In keeping with my tradition of buying every Nintendo console roughly two years after they launch, I finally got myself a Switch in June. The first game I bought for it was Super Mario Odyssey, because if you are a Nintendo gamer you are almost certainly a Mario fan as well. I’ve been plugging away at the game for a few months now, and I’m beginning to appreciate more and more the different atmosphere it brings to the franchise.
Granted, it’s taken me a long time to nail down what it was that feels different this time around. I did know that I enjoyed the game, but it was a question of how much, and more importantly, why. To figure that out I’ve had to think about a lot of the patterns in the major Mario games. There are two generally accepted modes in which Mario has existed. First of all, there’s what I’ll call “stage-based” Mario. These are the games where the basic flow of the game is to get Mario from point A to point B. Whether it’s a flagpole in Super Mario Bros. or a star in Super Mario Galaxy, these kinds of games exist as clear challenges with obvious goals, and the tough part is surviving a gauntlet of some kind.
The second kind of Mario game is what I call “free-roaming” Mario. Until recently there was only two games in this tradition, but they had a huge impact. The first one, Super Mario 64, has long been lauded as a trendsetter in the medium, the first time that exploring a 3D space felt intuitive and comfortable. Here it was no longer about a clear goal with an obvious finish line. Now it was about repeated visits to the same areas, exploring every nook and cranny. You would select a star to seek out, but it was sometimes what must be done was rather oblique. It’s no coincidence that with this new style of gameplay, Mario’s moveset expanded drastically. Mario 64’s direct sequel, Super Mario Sunshine, followed the same format, and even added a new set of movement mechanics in the form of the water-jet-pack FLUDD.
Super Mario Odyssey is clearly much more of a free-roaming Mario game, but I think its strength lies in just how thoroughly it commits to that model. Again, it’s helpful to think about Mario 64 and Sunshine and how they contrast with Odyssey. Those games had open worlds to explore, but kept the model of set goals for the player. If you achieve that goal you are moved back into the hub world, whether it’s Peach’s Castle or Delfino Plaza. You might have to work out how to solve a specific problem, but like stage-based Mario games, the experience revolves around attaining goals. You need to swim down to the bottom of the lake and explore a shipwreck, or you need to use your jetpack to reach the top of some tower. When you get there, you get a star and you are taken out of the stage. The big difference between the free-roaming games and the stage-based games is not the nature of the goal, but the ability to move in three dimensions. Mario can do whatever in whatever order, but he still needs to do stuff. Those two streams of Mario games have a different execution, but they both revolve around achievement.
Contrast that with Odyssey, where the central mechanic of collecting Power Moons feels almost incidental. Rather than acting like the goal for the player to achieve, they are another kind of collectible. First of all there are a ton of them, over 800 of them if you’re counting. Secondly, there are also a whole range of ways to get them. Some of them require intense exploration, but some of them require simply talking to the right person or putting on the right kind of costume. Since there are so many of them, even the most casual player will find hundreds. The “story” portion and its levels are gated behind specific numbers of discovered moons, but you can actually reach the final Bowser battle with less than 250 of them, less than a third of the total in the game. So after the final boss fight, mostly all that’s left is to keep on discovering them. There are very few explicit goals. It’s just about hitting a certain number to unlock a couple of big boss fights, and unlocking new costumes in the store. Anything you try to accomplish after that is purely player-driven.
Odyssey is therefore the first Mario game to feel like it has no real goals besides running around and exploring every corner of the stage. The game encourages experimentation, because so much of that experimentation will give you another Power Moon. And when you find a Moon, you get right back in the game and keep going. This allows the game to get rid of a surprising amount of stuff that has previously been sacrosanct in the series, such as lives. Now when you die, you lose ten coins and respawn at the last checkpoint. You can try the same tough stretch again and again and never see a “Game Over.” The point is that the game is never over.
The result is a game that has a surprisingly breezy attitude. Previous games in the series, 64 and Sunshine included, emphasized challenge. You need to get good enough to beat something, almost to prove you deserve the reward. This challenge also ramped up as the game went on, though that challenge would take different forms. Maybe the game would force you to get through a storm of enemies without getting hurt, or emphasize perfectly-timed platforming. Some of the later areas in Mario 64 function as a sort of one-way loop, forcing the player to redo large portions if there was a mess-up. There’s not much difficulty ramp-up in Odyssey though. There are certainly big challenges for the player in the endgame, but the vast majority of the post-boss experience will be spent essentially screwing around. This exploratory attitude also explains the grab-bag aesthetic, like the oddly realistic humans in New Donk City and the goofball costume combinations that players can create. This is a video game designed as a big toy, rather than an achievement.
I don’t want to be too hard on 64 and Sunshine, because they’re great games. Both were made under some serious time constraints, and in the case of 64 there was a limited amount of memory to work with. (This is why other characters fade in and out of existence based on how close they are to Mario.) It’s hard to completely reinvent the language of video games, and somehow Mario 64 pulled it off. But the fact remains that both are not as refined as they might be. Sunshine in particular has a lot of visible seams. There’s the endless hunt for blue coins, and some punishingly tedious levels here and there. Odyssey feels much more assured in this regard, like the dev team took exactly as much time as they needed. They also benefitted from a lot of experience in making games like these. Mario 64 and Sunshine laid the groundwork for what Odyssey perfected.
Odyssey shares a common beef I have with any game that allows a lot of non-linear exploration, which is that it doesn’t have much arc at all. The challenge doesn’t really ramp up much, and since it’s entirely player-driven you’ll find things late in the game that are stupidly easy, right next to genuine challenges. That’s more of an observation than a complaint in this case though. I think the unstructured nature of Mario Odyssey speaks well to the power of open worlds in the first place. Challenge, while present in some late-game moons, isn’t really the point here.
I wouldn’t say Odyssey is my favorite in the franchise, because I need to sit with it for a few years yet. I would still at least put Super Mario Galaxy 2 ahead of it, the only other Mario game whose endgame is quite as expansive. But Odyssey does feel like the first time I’ve been given a completely different feel in these games. By committing so thoroughly to a different kind of goal, it feels surprisingly focused for as expansive as it is. It’s one of those games that rewards every moment you spend with it, and that is a sign of a lasting experience.
Games Are For Everyone 