Super Mario Galaxy
November 20,2007 - It has been almost too long since we’ve been able to see Mario platforming his way through a game. Super Mario Sunshine was one of his most controversial adventures, being a radical change from the beloved Super Mario 64. This time, Nintendo’s looking to make up for any past transgressions by letting Mario do what he’s best at and focus on that. The result is Super Mario Galaxy, a game that contains the pure essence of fun.

The Mario games have never been heavy on story and Galaxy doesn’t try to change the formula. Peach has once again been kidnapped by Bowser just as Mario approaches her castle, but his brilliant scheme goes one step further and takes the entire castle into space. Mario manages to hang around for a good amount of time before being knocked off of the floating castle grounds and landing on a nearby planetoid. He eventually finds his way to an observatory that’s run out of power and is just floating in space. In order to find and save Peach one more time, he’ll need to help the observatory regain its power. That’s really it for the story, until you open up the library wing of the observatory and unlock chapters of a storybook you can read if you’re interested.

Super Mario Galaxy doesn’t really do much that’s revolutionary, but it does evolve certain mechanics of the series until they’re as polished as can be. The aforementioned observatory acts as your hub throughout the game, with six hubs containing five galaxies each that comprise all of the action you’ll partake in. Galaxies themselves are made up of levels, each of which will give you a power star upon completing that level. These galaxies are initially made up of one or three stars, though you will encounter hidden stars and comets that offer even more stars to collect. Comets are additional challenges that can offer activities like speed runs, races, and even challenge you to beat a boss with just one health left for levels that you complete. Hidden stars are usually noticeable when you see planetoids in the distance that you aren’t able to reach by normal means. The big changes in the approach to collecting stars is that you’re not forced to collect every single star in the game to beat it, as you’re only required to beat the boss levels and reach 60 stars by the time you near that climax at the end of the game. The rest is up to you to decide how you play the game. Still, getting most of the stars for a hub makes it easier to unlock galaxies in subsequent hubs that you’ll visit. It’s just nice to see that if a level frustrates you, you can skip it and play another level and not just be forced to play through the frustration.

Once you actually get into the game, you’ll notice a big difference: the levels you visit are broken up into smaller pieces. These provide short challenges in themselves and then are connected with the star pads, which require a shake of the remote in order to activate them and move on to the next planetoid, and so on until you’re done with that level. Not every level is full of these planetoids, as some look more traditional as just one large level you’ll need to traverse like you’d expect to do in a Mario game. There are even some galaxies that don’t revolve around platforming, such as a galaxy where you race around a level while riding a ray or a level where Mario takes a page out of the Super Monkey Ball playbook by riding a large ball over goombas and coins. To stray away from spoiling the levels you’ll see, we’ll leave it at this: expect all the classic Mario environments and plenty of new ones.

With Super Mario Galaxy, Mario takes advantage of the Wii Remote, but to an extent that doesn’t get in the way of Mario playing like you’d expect. Power-ups are back, with the classic Fire Mario power-up and news ones like Ice Mario, Boo Mario, Bee Mario, and others that add some cool additions to the standard Mario gameplay. Shaking either the remote or nunchuck, Mario performs a Crash Bandicoot-like spin attack that’s best used to get enemies to drop star bits, which are the main pieces of currency for the Luma star creatures. The spin attack can even be used to get just a little bit extra height on your jumps for those boxes that are just out of your reach. Once you find star bits, you can either walk over them to collect them or use the Wii Remote to point your cursor at them to collect them. That doesn’t work for coins, unfortunately, so you’ll still have to collect those by hand. As you move through level, you can even find star bits and coins hidden in patches of grass or circles of rocks that surrender star bits with a quick spin.

Even the role of coins in Super Mario Galaxy has changed since the last time you saw them, as they’re now primarily used as a high score for each level, though you’ll still get a life for every 100 you collect, but that’s very rare for the smaller levels in Galaxy. The main source of collecting lives lies in the star bits, which only requires 50 star bits to get a new life, which is easy to pull off. Of course, there are still 1up mushrooms around for your quick fix in gaining lives. The weird thing about the game is that every time you save and quit, you lose all the lives you collect, which is usually around 20 or 30 for just an hour or two of playtime. So when you boot the game up next time, you start with just four lives, so luckily, the developers accounted for that by having the mailtoad bring you five lives, courtesy of the princess, as well as having a few 1up mushrooms around the observatory to help ease the pain. The fact that you have to go through that each time you get back into the game just to get somewhat close to where you were just feels a bit cheap. The camera is another problem with the game, not so much for planetoids and such, but for levels where you need a precise view of your action and resetting the camera doesn’t offer enough leeway to overcome the Wii’s natural lack of a second analog stick.

If there’s just one impressive part of the Super Mario Galaxy to laud over other Wii games, it’s definitely the impressive graphics. Galaxy has to be, by far, the best-looking game on the Wii. From the incredible amount of detail in ships, planetoids, enemies, and the levels themselves, you’ll see something new to be amazed about each time you play the game. There is even a next-gen shine to the game that you’ve probably seen enough of in PS3 and Xbox 360 games that make you wonder how the Wii is able to handle this game. There’s not really much to say that says it any better than that. If this is the graphical potential of the Wii, third-party developers have their work cut out for them.

The one thing about past Mario games that always elicits a nostalgic feeling is the music, and Super Mario Galaxy doesn’t disappoint. Featuring a lot of remixed classic Mario tunes and new tunes to enjoy, there’s just not much here that disappoints. Even a lot of the classic Mario sound effects are back, though some are tweaked to better fit the game. As a result of the minimal focus on story, the chatter is all in text, except for the occasional bit of noise from that character to start off the chat. There’s even more chatter coming out of Mario’s mouth at the disc channel than he says in the game itself, though that may be for the best.

This may not be Mario’s first appearance on the Wii, but it is definitely his best so far. Super Mario Galaxy may be Mario’s best adventure since he was last jumping on the Super Nintendo over a decade ago. This game just offers everything you’d expect out of a new Mario game and more. If you’ve read this far and are still unsure of whether you should buy Super Mario Galaxy, you should check your gamer cred at the door.

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