A Review of Super Mario Odyssey

Super Mario Odyssey is a game that holds two firsts for me. It is the first game I played on Switch, which is not much of a special accolade. But what it also came to be was the first 3D collect-athon platformer that I’ve not only completed, but actually enjoyed. I’ve written about my opinions regarding 3D collect-athon platformers before, I’m not sure whether I wrote about it on this blog and I can’t bothered to check, but in summary: I’ve played Spyro the Dragon on PS1 and Banjo-Kazooie on N64, barely getting past the first stage in either of them. The former I found boring and the latter I found catatonically boring.

When it came to 3D Mario games, however, they kept my interest for a little longer but never for too long. I first got Mario 64 on the N64, if only to pad my N64 games library, and I gave it a good hour or so every day for about week. Why I eventually gave up I’ll get to in a moment, but the second 3D Mario game I played was Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the Wii, because it was in the house for some reason. I think my brother bought it for a games night or something like that. Galaxy 2 I gave about as much attention to as I did Mario 64, but I gave up for basically the same reason. I just found it tedious.

I would enjoy both of those games when I was actually doing the platforming and solving the puzzles, but every time I collected a power star at the end of a particular course, I would be booted out of the level back to the hub world. This would have been fine if there was only ever one power star required to be collected per level and the only point to replaying levels was for the sake of 100% completion, but that wasn’t the case. Take Mario 64, in each level there was no less than 6 power stars to find and collect but for every one you collected you were booted back to the Peach’s Castle forcing you to go back to the same portal room and do the whole level again from scratch for the next power star. Similar things can be said for Galaxy 2, and presumably by extension Galaxy 1. And probably Mario Sunshine as well, along with all the other weird ones that may or may not count as main games, depending on who’s counting.

Super Mario Odyssey changed this for the better. You collect a power moon in Odyssey and you stay exactly where you are, or at the most you get transported back to the beginning are of the level. In fact there’s not even a hub world in the game, it’s just the levels. You run and jump your way around the level, solving puzzles, climbing platforms and collecting power moon as you go, completely uninterrupted. I even found myself staying in some of the levels after collecting the required number of power moons simply for the sake of it, because the exploring was just much more fun when I knew that picking something up wasn’t going to abruptly stop the game, and boot me out to some dull hub world. This is ultimately why Super Mario Odyssey was the second of three really absorbing games that I’ve been through recently. Although not as thoroughly life-wasting as Stardew Valley was.

Like Stardew Valley though, Super Mario Odyssey was a game I finished with rather than finished altogether; a lot earlier too. Once I had beaten the final boss and was given the chance to explore the Mushroom Kingdom and Peach’s Castle I did go back to a handful of levels to collect further power moons just for sake of collecting further power moons. I was at around 200-250 power moons when I did a little Googling and discovered that there were over 800 power moons to collect altogether. Checking out the in-game lists per level, I also discovered that even on the less complicated earlier levels there were dozens that I simply had no idea where they could be. At which point I decided to draw a line under Mario Odyssey before it sunk too many hours into it. But unlike Stardew Valley, I think I’ll be going back to the same profile every now and again to gradually gather all the power moons over the course of a couple of years...

...or I might just get sucked back in and collect them all over the course of a few weeks.

Anyway, the third of the three games I’ve been playing recently was... another Mario game on the Switch.

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