Super Mario Galaxy 2 – Review
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Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a game developed by Nintendo EAD Tokyo and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Wii. It was directed by KÅichi Hayashida and produced by some guys not named Shigeru Miyamoto, along with Shigeru Miyamoto.
My original thought was to post a copy of Fern’s review of New Super Mario Brothers Wii, replacing the game’s name with Mario Galaxy 2 and any references to multiplayer with Yoshi, but I decided against it. Because while that’s what I’m going to say, in different words, I wanted to say it in different ways. However, we want you to know how similar our thoughts are, when we say that Mario Galaxy 2 is a good game that was surgically assembled in a laboratory. It’s perfect. And that’s why it isn’t great.
But that’s not even the problem. Let’s hit the first, metaphysical problem, new and unique from Galaxy: the weight of the moves. One thing in Mario Galaxy felt as much fun as long jumping in Mario 64: the spin. The spin was weighty, it was a move that gave you a little extra oomph. Everywhere I went, I’d hop and spin, because it felt like a really substantial move. Sure, the rest felt floaty and light, but the spin. The spin. Not so in Mario Galaxy 2. In 2, the spin feels just as soulless and precise. There’s no weight behind it, and while it’s perfect and precise, I don’t enjoy the move nearly as much. In fact, I don’t enjoy any of them. They feel like moves designed to solve problems and to get to the end of a level, not like punching someone in the face. I wouldn’t do any move in this game unless I was asked to, which is handy, because Mario Galaxy 2 is designed so you always know the specific move to solve the problem. Video games are supposed to be as enthralling as hitting an honest to god man in the honest to god face, and Mario Galaxy feels like looking at a picture of a punch: it’s not the same. But that’s the set up. That philosophy of precision bleeds over into my second issue with Galaxy 2: the level design. You heard me. The level design. I’ve never played a game that so coldly and calculatedly relied on nostalgia, and only nostalgia, to keep you playing. New Super Mario Bros. Wii relied on nostalgia, but Mario Galaxy does so perhaps as much, to the exclusion of its own style. Instead of the cool, cosmic levels of galaxy, here we have…one that’s a beach. One that’s full of really big enemies like in Mario 3. A fire and ice world. A ghost house. A desert galaxy entirely too reminiscent of 64’s. A big Mario you collect purple coins on. And the coup de grace, a polygon by polygon remake of Whomp’s Fortress. The only level I remember was the one with the kicking bluegrass music, which is perhaps the most original aspect of the game. Every other level is painfully attempting to remind the player of better days, when they were playing Mario games that had new ideas. At best, new levels are designed exclusively around the new power-ups, the cloud suit and the rolling rock. Not designed so one star uses them to clever effect, they are designed so that *only* that item appears. And when Yoshi appears, he will appear on every star, and won’t appear for a while anywhere else. It’s surgical, really. It’s what it is. Mario Galaxy 2 is Shigeru Miyamoto, with a scalpel, cutting the most fun parts out of other Mario games and pasting them together shamelessly. Furthermore, it feels like a game created by a level designed, and, coincidentally, KÅichi Hayashida, the game’s director, was lead level designer on Super Mario Galaxy. It feels like Shiggy told him to make another game using the assets he had leftover, and he did. And, I mean, is it fun? Of course it’s fun. It’s like a greatest hits record. All the hits are there. There’s no slow moment. The problem is, you’ve heard all the songs before. The volume’s been turned up in mix, the equalization’s different, but they’re the same songs. You’ve heard them before. They sound nice now, some even nicer, and they’re all classics, but…you know them by heart. It’s not a novel experience, it’s a masturbulatory experience, combining nostalgia with age-old ideas into a timeless package of hits. So it’s fun, but why do you need to play it again?
Instead of engaging with other reviews (which, honestly, is impossible: the lowest review for this game on metacritic is a 90, and even the user reviews are straight 10s), I’m going to posit *why* it scored so well. And I’ll tell you: because it’s aimed at you. Yes, you. The guy who’d go out and read a random video game blog in his spare time, instead of, you know, playing video games. It’s aimed at the guy who cares about video games, and about the culture of play they have created. It’s aimed to make the reviewer think, man, wasn’t Super Mario World awesome? And this game’s awesome, too. It’s success by association. If it didn’t wear a Mario hat, or was played by people who didn’t have Mario engraved in their consciousness, they would see a fun, capable game, but not what the fuss is about. Of course, it is Mario, and nothing can change that. I’d like to conclude with a discussion of the 3-D Mario games (all four of them) in history. Super Mario 64 was a game about the 3-D. The 64 was the most important part. It wasn’t really a game about jumping, or platforming; even in the middle of the game, there were levels with remarkably little jumping (The Hazy Maze Cave, the Desert, the second ice level). Super Mario Sunshine took that forward, and was a game about exploration. About looking, and finding, not about jumping. Mario Galaxy was a game about doing really awesome shit. It took all those moments in Super Mario World where you felt like the king of the world, and transmuted them into 3-D. It was a game about epic epicness. Mario Galaxy 2 is a game about remembering that time you did something awesome. |
Wow, that’s the first non-gushing review of this game I’ve read. I almost bought the game last weekend but decided I’d just play the first one again. I’m still stuck on that darned jumping level close to the end but maybe this time I’ll get past it.
I mean, I’m not saying don’t play it. It’s a fun game, and I enjoyed it a whole lot (not as much as Galaxy, though). The difference is that this game gets by on nostalgic levels. The unique, new to Galaxy 2 levels are mediocre at best and quickly swept under the rug for time tested ideas.
The time tested ideas work, but it feels like less of a unified experience than Galaxy did. It’s Mario’s Greatest Hits, and god knows he’s had a lot of them.
Considering how I hated the blandness that was the first Galaxy, I wonder how much I would hate this game…
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(Hello, sorry I’m late. Also: warning, long comment.)
Some random, disjointed thoughts:
Regarding the level designs: To each his own, but I personally haven’t found the levels mediocre at all. In fact I’ve had almost nothing but fun with this game and I get bored with games easily.
Regarding your statement that (to paraphrase) the game has only got such glowing reviews just because it has Mario in it (i.e. it’s pure nostalgia), honestly I think the opposite is at least as true: reviewers will tend to dismiss Mario (and other Nintendo) games because “oh it’s the same stuff Nintendo have been peddling for 20 years”. For instance, just read some of the comments in this IGN Editors’ Roundtable. More generally, I’ve found from reading various reviews (guilty as charged!) that Nintendo’s recycling of themes and assets earns them as many scowls as smiles, so you’re not the first or only reviewer to call Nintendo out on this.
(At any rate, it’s well-nigh impossible to disprove, given that we have no way of knowing what would have happened if Nintendo had released exactly the same game but with, say, Gary the Carpenter as the main character.)
And you’re right, it is a nostalgia-rich game, for those who get the references, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t stand up perfectly well on its own for those who don’t.
You say, “Mario Galaxy 2 is a game about remembering that time you did something awesome.”, and “It’s aimed to make the reviewer think, man, wasn’t Super Mario World awesome?” Well, I can’t speak for the reviewers, but as a player I spent most of the time thinking, “Man, isn’t this game awesome?” And I was thinking that most when experiencing the stuff that I (personally) had not seen before.
“The only level I remember was the one with the kicking bluegrass music, which is perhaps the most original aspect of the game. Every other level is painfully attempting to remind the player of better days, when they were playing Mario games that had new ideas.” Did you mean the Hightail Falls Galaxy music? Because that was a direct remix of the Athletic Level music from Super Mario World. In that case, you’ve just fatally undermined your own argument.
“I’m going to posit *why* it scored so well. And I’ll tell you: because it’s aimed at you. Yes, you. The guy who’d go out and read a random video game blog in his spare time, instead of, you know, playing video games. It’s aimed at the guy who cares about video games, and about the culture of play they have created.” Funnily enough, Gametrailers seemed to reach exactly the opposite conclusion. From a transcription on Spike.com: “Super Mario Galaxy 2 is one of those games made for the game player, and not necessarily the game fan.”
Please explain to me how shaking your Wii remote can possibly have more or less “soul”, and/or how Nintendo might be able to put the “soul” back into it next time.
Indeed, I have to ask: What did you want from this game? For my part, I wanted a series of fun and challenging virtual playgrounds and obstacle courses that I could navigate using controls that were easy to learn and let me do what I needed to do without having to think about them or fight them — in other words, a Mario game. All Mario games have been cut from this cloth. No Mario game, not even the one that changed your life when you were 10 (I’m speaking generally here), has been an outpouring of some personal artistic vision; they’ve all been (excellently) designed and crafted to alleviate boredom and make Nintendo richer. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Some (more) personal background here: I started looking into the old Mario games for the first time when I bought a Wii a couple of years ago. And I found them good clean fun, and nothing life-changing, and I didn’t expect or need them to be. I realize this is a subjective, personal thing, but I just cannot accept that there is any more or less “soul” in this Mario game than in any other. Or is that your point? In that case, why are you knocking this game for being, essentially, entertainment and not art, when it’s not pretending or trying to be anything else?
To be fair to you, you do say, “It’s a fun game, and I enjoyed it a whole lot”. I guess the big difference between you and I is that that satisfies me, whereas you seem to want something more from a Mario game but don’t seem to be able to articulate what that is.
“The time tested ideas work, but it feels like less of a unified experience than Galaxy did.” How was Galaxy (1) more of a “unified experience” than this one. As far as I can tell they both seem like an assortment of fun levels with little-or-no rhyme or reason to their existence or ordering. Or have I missed something?
I’m probably being too defensive and “fanboyish” about this, and it is refreshing to see a review that’s determined to counterbalance all the hype and hyperbole, but I do think that sometimes games get good reviews because they are good games, and not because Nintendo have been putting something in the water.
Anyway, sorry about the long-winded ranting. And do keep up the good work: we need people like you to keep the industry honest :-).
That’s…a long comment. Will my comment be as long? I don’t know! Probably not, though.
First, on the music: the song I referred to was the one from Puzzle Plank Galaxy. Which is either new, or an unrecognizable remix.
As for what I want in a Mario game, I want a game where I can run around in an open level space and everything feels weighty. My complaints about Mario Galaxy 2 lie mostly in the fact that the game feels so precise, so light, that you can do anything you want. The long jump is the perfect example. Boot up Mario 64, and do a long jump. You’ll probably do four or five because they’re so much fun, regardless of the obstacles. Then go to Mario Galaxy 2 and try one. The feeling isn’t there. You can do it with any move, really. Even compare Mario Galaxy to 2. The spin. The spin is so light in Galaxy 2, like you’re doing nothing at all.
I probably don’t hate Mario Galaxy 2 nearly as much as I let on. It’s a pleasant little game, that’s enjoyable. I think it’s a very solid game. The problem I had is much with reviews like this one, which claim Mario Galaxy 2 to be the best Mario game ever created. And, you know, it’s good, but when so much of its value is nostalgia (not all of it, but enough of it to be depressing), I can’t see it. As much as they might think it’s because of the game itself, but the nostalgia is probably a bigger factor than they realize.
I appreciate the rant, though. It means I’m doing my job, apparently.
Hey, that bluegrass song *IS* pretty sweet!
It reminds me of the Ennio Morricone-like music played at the Hidden Village in Twilight Princess. As a big fan of Spaghetti Westerns, that part of the game hit the sweet spot for me. Man… this only makes me even more sad because it proves to me that TP could have been so much better!
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DON DOWNS
Plumber (Plumbing Contractor)
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