Super Mario Odyssey

Super Mario Odyssey is a marvelous achievement, not only successfully moving the series back to its sandbox structure, but also expanding it in exciting new ways. It’s a game brimming with energy and creativity, one that fully develops its many ideas and lets the player free to explore its fascinating worlds packed with things to do and discover.

The story starts with – how else? – Bowser kidnapping Princess Peach. The king of the Koopas – looking simply dashing in a white tuxedo – kicks Mario out of his flying ship, takes Peach as an unwilling – Mario can only hope – bride, and crushes the poor plumber’s cap under his spiky boot. Luckily for Mario, he falls from the sky right on top of Cap Kingdom, a land ruled by ghastly – but friendly – sentient caps, where he quickly befriends one – a cap called Cappy –, who had his sister also kidnapped by Bowser to serve as a crown for Peach.

Cappy is responsible for one of Odyssey‘s biggest gameplay hooks, serving multiple functions when we throw him around: he can destroy small obstacles, like wooden crates, serve as a temporary platform we can jump to – as we get more comfortable with the controls – and, more importantly, Cappy can possess enemies, turning us into them for as long as we like.

We can become a Bullet Bill and hover around the level to reach otherwise inaccessible areas or explode a distant enemy. We can become a Chain Chomp and use its attack to break down stone walls barring passageways. We can possess a wiggler and stretch ourselves between small platforms that would otherwise be difficult to jump onto. In other words, Cappy expands the function of each enemy in the game, as they are now not only obstacles in our way but also tools at our disposal. In Super Mario Odyssey‘s first stage, the game makes it clear that it intends to explore this mechanic to the fullest, going beyond Mario’s usual foes: in Fossil Falls, we can possess nothing less than a T-Rex – who looks very funny with Mario’s cap and mustache – and become capable of destroying any enemy and barrier in our way.

The brilliance of this mechanic is that, save for a few enemies that work as one-time gimmicks, such as the T-Rex, it expands Mario’s moveset, opening up exploration by increasing the array of places we can reach. If we possess a Cheep-Cheep, the cute little fish of Mario’s universe, for example, we can swim to deeper places without fear of drowning. But, more importantly, these powers also allow us to move faster and easier through the environments, making traversal a fun, hassle-free experience, which is incredibly important in a game about exploration: there’s a level where we can even possess power lines – yes, you read that right – and move as an electric ball through them with incredible speed.

Super Mario Odyssey is constantly asking us to engage with its systems and mechanics, so it’s no wonder that one of the game’s most frequent challenges is a race, as it pushes us to find shortcuts in the levels and play with Cappy’s abilities to reach the goal as fast as possible.

These “possessions” not only hand Mario new powers but also new weaknesses. When he’s a Wiggler, for example, he can stretch around making adorable accordion sounds, but he’s unable to jump, and when he’s a Cheep-Cheep, he can explore vast lakes with ease, but barely move on land: these trade-offs keep things balanced, preventing us from staying as a specific creature for too long.

Some of them are even puzzles: when we become a Goomba, for example, we can jump onto another and start to stack them up. The puzzle usually involves creating a tower of Goombas high enough to reach where a female one is standing all by her lonesome and win her heart – it’s better, however, if we don’t dwell on the morality of these actions for too long. We shouldn’t ask difficult questions, such as what would Peach think of this and what would the female Goomba say to the police, seduced by a man pretending to be someone else.

In the second level, the Sand Kingdom, we become acquainted with Super Mario Odyssey’s overall structure. The kingdom is a vast desert area with a Mexican-inspired town – where friendly skeletons wear ponchos and sombreros –, an oasis, and a floating Inverted Pyramid. We are given a clear objective, to follow a beacon of light to acquire a Moon – the game’s main form of progression – but we are supposed to wander off the path, visit the oasis, talk with the Skeleton Mariachis, and explore the desert. It’s only by partaking in optional challenges and discovering secrets that we can acquire the minimum number of Moons required to progress to the next main Kingdom.

Moons in Super Mario Odyssey are the reward for various kinds of actions.  There are some – the biggest ones – that are behind scripted platform sequences and boss fights, being the ones that function much like the Stars in Super Mario 64: they’re the rewards for beating the game’s main set-pieces. But Moons are much more freeform in their structure than Stars, allowing Odyssey to be much more complex than the already brilliant N64 classic.

Here, there are Moons hidden away behind conspicuous holes in the walls or inside crevices: they reward us if we pay careful attention to the environment.  Some invite us to play around the levels and figure out how to reach certain places, such as the one that lies at the top of Sand Kingdom’s town – they reward our problem-solving skills. Others are behind minigames, such as hitting the Moon symbols at a store to get a jackpot. Some require a bit of platform prowess to reach: there’s an underground passage in the desert ruins that leads to a Moon, but this passage hides another Moon that expects us to successfully wall-jump between giant pillars to reach it – secret passages in the game always hide a much more difficult second Moon. There are some Moons, of course, that are protected by harder enemies and optional bosses. And many simply reward our curiosity: why does that bird flying around the desert seem to glow or why does that spot on the sand make the controller vibrate? Some are even locked behind specific puzzles, such as the pictures we find across the levels that hint (usually, in an obscure way) to where a secret Moon is hidden. There’s no lack of variety and creativity in Super Mario Odyssey and we are always engaging in some kind of different activity.

Most levels in the game are fairly big open areas that we can explore in the order we want. Odyssey’s aesthetic is built around the idea of traveling, with the game’s map being designed as a tourist brochure, offering us descriptions of each Kingdom’s famous attractions and the history of the places. This means that while trying to save the love of his life, Mario is taking the opportunity to go on a guided tour of foreign countries and get to know them better. His priorities are always in the right place throughout the adventure: while Bowser is trying to acquire special adornments for the wedding, such as a legendary ring that is bigger than Peach’s whole body – he’s a gentleman who believes she deserves nothing less than the best of the best –, Mario is jumping rope with strangers on the street, racing with toy cars, harassing poor Goombas, and playing beach volleyball with snails.

For this aesthetic to work, it’s important that each Kingdom feels less like a generic “water level” and “fire level” and more like a proper place that exists in Mario’s world, boasting a distinct identity. Lake Kingdom, which used to house Peach’s newfound dress, for example, is obsessed with fashion. It has zippers – the locals consider them an art piece – adorning walls, and when we possess them with Cappy – yes, we can possess even zippers – we can simply open the wall as if it were a piece of jeans. And if we stand in front of the underwater dome that houses the kingdom stores and look up, we can get a glimpse of a beautiful otherworldly dress moving in the water, which gives the whole place an ethereal vibe.

Mount Volbono, in turn, is half about food and half about its funky colors. It has corncobs functioning as rotating platforms on top of pink lava in front of a purple mountain rendered in a strange low poly art style. Its town is inhabited by weird humanoid forks, who need us to gather golden turnips for their special stew, and it has an Italian-inspired musical theme: the result is something entirely unique.

One of the secrets of 3D Mario games is that it feels like anything can happen in them. They’re games in which we’re constantly being surprised by what’s occurring on the screen, and Super Mario Odyssey is no exception. Sometimes, we’ll go down a pipe and instead of appearing in another area, we’ll find ourselves inside the nearby wall, playing the game now in 2D, just like the classics. Sometimes, we’ll be fighting the most relatable dragon of all time in a gothic arena straight out of a Castlevania. Sometimes, we’ll be answering the riddles of a cranky Sphynx while underwater, and realizing that they really dislike when we get them right. Sometimes, will be searching the skies with a telescope and suddenly spot the very same Sphynx flying… with a sail, because how else would a Sphynx fly?

Super Mario Odyssey is a fantastic platformer, it’s creative, well-designed, and fun. Packed with content – there are more than 800 Moons to find –, the game once more proves why its series is so praised for offering genre-defining experiences.

January 05, 2024.