You don’t have to read the rest of this post. I’ll sum it up for you here: I loved everything about Super Mario Odyssey, and I think it’s going to go down as one of the best platformers of all time.
That’s it. Y’all can go home now.
Still there? Okay. Buckle up at how I gush about my time with the game at E3.
Nintendo is looking to set the bar extremely high with Odyssey, and not just in the industry but internally as well. It’s absolutely stunning, and the level of detail is gushing with delight. It feels massive (Odyssey is a fitting title) and the levels endless. The levels are laid out in giant “kingdoms,” opening up new areas as we explore and accomplish tasks. This leads to infinite treasures to find, enemies to possess, and secret areas to explore.
It’s incredibly ambitious, and easy to (happily) get lost in.
Visually, it’s charming as all heck. The animations are smooth and full of life, unseen like this in a Mario game before. I often found myself staring at enemies for too long just to watch them move around or interact with their environment. Bright, poppy colors are becoming the standard for Nintendo’s Switch games, and Odyssey hits all those notes.
Mario controls as expected; little has changed from the Gamecube’s Sunshine, as the plumber still jumps, double jumps, triple jumps, and butt-stomps as normal. With verticality a big part of the experience, understanding depth is still important to knowing how to traverse areas and obstacles.
Using Cappy, Mario’s hat friend, felt good; the game allows for both button and motion controls, so tilting the Joy-Cons in one direction activates a spinning cap attack, while shaking them activates another. It’s a little tacked on, and I don’t know if it’ll be my preferred method of playing the game, but it didn’t detract from the experience. Capturing (possessing) enemies and objects with the hat is done with an easy button press. It’s easy to want to throw it at everything, and so I do. “What does this do?” runs through my mind as I chuck poor Cappy around, capturing enemies galore. Mastering the use of the hat feels like dancing, as spinning and attacking can be prolonged, creating neat combos as the cap flies around everywhere.
The timed demo gives us access to two areas: New Donk City and Sand Kingdom.
New Donk City
The hub world of Odyssey, Donk is set up to let us travel around and explore the city, go into buildings and interact with its denizens. The aesthetic is set up to be more realistic, with life-like human proportions, taxis roaming around, and musicians on the sidewalk. Since everyone is in suits, it feels like a mix of modern New York with gangster era Gotham. Mario himself is in a suit and tie, and looks fresh AF.
We can bounce on the hood of a taxi to get to higher places, climb girders and traffic lights, or enter shops to buy hats and outfits. There’s a jazz club in the area where we meet the city’s Mayor, a rooftop cafe, and construction site. THIS IS ALL IN A MARIO GAME.
It’s expansive, to say the least.
Breakable barrels and crates are everywhere, allowing us to find coins and Moons, a sort of secret collectible akin to Shine Suns in previous Mario games. Picking up Moons gives us a date & time stamp, so that we know when we grabbed them. It’s a nice touch to help us remember if and when we found a secret. It’s worth possessing everything and seeing what we could do with it, especially when finding secret areas. I was a taxi with a mustache, which made me a Lyft driver I think?
We can speak to almost of the citizens, and they can sometimes give us hints or just random conversation. It’s both jarring and hilarious to see the portly Mario next to a lifelike dude in a gray suit on his way to work.
Sand Kingdom
We enter Tostarena Town in the Sand Kingdom. This is more of a traditional level, with a specific goal to get to the end. Something strange has happened in the hot Mexican inspired desert, as ice is poking through the ground and the world is cooling. Mario shivers and the citizens here are freaked out. It’s great to see the juxtaposition of ice crystals in a sort of Day of the Dead world. Skull-faced citizens wear ponchos and sombreros — which Mario can buy as well — and the adobe homes have little ice cubes cracking through.
Along the way are black Koopa flags to use as respawn markers should we perish. There are sand dunes, stompable tiles to find secret rooms, and coins galore. We can hop across floating platforms, or throwing our hat onto Bullet Bill and zip across the same area. In one section, we’re required to toss Cappy at switches as we float across a ravine, blasting apart obstacles that endanger us.
In a couple of the areas, Mario can enter a pixelated pip to switch into a 2D sidecrolling mode, with visuals reminiscent of the original 8 bit Mario and feeling a bit like heiroglyphics. Bullet Bills attack us and coin blocks give us something to collect. It’s like the 3D to 2D flip in Nintendo’s own Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds on the 3DS.
Open world perfection
It’s clear that Odyssey has been in development for a long time and by a staff that loves what made Super Mario 64 so groundbreaking, delivering on everything asked for in an “open world Mario” checklist with plenty of extra credit. It’s huge, it’s joyful, and I want to go back to it again and again. When it releases in October, Super Mario Odyssey has a great chance at being one of the most memorable platforming experiences in a long, long time.
Resume gushing.
Super Mario Odyssey recently took home a SideQuesting Best of E3 2017 Award
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