Another big Nintendo game I’m getting to fashionably late. I’m very much of two minds about this one.
Aesthetically, the game is an absolute delight. The premise of making the different worlds feel genuinely alien in a way that even the planets of Galaxy didn’t by giving them all radically different aesthetics and art styles was wonderful, and a fantastic way to make even this old franchise feel fresh. I loved all the kingdoms and all the inhabitants, especially the steam gardeners — despite being robots they actually seemed like the most emotional of all the characters, and the duality of their earnest joy at their work and snarky pettiness was so adorable. (I particularly love the one that is very obviously the robot equivalent of drunk hollering that the Steam Gardens are objectively the best kingdom.) I loved the possession mechanic. I loved the 8-bit segments and the callbacks to earlier games, especially the New Donk City festival, which felt like a reflection on how far the franchise has come. I loved that we got to explore Bowser’s kingdom and that it was a completely different flavor of medieval palace than the Mushroom Kingdom. I loved getting to fight a giant frickin’ dragon that looks like it wandered in from Dark Souls. I loved that we got to revisit Peach’s castle as it was in Super Mario 64. I loved that the designers put in the detail that Bowser didn’t just dress up for the occasion, he also delicately coiffed his hair. I loved following up the final boss fight with getting to possess Bowser for a super awesome Metroid-esque escape sequence. I loved all the outfits, and I took a particular delight in dancing around Bowser’s kingdom in a clown suit.
But I feel they really dropped the ball on actually putting a compelling game on top of this phenomenal backdrop. It was clearly trying to experiment with the same open-world approach as Breath of the Wild, but that doesn’t work nearly as well for a platformer than it does for an action adventure. The actual platforming challenges feel tiny, empty, and unsatisfying, and the game as a whole feels like it’s pulling in too many directions.
The worlds follow a particular formula: When you first arrive, you discover that Bowser has stolen something from the kingdom for his wedding, throwing the kingdom into chaos and forcing you to deal with it. These segments feel a lot like the missions from the previous 3D games: you can go off the beaten path a bit, but there is still a clear linear string of challenges with a boss battle at the end. After you complete this initial scenario, you’re turned loose in the world and allowed to explore it at your leisure to find more power moons.
The issue is that the second part doesn’t follow the mission formula of the previous 3D games: power moons are absolutely everywhere, and you can’t go five feet without tripping over one. The difficulty of getting power moons varies wildly; some are as simple as literally walking over to them or investigating an obvious glowing patch, while others are gated behind obtuse sidequests or difficult platforming challenges. It turns the game into more of a scavenger hunt than a test of platforming skill, which is just frustrating once you run out of all the obvious ones. (The ones that required you to be wearing a specific outfit were just tedious, also, to run to the Odyssey and back to change. I get wanting to give some incentive to experiment with our outfits but darn it, I don’t want to change out of my fun clown suit just to get a moon.)
This completely breaks the game for me. I liked that collectibles used to all represent significant challenges and accomplishments. I liked the gameplay loop of exiting the level, reflecting on your accomplishment, and taking a breath before jumping back in. This nonstop instant-gratification train of getting power moons like party favors just feels wrong. I want them to feel significant. Even for the more difficult ones, I kept saying “That’s it?” when I got them, much like I did with the dungeons in Breath of the Wild. It’s quantity over quality, creating an entire game of bite-sized pieces with no strong, savory meals.
Also, screw the Dark and Darker Sides. Denying the player checkpoints isn’t difficulty, it’s just wasting their time. I 100%ed Breath of the Wild, but I will not be 100%ing this.
I kind of wonder if there was some sort of disagreement within the dev team on this. The postgame feels much more in line with the idea the game presents, of Mario being a tourist in strange lands, and there are so many events related to that idea that are only unlocked in the postgame too. The Bowser segments honestly feel like a bit of an interruption in how the game wants to be played, plus it feels thematically bizarre for Mario to run around playing tourist when he knows Bowser is menacing the next kingdom over. Was the game originally conceived without that central conflict spurring you along?
So: points for effort, Nintendo, but this is one time you shouldn’t have strayed from formula. I would very much like to see a Mario game with this aesthetic sense but gameplay more in the style of 64/Sunshine/Galaxy.
I must have missed this post at the time, or didn’t have the energy to comment, but as I was asked I’ll share my thoughts. I largely enjoyed Odyssey as a game, but equally many things about it infuriated me. A lot of my biggest issues come down to ludonarrative dissonance, and the inability of the excuse plot to get out of the way; more on that in a moment.
The game itself is fun (although I have no desire to replay it ever). The environments are pretty and fun to explore, and getting to dress up Mario in outfits that fit all the regions (or don’t) was surprisingly interesting and novel (it surprised me how much Mario continued to look like Mario no matter what he wore, considering how much of his identity as a character is often tied to iconic costumes). Getting to see Peach exploring the various regions in different costumes in the postgame was a pleasant surprise, too.
It’s not a game I recommend trying to complete, even as someone with strong completionist tendencies (I finally tapped out with something like 4 moons left to go, there were a few insufferable minigames I just couldn’t be bothered with but I did everything else, including Dark/Darker Side). I’ve seen a fair bit of conversation over the years about ways in which the design is fundamentally anti-completionist (“do as much as you want, then move on”) and that enabled the developers to put in many challenges with more niche appeal (or higher difficulty) that they wouldn’t otherwise have done. As a playground for the player to just enjoy moving around in and explore, it’s wonderful. I think I probably should have stopped playing it a bit sooner than I eventually did, but I enjoyed most of the time I spent with it.
(I do agree with you that the 64/Sunshine/Galaxy style where each collectible object is a separate named mission felt better/more satisfying than MOONS EVERYWHERE! The way I played Odyssey kind of ended up simulating it, I’d beeline to Toad to buy all the hints and then go after them one by one. A lot of the moons are unsatisfying, but there are equally many that are, so it’s a bit of a mixed bag; I’m not sure how to fix it without drastically changing the game’s identity, though. I’m not a huge fan of collectathons as a rule, e.g. I never much liked Banjo-Kazooie, and Odyssey definitely came close to being that, but there was enough to enjoy that I put up with it.)
What I disliked was the fact that the story, as many game stories do, got in the way of this.
The biggest strength of “oh look, Bowser kidnapped Peach again, better call Mario” is that it’s obviously an excuse plot, and very directly tells you something along the lines of “this is here to justify there being a game, but it’s not important, so stop thinking about it and enjoy the rest of the game”. Not every game has to have a good or deep story, but a game having no underlying story at all often just doesn’t work, so this is one type of compromise. Odyssey’s forced marriage plot looks like this on the surface, but failed to work that way for me in a few important respects.
Firstly: “wedding” became the overarching theme of the game, and a gimmick underlying the world design. This means it never gets out of the way. Every time you get to a world, the first thing you’re told is “here’s the cliche wedding gimmick we built this world around, the world revolves around it”. The minibosses are wedding planners. And so on. So if, like me, you thought weddings were a stupid and annoying central theme to build the game around (especially when the joy of tourism and exploring new cultures was right there), the game keeps throwing it in your face and making it difficult to ignore. (I might have reacted more strongly than many others due to my personal distaste for weddings, the wedding-industrial complex, and everything associated. I want to call it heteronormativity overload?)
Secondly: the wedding aspect, by providing details to the kidnapping plot, makes it harder to ignore it in the usual way. I could see defending this along the lines that that’s always what kidnap implicitly is and that shouldn’t be ignored, but to me at least it created a veneer of seriousness and urgency to the threat that the rest of the game just didn’t want. You alluded to this with how incongruous it feels for Mario to be playing tourist while a crisis is on; Breath of the Wild had a similar problem, with the main plot constantly talking about time pressure and how Zelda’s power could fail any moment, but you were supposed to be taking your time meticulously exploring and gathering resources. Ludonarrative dissonance. There are so many ways they could have tweaked the writing so this wouldn’t conflict, and they didn’t.
Thirdly: I think a lot of it was designed around the ending fakeout, which I found distasteful on several levels. I remember seeeing Anita Sarkeesian point out at the time out how distasteful it was for Mario to jump in at the end and propose to Peach (even being friendly with Bowser and commiserating with him over the rejection, decentering her as it was happening); even if her rejecting both of them was in some ways satisfying, it felt like character assassination of everyone involved (and Mario in particular) that it got to that point at all. (Hell, even if they wanted to leave the Mario-Peach relationship ambiguous, all they’d have to do is show them being friendly and concerned about each other. It wouldn’t take much.) We have enough creepy male game protagonists already, thanks so much. I suspect the main goal here was to tease the audience with the idea that Mario and Peach would actually get married and change the status quo, which it’s obvious Nintendo wouldn’t actually do, and they warped the story and ending around this.
There are plenty of ways they could have come up with an excuse plot that would have been more conducive to Mario playing tourist while looking for moons (hell, have both him and Peach doing it, and have her postgame cameos occur during the main game instead). Bowser has some long-term plot that can be averted with enough moons, I don’t know. Maybe he’s threatening to take over all the kingdoms with a big fuckoff airship and the Odyssey needs enough moons to be strong enough to oppose it? But doing something like that wouldn’t have gotten everyone into wedding costumes, and that seems to have been very important to at least some of the people making this game. (In fairness to whoever it was, the costumes did look nice, I’ll give them that.)
I’ve also seen it pointed out (maybe also by Sarkeesian? I don’t remember) how casually sexist is is that of the two hat ghosts, the male one gets to adventure with Mario and the female one becomes a damsel in distress with Peach. Doubling down, let’s do it! (Please don’t.)
I don’t necessarily think, in a vacuum, Odyssey’s plot is outrageously bad. But in the greater context of the conversation around games at the time (and, perhaps, I had started paying more attention to sexism in games than when I was younger), it felt more like it was rubbing our faces in “yes, we’re still doing this thing, and we’re even going to ramp it up” than anything else. I remember thinking the cutscenes and plot dialogue felt really squick while I was playing it. I should also point out, this isn’t a universal objection (e.g. I still think Paper Mario 64 handled the kidnap plot well in a defensible way), but rather all the little details in Odyssey’s version rubbed me very much the wrong way.
I apparently had more to say about this than I thought I would; sorry I couldn’t be more concise about it. I hope at least some of it made sense.
Eh, I didn’t find it particularly more sexist than other damsel-in-distress plots. As far as I can remember, all the Mario games with actual plots give Bowser an explicitly romantic interest in Peach, so this wasn’t anything new, and I actually found it funny that he thought it so important to stand on ceremony.
I think the whole thing becomes more palatable if you assume Peach really does reciprocate Bowser’s feelings to some extent, making the plot a love triangle rather than a standard hero-saves-girlfriend scenario. (Yes, Super Paper Mario contradicts this, but that’s an alternate continuity.) I actually think the ending supports this, as Peach is equally exasperated by both of them trying to propose to her, and Peach seems more bemused than genuinely distressed by the wedding.
I’m not actually sure what you mean by this? The wedding item is the initial MacGuffin of every world, but I don’t see how the worlds themselves are themed around it. If anything, the wedding items felt tacked-on to me. Why is there a giant wedding ring in Desert World, for instance?
This is probably fair. (I think I agree that the love triangle thing is implied, but then I despise love triangles, so it doesn’t help much.)
I thought about it, and it’s entirely possible I was pre-sensitised to misogyny from the environment I was in at the time I was playing it (at the time, I had coworkers who constantly spouted the worst sort of incel-adjacent rhetoric; I wasn’t out as nonbinary/agender, so they viewed me as male and kept being surprised I wouldn’t play along) and therefore it got under my skin more than it would have in a vacuum.
You’re right it’s not all the worlds, I guess the ones that were stuck with me more (flower kingdom, luncheon kingdom, the water one that was all about mermaid dressmakers, the other water one with the giant champagne bottle). Even those have aspects beyond the McGuffin, but it seemed obvious to me what came first in the design and they didn’t quite feel cohesive (though obviously there’s room for differences of opinion here). It’s honestly been a while since I played or thought about the game, my memory may well have exaggerated the flaws.
(And then there was New Donk City, which certainly wasn’t wedding-themed and had a lot going for it, but still got… weird about Pauline. I liked that she was the mayor, but it seemed a bit ick that there was so much focus on giving her stereotypically feminine gifts, and her primary mayoral act was singing in a concert. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with either of these things in a vacuum, but in context it felt like part of a pattern.)
It may not be the worst thing anyway, because one thing Odyssey did well was having incredibly diverse, strange worlds (so having an unusual gimmick may well have helped them think outside the box). Thinking about it, I would probably have enjoyed the game more if I’d gotten the main story out of the way first, rather than trying to complete each world as much as possible before moving on. It might have bothered me less if it had been behind me for the majority of my time with the game.
I did like a lot of Odyssey (and I’ve recommended it to people in spite of everything I’ve said here, there are far worse games); all I’m saying is that it left something of a bad taste behind for me personally.