The Sunshine State

Or: Holy Shit, Super Mario Sunshine is compromised at a base level! I feel like more people should know that??? Kind of a review, kind of a complaining sesh.

Like some of the game’s designers, Mario is fast asleep while on the job.

Uh, so let’s get the tagline of this one out of the way? I’ll explain myself, I suppose, at the very least, and at length I promise… Super Mario Sunshine is a game that I like parts of. I am heavily caveating here. I like a lot of things about it. I think it looks great, sounds great, and has a lot of really well-made components in its makeup.

It’s one of the best vibes of its era: with the game’s setting, the dolphin-shaped archipelago, Isle Defino, offering one of the best settings you can explore on a GameCube console. Every inch of this gorgeous tropical paradise is teeming with lots of great characters, marvels with stunning island vistas, and is punctuated by the enticing goal of collecting the numerous Shine Sprites littered across the many biomes of the island. There is a ‘blue sky’ canvas feel to the proceedings that feels squarely of its era; like Sonic Adventure, and Jet Set Radio, were for SEGA’s Dreamcast, and games like Wave Race 64, Super Mario 64, and Banjo-Kazooie were for the Nintendo 64— so too are games like Super Mario Sunshine beacons of aesthetic positivity for their console’s stable of vibrant, creative titles.

There's just a verve, vim, and vigor to everything about Super Mario Sunshine; it’s hard to knock the flavor of any part of its visual appeal. It’s all just that: extremely appealing. Especially to me. I could go on and on about how much I enjoy running around the Isle, collecting Shine Sprites along the way. It’s not just the visuals— the music is enchanting as well, with more maracas, accordions, drums, and other oceanic-inspired orchestrations than you can shake a palm frond at. It’s one of the best-sounding games in the Mario series, if you ask me. I like pretty much everything about this package from a presentation level. (Aside from the sub-par voice acting, which is a minor quibble, as there is little spoken dialogue in the game from actual Mario characters.)

The thing that isn’t great about Super Mario Sunshine? Well… um… a lot of things, I guess. But chiefly? The… uh… playing of it. It kinda plays like shit?? It also falls apart on you frequently. It’s a whole thing.

Now, now, put your pitchforks away, I’m getting to the core of it, I promise. I know you wanna take up arms to defend your favorite Mario game, dear reader… Why else would you click this article? Surely it can’t be because you willingly want to hear me grouse about a topic such as this? You want to defend your little gem, don’t you? I see right through you!!!

I think this game, while I like a lot of things about it, I feel like the entire product is compromised at a basic level. What do I mean by this? Oh, I shall get into it. The game is rumored to have been made on a truncated time-schedule; reportedly, 18-20 months, and it feels rushed as a result. That’s a good deal less time than a lot of triple-A video games of the time had in the oven, and this sped-up timeline seems to have made the developers of this game cut a few corners along the way. A few too many corners, if you ask me. I think the concessions Nintendo made along the way while developing Super Mario Sunshine are extremely evident upon playing it. It is frequently a frustrating, janky, messy experience.

The largest and most grand issue I have with it? Super Mario Sunshine is one of the least polished Mario games in the series, and one of the most broken games I can remember playing from Nintendo. Sometimes it barely functions at a basic mechanical level, with glitching and hitching galore. It’s an extremely frustrating ordeal at the worst of times, and mildly tedious and annoying at others. I have rarely had such a love/hate relationship with a game I actually like as with this. I am incredibly mixed on it.

My main issues with the game stem from this problem. It just feels like the game is bound to fly apart on you at any given time, so there was a sort of anxiousness I felt while playing it that I just didn’t enjoy. I felt like I was walking on eggshells around the game, trying to be as careful as I could while getting around, because the game straight up has a different set of rules from every other Mario game in the series. It’s the ‘black sheep’ of the series for that reason.

Let’s break down these rules, maybe? These are the rules I’ve identified, anyway, in my time with it.

———————————————————————————————————————————————Rule 1: Always Use F.L.U.D.D.: This is the most obvious change in the game compared to the other titles. At least initially. Mario’s moveset is very pared down to the other 3D entries, and it’s not too much of a nuisance at the outset. It takes a bit of getting used to, say, not having a ‘long jump’, which was a very useful mechanic in both previous entries, Super Mario 64, and every game after, but FLUDD makes up for it in some interesting ways, even if I do prefer having increased movement options like that iconic leap from the other games.

FLUDD is a gimmick item at the end of the day, but that doesn’t make it not useful. It’s great in a pinch, if you’ve overshot your high jump and you’re likely to miss a platform— you can use FLUDD to catch you before you take a tumble into the abyss, and it will slowly assist in guiding you back to where you intended to go. I could do without the dumb voice acting in the game in general and especially with FLUDD, but again, it is a minor quibble given how little characters speak. FLUDD is an interesting idea, and for it being a gimmick, the game focuses on it and its capabilities, constantly allowing for many interesting gameplay opportunities. ‘Interesting’, being the keyword here, not ‘good’. There are some major design issues I have with the game that involve FLUDD.

Just interesting ideas executed poorly, like Corona Mountain’s boat segment, where FLUDD is used to propel you forward over lava and around obstacles. The mechanics of propulsion, tied with some of the most bizarre-feeling boat physics I’ve encountered in a game, make this a great example of poor execution in the game when it comes to FLUDD. There are more instances of this, too, but we don’t need to get into all of it. Great ideas abound, but shoddy execution follows regularly.

Rule 2: Calamity Comes: This should be Rule 1. This is the ‘modus operandi’ of Super Mario Sunshine as a game. Sometimes, no matter what you do, whether you have executed a perfect series of jumps, taken all the necessary precautions, and delivered on every criterion of a sequence, the game will betray you. Sometimes, and very frequently in fact, the game will refuse to honor your gameplay.

I had so many instances of pulling off perfect jumps over long crevasses, completing excellent chains of wall-jumping, and even sticking perfect landings while platforming, and even still, the game just completely whiffed on me. So many examples of this… I can count on 3 to 4 hands how many times I clipped through geometry during a wall jump and fell to my death, glitched through physics while attempting to collect red coins for a Sprite, and even fell through the world while just running around collecting items in a level. It’s crazy how fundamentally broken this game still is to this day. It’s just baffling, frankly.

There is a different ethos that this game has compared to every other title in the series. It falls apart frequently and looks at you to blame for its fuck-ups. I should be able to trust Nintendo of all companies and developers to allow me to execute in their games. They have a reputation for quality and fun, which they usually hit in their titles, and especially in the Mario series. It’s a bar of quality I’ve come to expect from their games, that Sunshine just doesn’t even come close to. For every great level I played through, 2 to 3 bad, horribly executed episodes were sure to follow. It’s so frustrating. I was extremely disappointed by large swathes of it. The levels are frequently a pain in the ass to complete, by extension with lots of dumb design decisions dragging down, again, interesting ideas.

‘TOO BAD!’ It’ll say as you plummet yet again for the umpteenth time, this time, because your Yoshi mount fell too far down, and because of that, the game won’t trigger a recovery flutter-jump to save yourself. The things that should work in every other game, DON’T HERE. This isn’t an interesting thing. It’s just bad game execution. Every neat idea, cool presentational piece, and interesting bit of design is handicapped by all-around bad execution, in my eyes.

Rule 3: DON’T TRUST ANYTHING!: Aside from graphical glitches and gameplay quirks, it wouldn’t be so bad if Mario routinely did what I wanted him to. In Sunshine, he is by far his most ‘squirrely’ feeling. There is an inherent skittishness to the character of 3D Mario that is shared throughout the series. He usually does just that, skitter— tippy-tapping to and fro in a direction to gain momentum for a jump. But in Sunshine? He has a penchant for being completely unwieldy to control at best and totally manic and volatile at the very worst of times. That’s the biggest issue with the game. The worst thing about it. The physics of Super Mario Sunshine are BAD.

The physics compromise every aspect of this game. From timing traversal, dealing with environmental hazards, to executing the platforming, and interacting with physical space in levels— every part of this game has a lively, rolling churn to it just beneath the surface. I mean that. It feels like every piece of solid-looking ground, wall, or piece of geometry is actually deceptively liquid in nature, pliably giving way for you to clip through it when you desperately need its purchase. Every bit of platform in this game feels like there is a slow boil just beneath. Vertices and geometry constantly stay in flux here, and Mario moves with the motion of that ocean. Out of nowhere, you could be standing in one place, and the platforms move beneath you, so you have to constantly adjust your position to time your next move, and that moving of the goalposts is so frustrating to have to juggle as situations in a level constantly change.

I was once on a rotating platform and was sitting squarely on a flat part of it when the platform rolled to its right. I randomly slipped as I was making it to the next part of the rotation, and I fell to my death. This happened so many times, specifically on this level. The game expects you to replay level after level after that to get a minimum amount of Shines to progress the campaign, so sometimes you are doing these platforming challenges A LOT.

It’s so... So…. So frustrating, especially when you do EVERYTHING right. It’s why this game is so low in my eyes. You can’t rely on it. You can’t trust anything about playing the game. The game commits cardinal platformer sins so frequently its astonishing. If I can’t bank on anything, what do I have to hold on to? It’s a broken, unpolished game with the worst-feeling physics in the series. I am baffled by it. Don’t even get me started on the PLINKO PLATFORMING RED COIN SHINE SPRITE LEVEL THAT NEVER FUCKING WORKS!

———————————————————————————————————————————I believe Mario games to be experiential adventures centered primarily on gameplay: games that have more to do with mechanical specificity and feeling than actual narrative substance. When you talk about Mario, you talk about how a game in the series plays and how said gameplay, per title, makes you feel. I really like Mario games, especially those in 3D. If those feelings are betrayed? You get a game like Super Mario Sunshine, a supremely flawed game with myriad issues, and a presentation and setting that almost make up for it.

I wish I liked it more, but I don’t. It was very disappointing to me. I am glad I played it, though, and got that proverbial ‘monkey off my back’, as it were, because I have tried to get through this game a ton over the years. It’s just a shame? That’s kinda how I feel about it. It is severely lacking in so many key areas that it’s hard to elevate it to anything higher than I would rank it on my personal list. It’s the least good 3D Mario game by a wide margin.

Why don’t we rank them next? That sounds fun. First, a little history of my time with the series, and my new goal to complete them all (despite my misgivings).

Recently, I played both of the Super Mario Galaxy games and now Sunshine after watching the newest Mario movie this year (I even played through the original Star Fox 64 for reasons), since I was in a Mario mood. My favorite in the series is far and away Super Mario Odyssey, though. Even in 2017, a year dominated by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Persona 5, I preferred Super Mario Odyssey over any game that came out that year. It’s one of the best games ever, absolutely the best Mario game, and one of my personal favorite games of all time. I got every gatherable Moon collectible, every costume, and even turned my spaceship’s hot air balloon to gold (a signifier I maxed out every Moon you could attain in the game), and I even participated in the Balloon Luigi activity that came out post-launch (kinda fun!).

I adore Odyssey, and I loved completing it. So, as a long-term goal, and being in a Mario ‘mood’ as it were, I am interested in completing the other 3D entries in the series. Getting all the ‘stuff’, that is. With the release of the new movie, and Nintendo re-marketing the Galaxy games as a co-promotion of said movie, I decided now was as good a time as any to dive in.

Maybe I’ll talk about the Galaxy games at length another time, but in short, they are wonderful games. I prefer the first entry to the second, but both have very strong pacing, imaginative level design, boast lovely orchestral soundtracks, and contain fantastic gameplay ideas. They’re brilliant video games. If I had to rank the 3D games in total, though? It would go something like this (ask me on a different day, and they may be totally changed aside from the top pick):

1. Super Mario Odyssey

2. Super Mario Galaxy

3. Super Mario 64

4. Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury

5. Super Mario Galaxy 2

6. Super Mario 3D Land

7. Super Mario Sunshine

Yep. That looks right to me. Sunshine is at the very bottom (surprising no one who has read this so far), and there is no way it won’t stay there at the very pit. Now, don’t get me wrong, even if it is by far the least ‘good’ 3D Mario, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a bad game in totality. It has a lot of merit. I like so many parts of it, actually. The bad outweighs the good, unfortunately, and that’s a major detriment to my feelings concerning it. That’s why I am so upset and frustrated by how I feel about it. There is SOMETHING there. I can’t help but feel like this is a missed opportunity. At the end of the day, even a mid to low-tier Mario game is far better than a lot of your stock-standard video games.

To wrap up this whole complaining sesh, I guess I can’t recommend it. It’s an old ass game, but if you are going to play any Mario game, don’t make this the first one you play. You might swear off the series! I’d save it for last so you can compare the whole series to it and see for yourself how out of step it is. I wish I liked it more, but I see Super Mario Sunshine as mostly a miss: an interesting, tropical sophomore sojourn for the 3D Mario flavor of games that is consistently bogged down by bad physics, shoddy level design, and unreliable gameplay. It’s just a shame… I really wanted to finally love it this time. Oh well, I tried.

Stay classy, and “It’s been a thin slice of Heaven, folks.”