Super Mario Odyssey Review

Oh the places you will go.

Click here to donate to my Patreon! If you read my reviews and want to see more and want to be a Patron for a site I love, please donate and become a supporter!

So I think we can safely say that 2017 was a stellar year for the Nintendo Switch. At the very beginning of the year, we had a press conference announcing the Switch, and since then the Switch has been on the forefront of the gaming world. Like it or not, the Nintendo Switch was the biggest video game related story to come out of 2017. It was a console that put Nintendo back on the map, and has already sold millions in a little over 7 months.

Most importantly though, the Nintendo Switch has had a deluge of fantastic games that came out, Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 2, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Mario & Rabbids, and that's not even getting into the third party and Indie support. As a Nintendo fan, it makes me happy to see the Switch do well, and it makes me even happier that I'm able to play a bunch of great games on the system. There's no reason for anyone to be crying Nintendoom is all I'm saying.

But one of the most intriguing things about the Nintendo Switch reveal was the sudden announcement of Super Mario Odyssey. It was announced at the Switch reveal, and lo and behold, it was given a 2017 release date. A new Mario game was announced with a short wait time from announcement to release, and the game has been building up steam ever since E3 with it's huge demo and even crazier trailer. So I was looking forward to the game, but not by a huge amount.

I'll be perfectly honest when I say that while I enjoy Mario games, they aren't my favorite games Nintendo makes. I usually think that Mario games are excellent video games for beginners, gateway games in a way. You play a Mario game, enjoy it, then you start looking around for other similar games to play. They're not hard to beat, but challenging to master, and with the exception of two Mario games, I've never 100% completed them, but it was never for a lack of effort. I just got genuinely bored with them. I beat the main campaign, called it quits, and moved on to something that was more captivating for me.

 Super Mario Odyssey commanded me to beat it and I was more than happy to have at it.

We all know the story by now. Bowser kidnaps Peach and Mario needs to rescue her, but this time with hats! Mario loses his hat after Bowser beats him within an inch of his life, shooting Mario off to the Cap Kingdom. There. he meets a little ghost hat named Cappy that wants to travel with you to save his sister, who was also kidnapped by Bowser. So it's a big chase across the world as Mario tries to rescue Peach from Bowser and his new wedding planners, the Broodals.

So Super Mario Odyssey was a gave I didn't expect to engross me as much as it did. I played it whenever I had the chance to, but I can't quite put my finger on why. From a gameplay perspective, Odyssey is a tried and true Mario game. You run, you jump, and you collect a set number of items, in this game Moons, in certain world by using your skills. I know that a lot of people have compared this game to Super Mario 64, but I always thought it was much more similar to Super Mario Sunshine more than anything else.

Sunshine had large, sprawling worlds that you could go to and do multiple things in. Sure, you really couldn't go out of order in that game like 64, but there were still plenty of Blue Coins to collect and a ton of little things that you could do just for fun. The Moons in Odyssey are almost exactly like the Blue Coins from Sunshine. They're littered throughout the game and you can get stupid amounts of them. You don't need that many Moons to complete the game, I think it's a little over 100 to get to Bowser, but there are a grand total of 883 Power Moons in the game, and that's not even including the ones you can get post game. There are a ludicrous amount of Moons to get, and you get almost all of them by doing different things.

You can obviously get Moons by beating bosses or doing platforming sections, but a lot of Moons are acquired by doing puzzles and world specific challenges. Maybe you'll need to fish for a Moon, or use a specific costume to get into an area, or maybe you'll need to search for a secret portal to another world. It's never boring to collect the Moons because you can get all of them in different ways. I never felt like it was a slog to get the Moons in certain levels because they all presented their own challenge. That isn't to say the game is hard though. I actually think it's one of the easiest Mario games in terms of difficulty, but it's challenge comes from deducing what you need to do to get a Moon. You can talk to a parrot to get a hint, and if you need a bigger hint you can pay a Toad to reveal to you the location of it, but even then those aren't guarantees that you'll be able to figure out how to get the Moon.

And how can you get these Moons? Well you can obviously go through platforming sections, but you'll probably use the game's new Capture feature to get a Moon. Now Mario can throw his hat at enemies and send them to the Sunken Place from Get Out as he commandeers their bodies. You can take over 52 kinds of objects, where they're enemies that will hunt you, inanimate objects blocking your way, or obstacles that are themselves the puzzle. All of them have their own features and can be used the navigate the world in their own unique way. You can take control of a tank to shoot at enemies, a long legged creature to raise your height, a Goomba to form Goomba towers, and yes, even humans.

That brings me to one of the aspects that has a lot of people weirded out by the game; the visual style. People have been really put off by the fact that there are humans in the game, and I mean actual humans you may see in a GTA game, and a T-Rex that contrasts directly with the more cartoony elements of the series. Hell, some people are even put off by the very low-poly inspired Luncheon Kingdom where everything is made out of polygonal objects. While a lot of people don't like how it looks, I think it's pretty charming all thing's considered. The whole point of the game is seeing Mario travel around the world and seeing different locales. Of course not all of them are going to be just like the Mushroom Kingdom. Plus it gives the series to try something different visually and allow the game to stand out because of it.

All of it is highly engaging to see and play, but that's to be expected. A Mario game is polished to a mirror shine? You don't say. Even as I'm explaining this game to anyone who doesn't know about it, I'm trying to figure out what makes Odyssey so special as a Mario game. I mean, what I just described can be applied to any game in the series. The gameplay is fantastic, the visuals are enticing, and there's a lot of things to do in the game. But what makes Odyssey truly shine?

Honestly, I think it's just how the game presents itself. Sure, you can just beat the game and that's it, but unlike every other game in the series, there are legitimate reasons for continuing your adventure. You can unlock a huge swath of costumes just to try out and play with. There are three extra worlds to explore that put your Mario skills to the test. If you ever get bored of a world, you can just go to another world and recharge yourself there. The game is completely open to all play styles.

I love Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario 3D World, but those games were always too linear to me. I beat a stage. Hooray. But here, there really is no completing a stage. You can open more of a stage, but you can't really "beat it". Hell, even after I collected every Moon, costume, and Capture in the game, I still revisited worlds just to explore around and have fun. Think about that; I already beat a world, there's nothing left for me to do... and I still hung around just to have fun. I think that's the key to Super Mario Odyssey; you can have fun no matter what you're doing.

Usually I just went to worlds to listen to the fantastic soundtrack. Some worlds mostly just have really quiet ambient music, but other worlds had fantastic songs that I wanted to play on repeat. The best song, by far, is "Jump Up Superstar", the song that's plagued trailers, commercials, and a few key moments of the game, and it sums up the entire game in a nutshell; it's time for an adventure, so strap in, have fun, and just put a big smile on your face.

Video games, at the end of the day, are meant to be fun. Why would you spend $60 on something that you didn't think was fun? Some games are better at being fun than others, but at the end of the day, as much as hardcore gamers don't want to admit it, video games are toys. They're meant to be played and enjoyed by everyone, and Super Mario Odyssey embodies that idea. Anyone can pick up and enjoy it, and that's something that only a few games could ever do. I don't even think Breath of the Wild was able to accomplished what Super Mario Odyssey does so effortlessly. It invites people to come in, play however they want to, and just have a good time.

I could nitpick the game with how the removal of a lives system effectively makes death pointless here, but that's one of the smallest nitpicks I could ever make. I'm unapologetic when I say that this is going to be one of the best games of 2017, and I'll even go so far to say that this is my favorite Mario game now. It just does everything right, and even though I beat the game in a week, I would gladly go back and start a new playthrough just because I can. I know some people are hesitant to pick up a Switch, and I even said to wait awhile when I first reviewed the console. but consider that grace period over. Now you have no reason to not go out and pick up a Switch. It has two of the best video games made in recent memory, it has a fantastic lineup coming, and it's just a creative and fun piece of hardware. Get it, and be sure that Super Mario Odyssey is one of your first games.