Fillip J Phry
Well-Known Member
Finished a second game this week - Super mario Galaxy. I completed 120 stars with Mario, and 121 stars with Luigi, so now I have 100% completed all games in 3D All-Stars. I waited to discuss Galaxy to see if my opinions from when I originally played it on release have changed now. Here's my thoughts:
The Environment: the world still looks great, and has a lot of variety in the scenery. There's a mysticism around everything, and stuff like the star bits falling around the world, and travelling between planets from the star shooters is still highly satisfying. Walking around the hub and seeing all the rooms and the lumas everywhere makes things feel alive. Enemy variety is a little lacking, but that's pretty commonplace for mario.
The Controls: I typically compare controls to Mario 64 when it comes to 3D platformers, for both the good (quick fluid movement) and the bad (precision and quick turn arounds). I feel like for the most part, the fine movement is better here, but Mario feels slower in the quicker movements, even though the moveset is similar. Another issue I had was judging the hitbox for the spin move. Most of the time it wasn't an issue, but the Pokey's in the sand world gave me way more trouble than they should have. Then Luigi shows up and throws all that out the window. His take off is slower, but overall speed is faster, and he can jump higher, which is great for skipping some parts of levels, but his inability to stop quickly made some of the later levels a real chore, particularly in the purple coin auto scrollers. One thing that I did have a better experience with than I originally remember was the motion controls. I played on a switch lite with a grip case. Grabbing star bits was a simple finger wag on the screen, and the parts where you blow Mario around in a bubble were very easy due to precise finger tapping. The ball sections were fine too, and my only complaint was I had to sit up straight to use it, as it picked a fixed point for the "upright" position.
The Completion Journey: Like the first time I played though, I found a lot of the stars and areas to be highly forgettable. This has been consistent across all 3 games in the collection, but I feel the other two games had more highly memorable moments. I forgot some parts in short timeframe between my Mario and Luigi playthroughs. Comparing to Mario 64, in that game I may forget entire worlds between playthroughs, once I'm in there, the star descriptions have it all come flooding back in. Galaxy tries a similar setup, but I find the star descriptions not all that helpful. I think a lot of it is that the basic setup is the same for a lot of the stars: run to the star shooters, and go to each little planet to do the thing that gets you to the next area. Travelling around on the planets is fun, but everything moves so quickly and is often just a straight path to each star, so that sense of discovery isn't there that is present in 64. Sunshine had a similar issue, but I feel like the challenges to get each star had more variety.
The Difficulty: This one's the easiest by far. I flew through it without too much trouble. Some of the races you do as Luigi seem faster than the Mario version, which does add some challenge, but still only took a couple tries to get the movement down correctly. The only time I struggled was due to Luigi's movement, and even then taking it really carefully usually let to success.
Overall, the game is still fun, but I think I had more problems with this one than the other two in the collection. I really wish they'd add Galaxy 2, as I hear that one takes Galaxy's foundation and runs with it. Sadly, I never got to play it since I sold my Wii before it released.
The Environment: the world still looks great, and has a lot of variety in the scenery. There's a mysticism around everything, and stuff like the star bits falling around the world, and travelling between planets from the star shooters is still highly satisfying. Walking around the hub and seeing all the rooms and the lumas everywhere makes things feel alive. Enemy variety is a little lacking, but that's pretty commonplace for mario.
The Controls: I typically compare controls to Mario 64 when it comes to 3D platformers, for both the good (quick fluid movement) and the bad (precision and quick turn arounds). I feel like for the most part, the fine movement is better here, but Mario feels slower in the quicker movements, even though the moveset is similar. Another issue I had was judging the hitbox for the spin move. Most of the time it wasn't an issue, but the Pokey's in the sand world gave me way more trouble than they should have. Then Luigi shows up and throws all that out the window. His take off is slower, but overall speed is faster, and he can jump higher, which is great for skipping some parts of levels, but his inability to stop quickly made some of the later levels a real chore, particularly in the purple coin auto scrollers. One thing that I did have a better experience with than I originally remember was the motion controls. I played on a switch lite with a grip case. Grabbing star bits was a simple finger wag on the screen, and the parts where you blow Mario around in a bubble were very easy due to precise finger tapping. The ball sections were fine too, and my only complaint was I had to sit up straight to use it, as it picked a fixed point for the "upright" position.
The Completion Journey: Like the first time I played though, I found a lot of the stars and areas to be highly forgettable. This has been consistent across all 3 games in the collection, but I feel the other two games had more highly memorable moments. I forgot some parts in short timeframe between my Mario and Luigi playthroughs. Comparing to Mario 64, in that game I may forget entire worlds between playthroughs, once I'm in there, the star descriptions have it all come flooding back in. Galaxy tries a similar setup, but I find the star descriptions not all that helpful. I think a lot of it is that the basic setup is the same for a lot of the stars: run to the star shooters, and go to each little planet to do the thing that gets you to the next area. Travelling around on the planets is fun, but everything moves so quickly and is often just a straight path to each star, so that sense of discovery isn't there that is present in 64. Sunshine had a similar issue, but I feel like the challenges to get each star had more variety.
The Difficulty: This one's the easiest by far. I flew through it without too much trouble. Some of the races you do as Luigi seem faster than the Mario version, which does add some challenge, but still only took a couple tries to get the movement down correctly. The only time I struggled was due to Luigi's movement, and even then taking it really carefully usually let to success.
Overall, the game is still fun, but I think I had more problems with this one than the other two in the collection. I really wish they'd add Galaxy 2, as I hear that one takes Galaxy's foundation and runs with it. Sadly, I never got to play it since I sold my Wii before it released.
Bernie in the Skyrim with mittens...
