Super Mario Odyssey was hands down one of, if not THEE most anticipated game of 2017 for me and pretty much any other self-respecting Nintendo die hard. Having finished the game and completed most of the extras I can tell ya that Odyssey is something special and the shake-up that the franchise has needed for a while now. The main shift in focus here is taking the typical Mario level designs and moulding them into more dense, exploration heavy sandboxes. Mario’s movement and “power ups” also get a pretty significant overhaul here thanks to his new companion Cappy who allows Mario to not only double his base move set (allowing him to throw Cappy to attack enemies, interact with objects, use as a platform to gain more air, etc.) but Mario can now “capture” various living things in the world (like tanks, bullet bills, or hammer bros) lending him a near endless array of new challenges.
You know how the story goes; Bowser kidnaps Peach and you have to save her again. Different this time is that now Bowser wants to marry Peach (prolly out of wedlock for all of the koopalings they’ve made together… Also they almost got married before in that Super Paper Mario game many years back...) and so now Bowser’s travelling all over the globe terrorising different kingdoms as he makes preparations for the wedding ceremony. He’s also got this gang of rabbit thugs called the Broodals doing a lot of the dirty work for him and they make for some interesting new boss designs. Each Kingdom you travel to is it’s own sandbox not unlike something you’d see in Super Mario 64 or Sunshine. There are some seriously creative concepts for these kingdoms to; like with a prehistoric inspired kingdom, a cooking inspired one, and even an urban inspired New Donk City with life-like humans walking around (and Pauline as the friggin mayor). Each new kingdom presented a variety of unique challenges and captures that made them feel nicely distinct from one another.
The big difference here from something like a Mario 64 kingdom are that these worlds are more densely packed than in previous games with bucket loads of power moons (i.e. this game’s equivalent to stars) scattered and placed in every single corner of the map. You get power moons for completing everything from boss battles, platforming challenges, timed challenges, these sweet little 2D 8-bit Mario challenges, or mini games (like RC Car Racing, fishing, volleyball, etc.). But I found that you’d hands down get rewarded the most through sheer discovery and world exploration. I found the shift away from platforming challenges and into world discovery really refreshing, however I sometimes felt as though the game went a LITTLE overboard with just how densely packed the power moons are and how easy most of them are to obtain. I occasionally felt like a housekeeping lady just wandering around a kingdom picking up towels with little to no effort lol, but the game’s epic main story objectives, platforming exercises, interesting capture abilities and the stellar boss encounters kept me from ever feeling bored for too long.
I didn’t always feel like the game reached quite as far as it could of some of the time. There are a small handful of Kingdoms in particular that I feel like could have been more expansive and better fleshed out. Like with the noire inspired Cap Kingdom and the prehistoric Cascade Kingdom; they’d seemed so significant and enticing from the game’s marketing materials but I was disappointed to find out that they pretty much surmount to short tutorial levels. Even the T-Rex capture that everybody freaked out about at E3 was pretty lame, you essentially just use it to break some blocks LOL. I don’t wanna spoil much more about these kingdoms but there were definitely some other kingdoms I felt weren’t designed to their full potential, there’s two kingdoms in particular that I thought had great premises but were literally only utilised for a single boss battle. I’d say that this complaint applies to a minority of the overall kingdom line up and even the content that does exist in these smaller kingdoms is generally quality stuff.
I think Odyssey’s strengths are in presenting a new exploratory way to progress through the game and in keeping the game-play feeling fresh as often as possible. The game successfully introduces gameplay updates and concepts like having you purchase Mario a variety of outfits to wear, adding in checkpoints, fast travel, maps, and changing up the death system to losing coins as opposed to reaching a game over screen. I’ve played legitimately every main line Mario game and I gotta say; it’s been a while since I’ve played a Mario game that had this many “new” elements to it, and even a handful of totally unexpected surprises. The game’s presentation also pops on the Switch, with very colourful and smooth graphics along with a groovy and well-orchestrated soundtrack (even throwing in a couple of vocal numbers courtesy of Pauline). Mario Odyssey is really just tightly designed all around with Nintendo’s trademark refinement. I don’t think it’s really possible to not enjoy at least something about this game so I’d recommend it to just about anyone who’s ever touched a video game before.
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incredible game on first experience - still amazing another playthrough and a half down the line but that element of discovering every new moon has sort of faded. like cool now i have to kick that one rock around a million times again to get that moon... and i would do it forever cus its still fun. even the shitty moons are still fun
i liked this game but man I thought this was boringly easy despite how pretty the worlds are and how enjoyable it is to move around as mario here. The hat mechanic gives you a lot of fun playstyles to try; but trying out all captures and the onslaught of how many Moons there were to collect made me feel like I was playing with a bunch of toys that look pretty to impress me than playing an engaging or challenging video game experiece. There’s some other Marios or even other random platformers I enjoy much more than this, honestly.
I played this on my cousin's switch when we were camping and it was fun, and its really enjoyable to watch - one of the only titles that makes me consider getting a switch
Nintendo's TRUE triumph in emergent game design. A magnum opus, and the first 3D Mario to deserve to be called the successor to the almighty 64. 100/10