The Super Mario Galaxy Review With No Rating

Mark usually helps me develop half-baked ideas about whatever video game I'm currently playing and we've been talking about Super Mario Galaxy recently. Mostly about how it borrows thematically from Super Mario Bros. 3 but sticks with the dynamics of Super Mario 64. Partially spurred on by the survey from Nintendo I got the other day which asks "How likely are you to buy a sequel to Super Mario Galaxy?", I've gathered some of my thoughts together.

You'll notice that SMG has the second-highest spot on Game Rankings (and previously the top spot) which is misleading, to say the least. There was a rash of perfect ratings right before and right after it came out that are to blame for that and if you've played the game for more than 10 minutes, you'd realize it's imperfections as well. Equally unfortunately, there were a couple ultra-negative reviews as well but that's at least predictable with a well-liked release.

There are some flaws with the game which immediately drive the rating down from a perfect score but I also have a habit of comparing Mario games to their predecessors which isn't unfair, I think - the goal being to have as much fun with a new version of Mario as you had with the old version while allowing for improvements from system-to-system. So, maintaining the concepts that are fun while allowing for a reasonable amount of change. I'm not really concerned with the flaws as much as I am with existing elements of Mario games that could have made the game more fun, ultimately by giving it a much needed bump in replay value.

There are two different types of persistence in Mario games. The first is world persistence, which Mario has only ever used in binary form. That is; in a series of levels this particular one is either complete or incomplete. This stems to create the dynamics of "which path do I take?" and "gather this many stars to move to the next world" but nothing you do in a level (short of getting a star or reaching a flagpole) effects your experience if you go back to that level. The only feature that I can recall that violates that rule is Super Mario World's yellow/green/red/purple blocks which you had to "enable" and take effect in previous levels and that's more action-to-the-past then real level persistence. I wonder if the idea of level persistence is written off when designing Mario games simply based on the argument that "levels aren't fun once you break all the blocks" which really only addresses full-persistence when you can very successfully implement partial persistence (the blocks come back!).

The second type is character persistence which Mario has classically been well aware of and only dropped with M64 and newer games (with the exception being New Super Mario Bros. for the DS). This is a tragedy of gaming! A long, long time ago, Mario used to be able to take his fire-power from one level to another. Combined with limited or progressing power-availability this feature single-handedly brings replayability to traditionally single-play levels by hinting at secret locations the first time around and revealing when the player eventually attains the relevant powerup. I'm sure this requires some deep level design thought about how to hint at secret locations but not confuse the player into thinking they should be able to get there without a powerup.

SMG has a modified world persistence which isn't constrained by path but by how many stars you have. Eh. It's different and achieves the same effect so my gut feeling that says that paths are better than stars is simply a nostalgic response. The partial level persistence could be improved, I think the fact that certain stars are only available when comets are in orbit was supposed to achieve the same replayability but complicated itself when the levels started branching into separate maps with timers and whatnot. More secret stars! Extra content based on skill, not luck! SMG manages to just piss me off with this next one though: the only powerup that doesn't go away until you screw up is the bee suit. Even firepower has a timer on it - how is that fun? Not only should they persist until you get hit, they should persist from one level to another. As I mentioned before, it does take a little more effort to design the levels appropriately but there are always creative ways to constrain! For example, if you didn't have enough room to build up some speed in SMW, there was no way you were going to fly anywhere.

Okay, I've gone on enough. SMG is a really fantastic game and I'm having a lot of fun playing it but I probably won't touch it again once I get all the stars. There are ways to fix that problem and make a great game really timeless.