s an attempt to connect the kingdoms
through hidden paintings that warp you from one to a secret area on
another; an incredibly cool concept that unfortunately plays only a small role
in the game. Similarly, characters from some kingdoms make appearances in
others, which is another great idea, but these both feel more like
window-dressing than a solid force that pulls together what’s otherwise a
fairly fragmented world. None of these fragments are quite as impactful as
Super Mario 64’s Peach’s Castle, in large part because it was a singular,
seamless world, which Odyssey’s simply isn’t.
The strangest thing for me in retrospect is that Mario
Odyssey arguably peaks with one of the game’s earliest kingdoms. It surprisingly
isn’t the Metro Kingdom, whose New Donk City was predominantly featured in the
game’s marketing, but rather the Sand Kingdom, the first you get to explore
after two small tutorialized ones. Whether it’s the little village of
Tostarena, surrounded by expansive sand dunes and underground worlds, modes of
transportation including zipping through electric wires and riding on creatures
called Jaxis, or a story-driven change to a beautiful, haunting night time
reminiscent of Breath of the Wild, the first major world you get to sink your
teeth into is truly amazing and sets a high standard for the rest of the game. It’s
a mark that the following kingdoms don’t seem quite able to meet. They all have
their own story missions to complete, their little NPC areas, their unique
features and currencies. But none match the expansive scope and true sense of
adventure felt in Mario Odyssey’s first couple hours in the Sand Kingdom, the
only one for me which captures the adventurous spirit that Mario Odyssey
seems aiming to deliver. Though to be fair, a couple of the others do come
close.
It’s initially a bummer, but thankfully the
incredible level
of personality and amount of sheer invention and sense of detail
throughout Mario
Odyssey helps to lessen the disappointment. The Metro Kingdom has a
jazzy,
vibrant feel to it, with a bustling sense of activity and vibe that I
certainly
don’t remember having seen in a Mario game before, while sunset in
Bublaine of
the Seaside Kingdom is something truly beautiful and relaxing to boot.
The many
kingdoms that you get to explore across the world of Mario Odyssey brim
with
such a sense of life that I couldn’t help but wish more had been done
with
them. The story mission that takes place in each one is over rather
quickly,
and due to the incredibly small role that the NPC characters in each
world play
in the proceedings, little seems to be truly at stake despite the dire
circumstance each kingdom finds itself in. It’s here that the Mario
series’
historic focus on minimal storytelling proves to be a hindrance; in an
imaginative world filled with charming characters and excellent bits of
dialogue, it’s simply a missed opportunity that none are given the
chance to
leave a mark. Even your companion Cappy, who’s relegated mainly to
repeating
gameplay hints to you when traveling from one kingdom to the other, has
little
to say or offer beyond the game’s opening hours. The main story
meanwhile can't wait to let you to travel to the next kingdom, and
though you’re welcome to hang back and continue exploring and collecting
Moons, (Odyssey’s
version of Stars or Shines) it made me wonder what the game’s hurry was,
and
why it couldn’t give us a more substantial story to experience on each
world
before telling us to rush off to the next one.
That said, the benefit of an exploration-driven Mario game is that you
can play it how you want. As was mentioned, you’re able to hang around
and continue exploring and collecting Moons, and while many of the kingdoms aren’t as
large as I’d have liked, they almost all have no shortage of secrets and
tons to interact with. Mario Odyssey’s
platforming itself, with takes place in either 2D or 3D, is for the most part
self-contained, separated through a warp function from the exploration. As far
as 3D Mario is concerned, the platforming sections don’t have quite the same
magic of those featured in the Galaxy series, or even 3D World, with Odyssey focusing
more on its exploring and collecting. I think a better balance was there to be
had, but it’s nevertheless always fun to stumble across a hidden platforming
section, and the game does a pretty good job of letting you know if there are
still Moons or currency to collect within them, or whether you’ve already found
all there is to find, which is helpful.
Visually, Mario Odyssey is often quite gorgeous. The
kingdoms you explore have incredibly distinct visual styles, and the game
handles itself well at 60FPS (save for some understandable stuttering in the bustling
New Donk City) which is a pretty great accomplishment given the speed and fluidity
in which Mario can move through the non-linear level design. As with much of the
rest of the game, I wished its art direction took a few more risks in
places (an equally derivative food kingdom replaces the standard fire kingdom,)
but when Mario Odyssey does try something new, such as a massive dragon boss that’s
very much out of the realm of what you’d expect from a Mario game, it pays off.
I just wish there was more of it. The music similarly doesn’t break down any walls, but it’s often
pleasant and atmospheric, and, on rare occasions such as a quiet night
in the Sand Kingdom or the jazziness of New Donk City, manages to stand
out.
I’d like to end by repeating the point that Super Mario Odyssey is a
lot of fun. I don’t want my disappointment with it to turn you away from giving
it a shot yourselves, especially if you’re excited about it. As a showing of
the Switch’s capabilities, in providing a charming world with endless hours of
gameplay and content to access, including an incredibly lengthy post-game, and
in delivering a quality title that fans would expect from Nintendo’s main
mascot, Mario Odyssey certainly does its job.
It’s possible that Breath of the Wild, which came out in the same year
that this game did, took some of the wind from its sails, as it did for
many of its fellow open world-style games. I tried my best
while playing not to compare the two, because they’re of course very
different experiences, but it was hard not to wish that the spirit of
some of that game’s more daring innovations made it across to Odyssey’s
development, especially as its opening hours seemed to indicate that it
might have. Doing my best to
remove the latest Zelda game from the equation, however, Mario Odyssey
still
plays it a little too safe for my liking. The idea of an epic,
world-traversing
Mario game had many possibilities, but the decision to keep its
characters and narrative aspects firmly
in the background, and the decision to break its world up into many
smaller-than-expected pieces goes against these possibilities and leaves
us with a fun and
polished, albeit a somewhat predictable, experience, and as a result one
just not
as adventurous as I’d have hoped for.
An enjoyable game and a fun way to try out your brand new
Switch, just don’t expect it to do much to innovate or to really take this
series to places it hasn’t gone before, despite the huge possibilities its
concept offered to do so.
3.5/5
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