Super Mario Sunshine

I’m going to come right out and say it. I thought this game was awful. As a huge fan of Mario (I’ve been playing the 2D games since the NES days), that hurts to say. Now before you start hurling obscenities in my direction, let me tell you why I think so. 

The game opens up to this wonderful tropical paradise called Delfino Island, and gives you a cool little super soaker jetpack called FLUDD. Sounds awesome! Well that’s where the fun ends. There are 7 different areas with 8 “episodes” each. Throw in the main Delfino Island starting spot and you have a total of 8 places to gather this game’s version of the star, called the Shine. In these episodes we see some horrible design choices, and constant disrespect for the players time.

Mechanically there’s some weird things here. The 8 episodes of each area contain no upward direction for difficulty increase, easing you into mechanics, or teaching you how to utilize FLUDD in interesting ways. The difficulty ramps up and drops down in each episode, leaving you wondering if there’s supposed to be any difficulty curve at all. They game almost expects you to know everything right off the bat. This constant jump (up and down) in difficulty leads to a very jarring experience episode to episode. It’s not enjoyable to play a super easy and boring episode, then be hit with one that just feels hard for the sake of being hard and isn’t rewarding.

Also there was one level where you rode a squid around to collect red coins, but once you collected them all, you could not dismount the squid. So you had to navigate back to the Shine and try not to miss, because if you did you could crash into the side of a boat and have to do it again. It’s an example of both bad mechanics, and disrespecting the players time. Which leads to the next bit.

Let’s talk about how badly it respects your time. I think the most outstanding example is the one level “Secret of Casino Delfino.” Any level with the word secret in it is a level where you lose FLUDD and have to go old school platform hopping. This would be fine except those levels are poorly designed. This one especially. To even open up the doorway to the FLUDD-less section you need to play some casino games, which take about 10-15 minutes to finish if you’re lucky. Mainly because one relies on chance, and the other is a 5×5 grid you have to spray to get tiles to flip over to form the picture of a Shine. Well the tiles all have different sensitivities to being sprayed, and your spray will hit 4 or 5 at a time, causing them to flip and flip. Once you get past this and start the actual platforming, pray you don’t end up getting a game over and have to do it all again. 

The physics in this game are extremely sensitive, and if you have a misstep there’s almost no way to recover. I found myself mastering a certain area, only to have it seem the physics suddenly shifted, and something I’ve done many times before now had a different equation affecting the outcome. I also would clip through barriers and walls falling to my doom all the time.

This may be nitpicking, but they shoved Yoshi in this game with no real purpose. Only two episodes were you required to use Yoshi. You got to use him a little on the main area, Delfino Island, but he had a timer and would blink out of existence if you had him too long. It feels like they only threw him in there because he’s Yoshi, and gave no meaningful thought as to his purpose. You could have removed him entirely and the game wouldn’t have noticed.

I did like how visually appealing the game was, and some of the ideas here weren’t so bad. FLUDD introduced a lot of interesting gameplay that could be improved upon for a better experience.

I think Nintendo got too ambitious and experimental after the success of Mario 64, and it didn’t do them any favors. I know this game is highly regarded so give it a shot for yourself, but I can’t recommend it. Seems bad reviews are harder to keep short, but I had to say my piece about this after how frustrating this game was.