Super Mario Sunshine

[Double]

Intro: Thank you Mario, but your good game is in another castle.

Gameplay: Lets just get this out of the way shall we:
10 stars, 7 of which are required to beat the game
30 Blue Coins
A varying amount of red coins, some levels have multiple red coin challenges
100 regular coins
At first glance this doesn’t seem, that much worse than Mario 64 in terms of items, but then there are those 30 Blue Coins. Blue Coins can be used to trade for a star, 10 per star. This is rather annoying on two aspects, it turns the game into a quest hunting for the damn things, and because the game still has 120 stars, it makes the fact it’s shorter than Mario 64 blatantly obvious. In each level there are 30 of those fuckers and they are often chapter specific, while that isn’t bad on itself, I DARE you to find all of them in the game without a guide. Seriously there’s one in the hotel level where you have to spray a piece of furniture that looks like it’s just there for background effect for about five seconds for example. Those kinds of blue coins, the SPRAY RANDOM AREA AND HOPE SOMETHING HAPPENS ones are far, far too common, to the point that most sane people will never complete this game to 100 %. Hell I haven’t, and I got all the shit in DK64.

Enough of Blue Coins sucking, let’s talk about how the game actually plays. Sunshine’s main rap name is the addition of the water pack, FLUDD, this seems good at first until you realize it means Mario has been stripped of nearly all of his moves from Mario 64. Mario can shoot water out of his pack to use as an offensive weapon, or clean shit. More often it’s the first amazingly, I’ll discuss that later. The FLUDD has three attachments, of which only two are really useful, the hover attachment, or crutch attachment, lets Mario hover for period. This makes the game pretty fucking easy as it makes most of the platforming trival. There’s really no need to time jumps if you can just hold down the R button and effectively not fail, ever. The second is the rocket attachment which is used for getting to higher up spots, usually only to get up there. Finally there is the Turbo attachment, which lets Mario run fast… which is used for a star, and couple blue coins. Seriously it’s fucking pointless. The FLUDD may have been a novel idea, but throwing it into Mario leads to it being compared to Mario 64, and the game just can’t. Had this been used in a new game it’d probably not be interpreted as being so bad. Also, had the designed the platforming more in mind with Mario having the FLUDD instead of pretending they were making Mario 65, it’d probably go better (i.e. acknowledging the fact Mario has the hover attachment in sections that involve jumping).

Yoshi makes a return appearance in his first active role in a non-spinoff Mario game sense Super Mario World… and is pretty fucking useless. Yoshi is only used to clear this yellow cheese like substance off a few walls in the game, to gain access to one level, to eat some boos in that level and is used for a platforming puzzle where he turns enemies into platforms. Which brings us to the next subject, Yoshi has “juice” he can spit at people in the same manner as the FLUDD*, which is used on the cheese substance. Depending on your color of Yoshi, if you spray enemies with it they turn into a certain type of platform. This is used all of once in the game. Yoshi has a limited life span and must eat fruit to survive, which changes his color, which determines the type of platforms enemies change into. While this is good and all, Yoshi is so underutilized it’s really laughable. Also Yoshi instantly dies if he touches water. In a game filled with water for the FLUDD, this is pretty silly.

Like Mario 64, the game has a central hub, but unlike Mario 64, everything is in one area. The hub is one of the few improvements over Mario 64, as there is more interaction with it. There aren’t as many hidden areas as in Mario 64, but a few of them will kick your ass. As for the actual areas in the game, this time around the game goes for a strict chapter based progression, in each stage you can’t get the next star until you get the one you are on. Add to this that you must, in order to finish the game, get the 7th star in each world, you end up with an experience that seems a bit forced. This does however let them change the level slightly in a few cases, but it isn't used enough to really justify sacrificing the non-linearity of Mario 64, which was arguably its best aspect.

Occasionally in the game, Mario will have the FLUDD stripped from him, and you can no longer use the cru… err I mean hover attachment. This may seem unfair as you don’t have the long jump either any more, but trust me, these are the most enjoyable sections of the game, because it’s actually possible you can die, unlike the rest of the game where they may as well have given Mario a Starman on loop.

Which brings us to enemies, not only are most of the traditional Mario enemies gone… most enemies in general are gone. If DK64 had shortage of enemies, Mario Sunshine is a fucking ghost town. Instead most of the game is just getting from one point to another, and enemies you do fight are pretty pathetic. Seriously, you will never die in this game by the hands of enemies.
7 out of 20

*Hahaha, bulimia.

Music: Pretty repetitive and uninspiring really. A good majority of the music seems to all be based off the same theme too, so it gets pretty boring. The fact that the game has such a rigid tropical setting also limits what the game presents, as most of the music sounds tropical to match, and it just becomes boring after awhile.
10 out of 15

Translation: The game has a lot more text in that Mario 64, because there are numerous NPCs**. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it either.
10 out of 10

**Not really a complaint with anything in the game, but I want to address the NPCs. They are douchebags. In one case one won't let you enter a pool to grab a star WHICH WOULD HELP SAVE HIS ISLAND APPARENTLY because you don't have swimwear. SO YOU SPEND THE WHOLE LEVEL GOING THROUGH SECRET PASSAGES TO GET A FUCKING PINEAPPLE TO GET YOSHI TO EAT A BOO SO YOU CAN GO TO THE GOD DAMN FUCKING POOL AND ALL BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE SWIMWEAR, GOD.

Length: Sunshine is by far shorter than Mario 64, it has to use the lame Blue Coins to even have the same amount of stars that Mario 64 had. Also something to consider, is that to get to the final area, you’ll have to collect most of the stars from each world anyways, leaving you with only the obscure ones, and blue coin stars left once you beat the game. Thus in order to beat the game, you end up seeing most of the games content already, leaving very little reason to keep playing for 100 %. Sure there are some pretty hard stars to get like the pinball one, and that toxic river one, but these really don’t help the fact this game is short and all the Blue Coins do is make it tedious.
7 Out of 15

Rehash Factor: Mario Sunshine can deserve some credit here, as it doesn’t seem to use much of anything from its predecessor. Even common enemies like Goombas are nowhere to be found, and the games mechanics as stated before are about as similar to Mario 64 as water is hydrochloric acid. However, and this is a bit of an odd case, Sunshine uses its own bosses in multiple places several times, there is the paint piranha which you fight about four times, and the blooper. You fight the blooper a total of 3 times, and he’s the same each fucking time. Why? Seriously, I’ve never seen a game that’s not only recycle from itself like that, but not even change the fucking boss. Even DK64 gave the Armadillo and Dragon slightly different attack patterns in their rematches. I’m sorry I’m penalizing this game for this bullshit. Yes this is the first time I’m penalizing a game from rehashing from itself.
13 out of 15

Plot: Mario has been framed by an evil Mario which is secretly Bowser’s son in disguise, because Nintendo wants to pretend the Koopa Kids never happened. What was he framed for? Murder? Rape? Larceny? No, painting shit. Mario is then ordered to clean up all the paint on the island, and with his new water pack sidekick FLUDD, he goes about doing so… only not really. Mario only actually cleans up shit in the first few levels, and then sporadically afterwards, the game then gives more random shit to do as your quests, such as collecting red coins on a flying sand bird. So not only is this part of the plot retarded, the game itself doesn’t seem to acknowledge it much, which raises the point of why even having it.

Eventually, Peach gets kidnapped, obviously, by Bowser Jr. and the game descends into your typical Mario, go save the princess bullshit of a story. Also this whole game takes place on a series of islands while Mario is on vacation, Super Mario World called, it wants its plot back. This plot is so bad compared to Mario 64 which got a 1, it really made me consider giving negative points here.
0 out of 10

Difficulty: The game is laughably easy with the exceptions of the final area, which just require memorization AND gives you lives, and a few stars as mentioned before. The only other difficult sections are the parts where you can’t use the FLUDD, but those are also the most enjoyable sections in this game. Finding blue coins isn’t hard in most cases, just tedious as hell.
7 out of 15

Total: 54/100 = 54 %

As I said before, if this were any other series, I doubt people would look back at it with as much scorn, but this is fucking Mario, Nintendo’s flagship title. The fact they let a Mario game reach this, really makes you wonder about Nintendo. The only thing I can think of is the deliberately made the game suck in a failed attempt to keep Mario on the same level as Sonic so they could make a sports cross over game years later.

Positive: It still isn’t the worst Mario game ever. No, I’m not touching that one.

Negative: Take a wild guess it’s colored blue and is used as currency.

[Jesuszilla]

10 out of 15 for music is WAY too fucking nice. 85% of the game－ not just the music, the fucking GAME－ is hearing the fucking Delfino Plaza music OVER and OVER and OVER and OVER, and the fucking PAUSE screen isn't even safe from it. After finding out there was a stage in Brawl that would have this music, I wanted to fucking kill whoever was in charge of that decision until Nintendo wised up and made it so that users could disable that track－ a feature that would have been VERY fucking handy in this game if they gave us a choice of other tracks to hear.

You'll WANT to play the other levels in this game just to get away from it. Once in another area, however, you get tired of hearing the music there too and want to get the hell out and go to another stage. The only problem with that is that you have to back to Delfino goddamn PLAZA where you have to hear DUN DUN DAN DAN DEN DEN DUN DUN DUN DUN DEN DEN DAN DAN DUN DUN DO DA DO DO DADAN ETCETERA ET-COCKROCKING-CETERA－ AGAIN. AND AGAIN. AND AGAIN.







And Mario didn't get in trouble for just painting shit－ he got in trouble for painting WITH shit. It's fecal graffiti! Got to at least give it 1 point for originality, even if schizophrenics do it all the time.

[Tyrannosaurus Reich]

hey fuck you i liked the music in this game















yeah i have awful taste i know

[Claws]

-While the island theme is re-used, shouldn't it get some points for effort of making them tropical? (boo no rainforest though)
-How far can one go with platforming? Eschewing the difficultly in jumping across pits isn't that bad because there's only so far you can go with jumping over pits. They did consider hovering in some platforming sections anyway, like in the volcano.
-The rocket nozzle is interesting because you can time it for proper executions during jumps and also because you get a great sense of vertical compared to the other games' horizontal.
-Similarly, the enemies in Mario besides the Hammer Brothers (to a point), Lakitu (to a point), and sometimes Bloopers are not exactly the evilest and strongest enemies in existence. Since there's only a few enemies polluted by the paint, most of the stuff is calmer wildlife anyway.
-Nothing on the actual levels themselves? They're quite large, and it's interesting to spray water at the ground and slide through a level. There's a good sense of explore around some of the larger ones, and they atleast have quite a few different mechanics for level shines (but as always never go far enough with them).
-It's most certainly a large tourist spot, I think it matters when you lose massive amounts of revenue because there's fecal paint splattered across your island. There's more of a general chaos around the island, and after you spend a few missions you've cleaned up the paint and can move on to helping the island villagers with their customs and problems.

[Double]

The island theme just serves to make the game a giant snooze fest, one can only handle so much of the same theme thrown at you. The only stage that doesn't shove this down your throat is the Hotel... AND YOU SPEND A FEW STARS OUTSIDE THE HOTEL ANYWAYS.

Mario IS a platformer so it SHOULD try to go as far as it can with platforming, now if this was an RPG or even an FPS that might be a valid complaint BUT THIS IS A PLATFORMER.

because you get a great sense of vertical compared to the other games' horizontal

I think you missed a word. Being able to time it with the R button sounds cool... but then you realize had they just done it like a normal button press you could time it AND DO IF MORE EFFECTIVELY.

Theres no point to exploring if the only thing you get out of it is the aforementioned Blue Coin nonsense. The only reason levels are big is because they need to fit eight stars, if you put all eight stars in the level at once like in Mario 64, you'd notice there wouldn't be a lot of "free" space in a level.

It doesn't matter if the place is supposed to be a tourist resort, the levels are still boring, using the games plot to justify them just doesn't cut it.

[Claws]

How many hard jumps were there in Mario 64?
How many hard jumps are there in 3-d platformers anyway?
You can only just barely make it or struggle against the platform's conditions or press any sort of button to make any sort of way through so many times in so many different ways.