Hrm. Well, I played it. I’m going to have to be a Negative Nancy again.

I like Super Mario World. I just want to get that out there, although I admit it’s probably mostly nostalgia. But it seems every Mario platformer I play leaves me stone cold. (Yoshi’s Island is not a Mario game. It’s a Yoshi game. A spin-off with distinct art style and mechanics. Ahem) The Galaxies were fun but didn’t have lasting appeal for me and in retrospect seemed flawed. Mario 64 is of course a glorified tech demo™. The 2D platformers are uniformly lacking in imagination, from the NES ones to the “New” ones. (I know everyone likes to suck up to Mario 24/7, so please read “solely in the opinion of a jaded gamer” after my every declaration. Thank you, Mario fans.)

I thought Sunshine would be the one to turn it around. Everything I’ve heard is that it’s the black sheep of the family, it’s divisive, it stands out too much. This seemed like a good idea to me. People have praised the world and atmosphere, qualities I value. I also like the extra interaction with the environment that FLUDD, the new core mechanic, affords.

Unfortunately I have to say that in terms of structure and design it’s way too similar to the ironclad blueprint that SM64 apparently laid down. I was expecting a world, but each level is segregated by magic portals. Why make the theme so homogenous when everything is so cut off? I expected a bit of plot focus, but there’s pretty much three cutscenes with atrocious voice acting (Bowser sounds like a Muppet). Peach was standing around talking to me for the first ten minutes: what a boon! But no, she got kidnapped again. Sigh.

I just couldn’t see past the obvious similarities, the mission structure. Sure, there’s lots of NPCs but they don’t really have anything to say and actually talking to them is stupidly awkward (too many functions mapped to the same buttons, and it’s very finicky for certain things like talking). I guess you could say I had expectations, but it fell short on all of them. However, at least it tried these things like plot and making a world, unlike other Mario games. The execution was just poor, and everything else is just the same as always.

So these elements that make it stand out to some degree were so flawed as to become drawbacks: the plot is dumb and the voices ear-bleeding. The world doesn’t have the variety that Galaxy or even 64 manages to achieve. It also has so many other missteps that I began to see why it was so widely disliked. The camera’s bad, many mechanics are poorly introduced and barely used, like Yoshi and fruits, and the different FLUDD nozzles. Swimming sucks. The enemies are both ugly and not effectively used. They removed the long jump, while making the slide slow you down more often than speed you up (due to collisions), and the camera focus button makes you ground pound in the air, which I inadvertently activated too often. The levels are too small and repetitive with many missions in the same area, doing similar things.

One of the few good points that stuck with me while playing was the dynamic that having FLUDD around enabled. Traversal was fun, using the hover nozzle to get some hang time or maneuever. Sideflipping then hovering was extensively used in my playthrough and felt good. It’s too bad the other nozzles were so bad and replaced the good one. And then many of the secret stages take away FLUDD altogether, negating the advantage this game has and replacing it with basic wonky platforming in very unforgiving stages. They also negated the ambition of world-building. You can’t have it both ways.

It seems the game has a lot of ideas jammed into it, but very few of them are followed through on and they just aren’t done well. Some do work, like having Bowser Jr. recur as Shadow Mario or having you clean up an area (I found pleasure in that, although I found aiming the normal nozzle awkward).

I dunno, my expectations were too high here and although Sunshine tried a few nice things, like a greater character focus and a consistent setting, those baby steps didn’t make it to the level that other 3D platformers already had such as Banjo-Kazooie, while the flaws make it not reach the gameplay level of other 3D Mario games. So it’s stuck between the two extremes, not quite as good as either. And subjectively, I simply didn’t have fun with it overall, and that’s the most damning thing. I’m proud to be a Mario hater (trololol) and this didn’t turn me around, but if you like Mario I don’t know if you would like this (assuming you haven’t played it and made up your mind already). It’s probably worth a go, especially for the bargain basement price I found it at.

Halfway through this review I found that my favourite Australian Nintendo site, Vooks.net, had done a podcast critique of Sunshine. I’m only halfway through it, but I agree with what they say so far. Check it out too, why not?