Super Mario Sunshine Retrospective

it: It's nice that brushing your teeth cleans Noki Bay, but this whole mission is a huge waste of time. Think about this mission: what are you doing? Floating on some teeth, waiting a while for it to open its mouth again, occasionally taking a breath, trying to aim the water correctly, fighting the physics of the underwater floating nozzle. You just shoot water and wait a while until it's ready. This isn't a boss fight, there's no defending, other than a few poison bubbles that burst the instant you hit them with water. I half expected him to start swimming around the room, forcing you to get creative with your position or something, but no: that's it.

All the bosses are like this, Petey Piranha is used twice, with almost no variation, Mecha Bowser is used twice, except the second time you're just popping some balloons. King Boo is kind of interesting, but once you figure out the pattern of him, all you do is wait for the hot peppers to land on his spinner and complain when it doesn't happen. How was the lead-up to King Boo? The one where you have to spray some tiles and spinners with water, praying that a single trickle of water doesn't suddenly unbalance everything. Waiting, spraying. There's a mission where you push a watermelon down a hill and spray each cataquack to get them out of the way, slowly pushing the watermelon forward, bouncing on a cataquack - you're doing a watermelon escort mission.

None of this is inherently compelling to me, I don't have fun fighting these bosses again, because they all take too much time and rely on simple cycles. At least the 64 bosses went down in seconds due to their simplicity. Sunshine has a series of two bugs that appear all the time: one where you shoot her in the mouth, wait, shoot her in the mouth, wait; then the other one where you wait for it to attack, pull the tentacles, wait for it to attack, pull the tentacles, pull the face and then do it again just in case. 3 times this happens.

Their redundancy is highlighted simply by how seemingly important they are. Sometimes you do platforming, like when you navigate support beams or park rides, but these are pretty weird compared to the other weird things they make you do. In Ricco Harbor there is a mission where you get Yoshi, spray some fish, jump on two platforms and that's it. I hate anything involving Yoshi, I don't even fully understand why they included him. At best, you're jumping over simple obstacles; At worst, you're... well, doing the most despised mission in the entire franchise. It's no longer an improvement, it's a hindrance, it serves the same annoying purpose as the special caps on 64 and, in that sense, the mouthpieces too!

Except for the injectors, this is not a scheduled temporary update. These named quests produce shiny sprites as rewards and are framed around that specific goal and nothing more: maybe if it were a level with no quest structure, no starting system, I'd get satisfaction from pushing a watermelon for a Hallo a rewards in the same way I get satisfaction from searching for blue coins. I can do them in any order I want, I can do them to the beat of my own drum. None of this can work because the game is so insistent on taking you out of the experience as much as humanly possible: extend the runtime, stay true to 64, keep things fresh?

I don't know. I really think Sunshine would be substantially improved JUST by removing these things, which is even more than I'm willing to say for 64. This linear, stifling mission structure goes against everything a collecting marathon stands for. This is the question I want to end with: what was Sunshine's responsibility? Be a real 3D Mario game or a real sequel to Mario 64? Either way, I'd say it failed. He tried to have his cake and eat it too. It attempted to be a linear, challenge-based platformer while also being an immersive collection, with almost no time to keep up with that ambitious goal.

Maybe I'm a little harsher on this game because it's a sequel, and it obviously made some of 64's problems worse by comparison, but that's only because its immersive quality is so good in the first place. I think that's why people still love this game despite its seemingly glaring flaws: the potential here, given what already works, is off the charts. Super Mario Sunshine is perhaps the most divisive Mario game of all time. My good friend ExoParadigmGamer loves it, Andre from GameXplain hates it: and both are equally valid in their points of view. Where do I fall? Well, I can't lie: it has decreased drastically over the years.

I said that Mario 64 may have been my least favorite of the 3D Mario games, and that's still true to an extent; However, I make a small distinction between the types of 3D Mario games I'm ranking. After all, it's a little strange to be ranked 64th against something like 3D Land or World. So, strictly comparing Sunshine to 64: I prefer what Sunshine was able to add in terms of immersion, control, and level design. It highlighted one aspect of collectathons that I would really like to see return one day: I seriously can't overstate how great Isle Delfino is and how much fun it is for me to race on it.

I'm sure people wonder about my critical process when I write, but it's as simple as: I play, I see what my gut reaction is: positive, negative, in-between, and then I try to explain it to myself and my peers. audience why my gut reaction was the way it was. I never deliberately try to fool people, surprise them, or go against the grain: I speak directly from the heart, directly from my own personal experience. Playing Sunshine again made me realize that the mission structure irritates me more than ever. I'm serious about this because it's a major flaw, but I still enjoy completing it to a certain extent.

Part of the reason it took me so long to make this video is because my opinion of this game seemed like a complete disaster. I constantly questioned myself, wondering if maybe I still secretly loved everything about Sunshine, or didn't want anything to do with it after all: and the meme didn't really help. Sunshine is still pretty fun as a Mario game, much like 64: but I'd say Sunshine has even more wasted potential than the latter: and that's a real shame. This script was quite difficult to write, so I'm glad everyone waited patiently for me to get over my writer's block and other similar issues.

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I love debates, that's why I started this channel in the first place. I hope you enjoyed the video and as always my name was KingK: I certainly hope you have a well-deserved fun today!