i have a bone to pick with 3D mario
ash gets heated about something they are arguably incorrect about
currently playing: scamper shores - daisuke matsuoka (bowser's fury)
just a disclaimer:
this one is not a review. this is far more inflammatory than my usual writing. i am not promising this piece to be impartial, mindful of other perspectives, or even really logical in any great capacity. this is a rant piece, through and through, and an arguably quite hostile one at that. if you enjoy super mario odyssey, or any mario game for that matter, please don't think that i hate you from the way that this reads. i just hate the game! hate the game, not the player. wait.
read on...
it's been strangely funny to me that owlless in mario 64 is considered to be this real showstopper of a trick to get down. doing it quickly under the pressure of a proper speedrun? sure, that takes talent. but there was a little sliver of time there where the ability to do it, period, was something celebrated. my thing is... why? i was doing that shit when i was playing the level for the first time anyway entirely inoccuously because i didn't know that the owl existed. what possible reason would i have, in this platforming game about platforming, to stop my flow, stop everything i'm doing, to go hump and climb a tree for long enough for the owl to come out in the first place? the idea that somehow, that is the more tenable solution, and indeed somehow the intended one to that particular mission in whomp's fortress is emblematic of a larger talking point with a fair few of these 3d mario games; basically any actual platforming being done is kind of taboo. the conversation around these games tends to be how "free-form" they are, and how many "skips" they let you do, when in reality, it's like, i got up to a high place and did a jump what got me a star. okay? that's supposed to be impressive as opposed to like, a basic tenet of a well-designed game, is it? all i'm saying is, if i do a spindash jump in sonic adventure, or tap an airboost to go further in unleashed/colors/gens (pick your poison), or rocket accel boost in heroes, or something of the ilk, fans of those games will herald it as simply platforming, and detractors - typically in my experience very vocal mario fans - will mewl about it "skipping" the level. and yet, do the same with mario, and you're applauded and very much seen as just playing the game. though, recently, i've noticed that if you decide to skip the dogshit unintuitive obfuscated owl, or if you actually try to maximise your toolkit to get around things, or if you god forbid actually use your brainstem to get around challenges in any other than the entirely prescribed milquetoast way, people jump down your throat if you say that you're playing it for the first time. "ingenuity at a glance?" they seem to say. "well, how could you know how to do all that unless you've played it so many times before? you're clearly lying." to which i say this: the only fun i had in odyssey is the few situations where i was able to maximise my moveset's capabilities, which i would say in my experience have been very few and far between without being intimately aware of outright speedrun tech, and every other part of that game, especially where you are arbitrarily forced into using certain transformations to progress (cheep cheep swimming sections, the tank section of new donk, the t-rex in steam garden), is all just so fucking annoying and, more damning, boring.
like, i'm glad that some people can like a mechanic that i don't. i think its a good idea in concept, for what its worth, the idea of enemies becoming power-ups and aides. almost like you're taking that one old minecraft mod that let you kill mobs and morph into them and building a game around that. that sounds sick. but i find that, in practice, it actively dilutes the experience into this sort of haze of simply following the motions without really thinking about it because a lot of these enemies only really possess (haha) one function, and worse, it removes platforming from the platforming game to focus on these mindless setpieces that, granted, can wow you the first time you see them, but are otherwise entirely vapid and disposable. i'd argue it gives nintendo a free pass not to create unique challenges that are fun on a great many playthroughs to follow, but instead are largely just entertaining spectacle. you know? spectacle? the thing that you'll praise when its happening from nintendo, but god forbid that sonic indulge in any sort, despite the fact that in the games that you love to dicksuck so much as "the only good ones" (i.e. 2, 3, mania), there's a great litany of spectacle inherent to them? only difference is, ooh, wait; in sonic, you're going fast. you're not having your basic toolkit that you expect of this character stripped from you for no good reason. hell, even the werehog keeps this - there's no section of a werehog stage, once you're in one, where your moveset is arbitrarily halted, swapped out for something entirely different and you're expected to just... be okay with that and like that. because that is dogshit design and actively goes against the idea of learning your character, how they move, and what you can do with that. movesets throughout a game should be iterative, not transformative, which is why donkey kong bananza works so well in comparison to odyssey. with bananza, you are receiving upgrades at set, linear times, that the stages are therefore designed around because they know exactly when you're gonna have them, and then they can sprinkle challenges that utilise them throughout the points after that happens. with odyssey, well, you could be possessing any one of the approximately 18 billion populants in this stage, so the only times we can design a challenge is when we put you in a room, give you one bloke wandering around with spit running down his face and his flies undone, and let you make the twain meet. mario always goes into either one of these extremes with no exceptions; it's either so obfuscated behind something entirely arbitrary and unintuitive that nobody would think to try if they were playing it for the first time if they were actually just playing the game and weren't smashing their face against the controller, or it's so spoonfeedingly obvious to where any thought in the challenge is entirely lost and it becomes another banal mark on the checklist, maybe with yet another unneeded moveset change (and restriction, frankly!) if you're extremely lucky. it's bad.
the best 3D mario is far and away 3d world and/or bowser's fury because of the integration of power-ups being functionally similar to how they are in 2d mario games, i.e. enhancements to your moveset that aid you but certainly are not required to beat stages. they reward you for having them, sure, but the rewards are almost never a requirement - there are plenty of green stars to go around in 3d world, and a bevvy of cat shines elsewhere in bowser's fury. both games understand this, and instead of indiscriminately ensuring that you have a power-up before a section where it is used in a challenge, they expect you to keep one to that part in the stage, almost like its some sort of challenge that actually expects something of you. further, power-ups are just that: power-ups. not power... switch-my-entire-moveset-to-make-it-a-wholly-different-thing ... its even clunky for me to slander it! i truly abhor how transformations work in odyssey because, to me, it is antithetical to a good power-up's design. your moveset should be enhanced and expanded upon, such as adding a dive and climb with the cat suit. hell, to get even more granular and low-level about this: in super mario bros., the fucking super mushroom lets you smash your fat head against blocks which can lead to you carving your own paths or even discovering secrets, but it is not required to beat the game. it is a fun addition to mario's moveset - this is also true of the fire flower, which simply iterates further on super mario by giving him a projectile, whilst, again, not compromising any of his earlier functionality. this is how a power-up should work. enhancing a moveset, not entirely scrapping it for one sole function like, again, the cheep-cheep swimming sequences. that goes doubly so for when it is shit as banal as swimming. at least a tank has an argument that It Is Kind Of Cool, if you're playing the game for the first time and you're six or inebriated to a point where you may as well be, but who the fuck is excited for Fish Mode? well, i suppose the six years old and inebriated.
on top of this, 3d world is a linearly designed game, which means definitive end goal points of a set of structured levels containing preset intended challenges. this makes for a far more compelling game, in my opinion! you might be able to do a bunch of moves and flips or whatever the fuck in 64, sunshine, galaxy or odyssey, but what, pray tell, is the point, if the act of collecting the stars/shines/padding macguffins isn't fun in the first instance? 64 gets a pass, its the first one of its kind, and its design is just about right for my taste; its not too big, there's a few challenges that'll always be present in a given stage, but a large swathe are unique per those stages, and whilst a few of those objectives truly are unfettered dogshit, they are few and far between. everything after though? well, that's the nintendo classic policy: do not learn, only recall. what do i mean by that? well, every single game after 64, despite boasting larger worlds, better tech, you know, the surface-level console-shifter shit, does not actually design for those larger worlds. rather, they either take the sunshine approach, by largely focusing on one area of any given map for a majority of the shines, or they take the odyssey approach of overcompensating and making 800 entirely fucking pointless throwaway moons out of 'ground pound here' or 'draw a circle' or 'breathe without failure'. that same sensibility of 64 of having bespoke, unique challenges that encompass an entire sandbox have never been met again. even bowser's fury struggles with it, despite it having the distinction of being the first sandbox-esque game since 64 to really make me feel like i was having fun with the game.
it really is funny. typically, with sonic, and people not enjoying their first playthroughs, i think to myself: well, why are you only doing one playthrough? the games have been intended since the beginning to be replayed, to become better. that's why the timer ticks up and not down from sonic 1; it's so you can see your own personal time it took you through a stage in human-readable measurements as opposed to it counting down from 360 half-seconds in super mario bros. it's why rankings exist in a fair chunk of the 3d sonic games. its why missions, red star rings, day and night medals, tapes, records, extra lives and so on, are all throughout the games as bonus collectibles to incentivise you to know the lay of the land and to intimately familiarise yourself with the stages so that you can A) collect all those yummy things, but more prominently, B) get the fastest time possible with that now-hardened knowledge of the level and all of the best routes to travel on. and that's within the game's design language, that's a fundamental part of these games. but people - especially critics - will happily one-and-done a sonic game, be upset that it was short or they didn't get much out of it, lambast it and maybe make a snide complaint about sonic's friends or whatever the internet has latched onto making fun of that year, and laugh their way to the bank as people click and click and click, and this narrative of "sonic not being good" continues because of the fact that they are games designed to harken back to arcade sensibilities, i.e. playing them again and again and again to become autistically good at them. why do you think recent retro throwback games are so short and snacky? it's because the things that they're retro throwback-ing to in the first instance were short to make you replay them! only now, you can make people want to replay the game for less cruel reasons than "i want to steal your lunch money by endearing you with flashing lights as opposed to punching you in the stomach". that replayability derived from getting a bunch of collectibles, or getting a high score, or a good time, or whatever it might be is intensely satisfying because these games are purpose-crafted to facilitate it.
so, for a game so up it's own arse to play the world 1-1 theme multiple times and expect it to make you cream yourself from gusset to knee every time, despite this now being over THIRTY FIVE YEARS of harping on it, and outright making you play dogshit super mario bros. sections that do not control properly and are yet ANOTHER arbitrary intrusion on your actual moveset (at least they sometimes have at least some fundamental basic platforming present, though!), does it offer anything else in its blatant nostalgia pandering- imean, retro throwback? does it have the replayability i seek? no, not in any fucking capacity. the most you can say is that it offers you the opportunity to do some different moves in pursuit of the moons, but it'll never really be much faster as a casual player, and besides, what the fuck would you want to collect more of the little bastards for? they're already boring enough to collect once because of how utterly toothless they are, and already having to get a minimum of 200 of the sods is enough to make me not want to touch the game with a barge pole. there's never really that same sort of owlless magic in odyssey. hell, what's your incentive to explore at all, beyond the utterly superfluous moons, really? regional coins to dress mario up like a moron, that you likely needed to get for a moon in the first place? oh, joy. this skeleton mario outfit that made me smirk for about a tenth of a phemtosecond that has zero consequence was totally worth the fifteen minute excursion into the barren, uninteresting map to trawl through for spare change to buy it.
again - this is something bananza does effortlessly better. it really steals the show; several types of collectibles to work toward and find all throughout the stages, a unique form of traversal from the offset that changes how any two given people will approach them, and implementations of power-up (or transformation?) unique challenges that let you use your knowledge of how those movesets function and interact with each other as well as your environments to go through a little bit of a challenge to earn something. you know. it's designed like an actually compelling video game. teeming with stuff that it wants you to discover and find, and it lets you know this by dangling them tantilisingly just out of reach, asking a little something of you before you get it. you could just smash the ground and eventually find a banandium gem, but why not platform up to a little stage, go in, do a snacky little challenge, and be rewarded possibly up to 3 banandium gems just for participating in the challenge, and likely a fourth hidden away in the stage somewhere? it's marrying the theoretical idea of odyssey, being able to go anywhere and get your shit, with the structured challenges of 3d world, both in the open-world layers and in the more condensed little challenge acts. fuck, even the costume element is better, because it actually provides gameplay benefits and alterations based on the ones that you select! damn i just want to go play donkey kong again because it was so sick. it was everything people had claimed odyssey was to me for years in a package that i actually found compelling enough to see to completion; a feat that i have attempted countless times with odyssey only for it to bore me to tears each and every time i've tried.
i suppose that's as good a closer as any; i bounce off of mario odyssey so easily and so consistently, that it now makes me appreciate the games that do captivate me all the more. thanks, mario odyssey, for reminding me that games don't always have to be that well-designed or even entertaining for them to hold some significance. may your sacrifice as a stepping stone to donkey kong's greatness and superiority be promptly forgotten.
/ rant
