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dartmonkey

Super Mario Odyssey (One D, Two Ss)

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Without spoiling too much, once you see credits there is a WHOLE lot of new content that opens up. It's actually pretty amazing how much they can wring out of this game. If your concern is density, you will enjoy post-credits a lot. Over hype is certainly an issue here, but I didn't have that as much of a risk because honestly, Mario is a distant third Nintendo franchise for me behind Zelda and Metroid, so the most I ever get hyped for a Mario game is "I will play and probably really enjoy this".

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I feel like Nintendo got some backflow from working with Ubisoft with regards to objective design. It seems very much designed with quantity over quality in mind, which isn't necessarily the worst thing, but having 300 moons probably makes the 301st feel a lot less eventful. I'd have liked to see more restraint in that regard.

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I actually hit my 400th moon a few minutes ago and it still felt like an achievement. Some of these late-game ones are damn hard.

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I'd assume it depends a lot on how many of the simple ones you pick up on your first pass through the early areas (as well as general curmudgeon-levels.) 

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Yes some of the post-credits content is very difficult, to the degree that I've left the game alone for a few days because of a frustrating Koopa race I can't complete. I do find the more advanced controls a little iffy at times, particularly diving where sometimes I feel like Mario is going a direction different to where my analogue stick is pointing or I wind up ground pounding instead of diving(inexcusable given how many buttons on the controller go unused this shouldn't be doubled up). Most of my time with the game has been post-credits, I'm at 630+ Moons now and I've got one more to go on the Lost Island Kindom, all the other Kingdoms up to that point I've gotten all the Moons and coins on. I'm not usually a completionist but I mostly really enjoy it in this. Except those bullshit Koopa races :P

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I have now completed the game. It ended really well, I'm very glad I loaded it back up and more or less mainlined the last 3-4 worlds. The ending sequence was great, I was smiling almost the entire time. The kingdom you unlock after finishing was worth running around in.

 

The kingdom you unlock with enough moons though...

 

 

A boss rush? Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME. I think I'm done with the game.

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I finally reached New Donk City today. This game is super fun! I expect that I will spend a lot of time looking for the moons after I have finished the main game.

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After starting and kind of really taking my time in Tostarena, I took someone's recommendation and just made my way through to the end before exhausting myself on each kingdom. I'm pretty happy about that. I think that the game is pretty fantastic in that it does what I really want in any Nintendo property: gives me some interesting game mechanics and lets me mess around with them, with rewards. I get what you're saying @Cleinhun, about the relative frequency of moons, but I guess my response when I think about it, is that there are enough Moons to represent Nintendo saying: "hey, good job getting here," or "good job trying that out," or, "good job poking around a little bit longer here." That always feels nice to me. I don't know if I understand your comment, @Jake, about the game not feeling "dense enough," but perhaps this is because I'm seeing the game from a little farther into it. I am astounded by just how much is crammed into every nook and cranny of each kingdom, and the variety by which you traverse things. I really do recommend just making your way through the core path of the game and then returning, especially because of how the game decides to both open itself up a bit, and also provides an increased challenge.  (I decided not to spoiler-tag this, because this is literally how every primary Mario game has done it for almost the last ten years).

 

In my opinion, people are going to look back on this and feel that the review scores were totally indicative of what an achievement this game really is. Nintendo has done something never really seen in other games of this scope. They've built an insanely varied series of gaming worlds where you are rarely able to do something they didn't anticipate and reward you for doing, and married it to perfect platforming controls. 

 

 

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Yeah, the moons really feel like Korok Seeds to me - I'm getting exactly the same pull of something in the distance before getting distracted by something I run past. I end up juggling 2 or 3 objectives but it always manages to stay just the right side of manageable and satisfying to tick them off. It's a bit of a pain to need a wardrobe to change and I'm still bludgeoning the controls upwards rather than elegantly flipping and wall jumping, etc. Although Sunshine is the obvious predecessor, there's still plenty of Galaxy in here.

 

It's really great. Zelda's probably still my goaty because its controls are spot-on at all times. Helluva year.

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I actually think they're more interesting than Korok seeds, but you are right, they do serve a similar purpose, @dartmonkey. I found that Korok seed acquisition didn't require a huge diversity of actions, and because of the size of Hyrule, I didn't stumble upon Korok Seeds in the same way that I suddenly find moons. I agree that Breath of the Wild is still my game of the year thus far, because of the confidence of its interacting systems, but Odyssey does give it a run for its money (as an aside: at the end of the year, GOTY-wise, I predict it's going to be hard for publications to decide between Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, and PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds).

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I'm trying to find a perspective, comparing those two games. I think the way I'm contextualizing it is I understand the praise of Zelda far more than I do Mario. Even though I finished Mario and I probably won't finish Zelda, I get why people went absolutely nuts about Breath of the Wild. Comparatively, I think Mario is fun with a couple of moments that stand out.

 

The music is awesome though, I've caught myself whistling it at work.

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It was mostly the desert that felt really sparse to me. I'm in New Donk at this point and that density issue feels moot. 

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16 hours ago, Badfinger said:

I have now completed the game. It ended really well, I'm very glad I loaded it back up and more or less mainlined the last 3-4 worlds. The ending sequence was great, I was smiling almost the entire time. The kingdom you unlock after finishing was worth running around in.

 

The kingdom you unlock with enough moons though...

 

  Hide contents

A boss rush? Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME. I think I'm done with the game.

 

In low gravity! Took me a few attempts, was actually really easy when I realised I could stun the downed bosses with my hat which made landing my jumps on them was much simpler. You unlock some more levels after the boss rush but it's still a rather disappointing unlock.

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Mark Brown has made an episode of his Game Maker's Toolkit series about Super Mario Odyssey:

 

 

While some of the video shows the later game content, you can mostly just skip watching in favor of listening as he describes, quite clearly, how the game was designed around the cap-throw mechanic. The more that I keep playing this game, the more that I am just taken with it's pure ebullient joy. It's the type of game that really, really likes you, the player. 

 

Olly Moss tweeted recently that he wasn't super taken with the art direction in the game:

 

 

Does anybody have any thoughts about this?  I think the game holds itself together pretty well with the kind of wacky and varied art design. There are so many different decisions, which I think works well with the "explore the world" concept. 

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I haven't played the game, so maybe some of it looks hella ugly in-game, but the mishmash art direction I've seen from videos is a pretty big part of my attraction to the game. The art direction feels loose and fun in a way big budget games usually don't. :tup:

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It's certainly all over the place but I think Mario (possibly singularly?) can get away with it. The citizens of these worlds just shouldn't be in the same place but it also feels novel that the

Spoiler

NY business-suited cabbie is taking the Day of the Dead Mexican cartoon dude into the roly-poly snow bear world that's filled with talking forks and a realistic T-Rex.

I don't think people would be so kind if the gameplay wasn't spot-on. The hat mechanic ties it all together.

 

Even so, if Rare was so haphazard there'd be a shitstorm. Say what you like, those googly eyes were consistent 👀 

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I don't wanna be a debbie downer here, but Galaxy and 64 are a couple of my favourite games. I feel a lot of steps back instead of steps forward in this one. I'm up to the volcano-cooking level.

 

Moving from 64 to Galaxy, I think the camera became a reliable friend. They doubled-down on using strictly top-down or side-on views for more levels, but the rest were tightly rigged too. In this game, I need to pull the camera around a lot more, it's not framing the platforming in a comfortable way without me keeping an eye on the right-stick.

 

Jumping on a goomba in 3D is tough aswel, but Mario 64 built in the ability to punch and dive at them. Less mis-judging the arc, direction and acceleration of your 3D boy. Galaxy made the punch even easier by turning it into an omni-directional spin. But I've found the hat-throw often misses my target or returns to me unexpectedly. A lot of the time I don't WANT TO possess a goomba because they're just as vulnerable as Mario but more stiff and slow. JUMPING precisely onto something rarely ever hits the mark, but this is the first game where I'm really noticing it.

Why not let Mario's roll knock out enemies and blocks? Rolling leaves me so vulnerable right now I'm hesitant to roll down hills.

 

I could really dig into the enemy-possession, or these freebie moons, or the nostalgia-trip 8-bit Mario sequences, but I think my most straight-forward gripe is that I don't like the art style, like Olly said. I think Galaxy has a phenomenal, whimsical identity; but what is that grass in the Cascade Kingdom? What is that waterfall? What game is that T-rex from?? It looks like it should be in a video named "Unreal Engine 1080 HD Mario (You Won't Believe Your Eyes)".

 

I'm enjoying the game. I like doing somersaults and diving onto the hat. It's a great game by any other standard, but for me it comes with many more caveats than these games usually do, sorry to bum anyone out.

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I was watching a video about speed running this game, and it mentioned that there's a super spoiler for the moon level in side the cave with the giant drop. So I looked up the spoiler...

 

Spoiler

...And it seems that the spoiler is that the drop leads to the a lava filled cave? If the Moon had a molten core, it would have a magnetosphere, and therefore have an atmosphere, and this is clearly not the case.   This is totally unrealistic.

 

I'm not playing this game but am watching from a distance. The posession mechanic seems cool, like from the Paradroid C64 game, and the character designs are really cute.

 

Edit: the all-over-the-place design seems like a page out of Wario Ware games. Both in mechanical variety, and in stylistic randomness. I mean, there's a jump rope mini-game. 

 

Spoiler

 

 

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I agree with dartmonkey. If it was just the familiar Mario aesthetic plus New Donk City, the latter would feel like a total misstep, but taken together, the wild variety of all the kingdoms and their inhabitants becomes the aesthetic - anything goes.

 

Spoiler

The Metro Kingdom and the Ruined 'Dark Souls' Kingdom may have stretched that theory almost to breaking point, but for me they really worked at that point in the game.

 

The element that doesn't quite seem to fit, despite all that, is the Broodals. I've found that lots of Mario bosses have felt visually out of place since at least Sunshine, so that wasn't a huge disappointment, just an odd choice, and quite throwaway in terms of character design.

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Even though the broodals aren't my favourite characters, I do love that animation loop when they're standing on the ship. The tall one is a big gross floppy noodle, and the fat one's going ballistic just to trying to breathe in and out.

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So, I'm at around 600 moons now and I'm travelling around hoovering up bits and pieces. It's obviously a great game.

 

It feels exactly like a Sunshine 2. I liked Sunshine (enough to 100% it) but it had some irritating design choices and felt rushed. This addresses nearly all those issues and buffs everything to a brilliant shine but it still feels somewhat boxy. And there are areas I just plain dislike. Is anyone a fan of the dark forest floor in the Wooded Kingdom?

 

If I was going to replay any of the mainline 3D Marios for fun, Galaxy & 2 would win every time. They feel like the ultimate in freewheeling platforming and experimentation - if I had an idea about a jump, I could give it a whirl and nine times out of ten it would work, and I'd feel like a whooping, gleeful boss. In Odyssey I'll try and usually end up hitting a wall or falling. That's not to say that the jump is impossible, but Galaxy was empowering and Odyssey makes me feel like I'm not quite getting something.

 

I'm going to enjoy mopping up moons in the coming weeks/months. And I'd be happy if they decided to release a DLC pack with a couple of new kingdoms (or even some classic stages from the Mushroom Kingdom.) But BotW is goatier in 2017, the year of the rather good video game.

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