Time Extend
Why the ageless Super Mario Galaxy 2 may still be Mario’s finest hour
Developer EAD Tokyo Publisher Nintendo Format Wii Release 2010
No one working at Nintendo, we’re fairly confident, was thinking of Roxette when EAD Tokyo started developing the successor to Super Mario Galaxy. But the much-derided Swedish pop duo’s greatest hits album Don’t Bore Us, Get To The Chorus is an uncanny match for the design ethos of the sequel, a mission statement to which the studio holds fast throughout.
From the very beginning, it’s clear it has places to go: we’re hurried through the narrative setup, the fanfare that greets our landing at Sky Station Galaxy bursting from our speakers much sooner than that initial touchdown in the Good Egg Galaxy. Yes, Mario’s ‘faceship’ is a more underwhelming hub than Rosalina’s comet observatory. But it compensates with the speed at which it whisks us to those vibrant, multi-faceted worlds. If Super Mario Galaxy 2 seems in a rush at times, that’s only because it wants its players to reach the good stuff quicker.
Granted, it can only do that because it’s following in the footsteps of a predecessor that made Mario the first plumber in space. But replay Galaxy today and its first steps, like those of Neil Armstrong, are understandably tentative. The giant leaps come later. Unlike the original, Galaxy 2 trusts us to keep pace with its gravitational twists and tricks, confident that it doesn’t have to slow down to make sure we’re still with it. Instead, it bounds ahead, willing us to catch up – literally so when you complete a galaxy as Luigi and a staff ghost shows you how a level is really done.
This acknowledgement of speedrunners, a precursor to 3D World’s Ghost Miis and
Odyssey’s time-trial challenges, is just one of dozens of ways Galaxy 2 plants seedlings that seem to have inspired Nintendo’s output over the decade since its release. Cloud Mario lets Nintendo widen those voids, inviting players to fill them with up to three brisk shakes of the Wii Remote – and as we do, it’s hard not to draw a line from those player-created platforms to
Super Mario Maker. The red-blue panels of Flip-Swap Galaxy, as you spin in mid-air to turn them over, were revisited in 3D Land and World. Then there’s the tense rhythmic challenge of Beat Block Galaxy, where platforms disappear and reappear in time with the soundtrack: another idea so good it bore repeating in each 3D Mario since.
And it’s not just Mario’s adventures that have drawn inspiration from Galaxy 2. Towards the end of the game, amid the helter-skelter rush of ideas, it finds a rare moment of stillness. Having spent almost two games getting away from Super Mario Sunshine’s claustrophobic interiors, venturing as far beyond four walls as possible, Slimy Spring Galaxy seems to break all the rules. Here, we find Mario swimming through an underwater cave like a moustachioed Lara Croft, a green shell propelling him through the water. Giant tube worms bend into your path, but the light from the shell is enough to make them retract into the cave walls. Just as his air is about to run out, a launch star lets Mario breathe again, carrying him up and out towards the flagpole at the midway point, a trail of coins marking a precipitous drop to the next aquatic area. This is patrolled by Boos, with boost rings in the walls sending you speeding toward them before a narrow tunnel sends you towards the surface, weaving between spiny urchins.
Then comes the payoff, as you emerge from these gloomy waters to a scene of almost transcendent serenity, Ryo Nagamatsu’s score departing to leave nothing but gentle birdsong and the soft rush of a nearby waterfall as you stroll into a field of white flowers. A treasure chest awaits before you, but your eye is drawn to the horizon, as the sun rises at what looks like the edge of the universe. Revisited today, it takes on new significance, with Breath Of The Wild’s tranquil exploration still fresh in our minds.
Yet just as often as it points the way forward, Galaxy 2 looks back, cheekily pilfering concepts from Mario’s past before gleefully making them its own. Sometimes it’s no more than a brief nod, such as Rolling Coaster Galaxy’s rainbow-coloured road. Later, it goes much further, paying homage to Mario’s first 3D outing in pitchperfect fashion with Throwback Galaxy’s take on Whomp’s Fortress. From the first notes of that instantly recognisable score,
it’s like stepping out of a time machine – and even here there’s a sneaky switcheroo at the end. But Nintendo goes one further with Tall Trunk Galaxy’s giant slide. On this twisting, looping course – faster, harder and deadlier than its 64bit counterparts – Mario remains upright throughout, as if to show how far he’s come since then. Skating along with his hands behind his back, he leaves his lower-poly iterations on their collective backside.
Occasionally, it sticks to traditions while toying with scale or gravity. Take Supermassive Galaxy, which, with its colossal stage furniture and enemies, playfully suggests that sometimes bigger really is better. Here, a spinning coin isn’t collected when you touch it, but rather lets you wall-kick off it to higher ground. Warp pipes are still technically a mode of transport but, rather than descending into them, you stand on their outer rim using them as a lift as they rise upward. Bowser’s Gravity Gauntlet, meanwhile, may take place in a castle belonging to Mario’s archnemesis, but it’s one unlike any fortress we’ve seen before, as you walk up walls and along ceilings, until somehow jumping up into an underwater section feels like the most natural thing in the world.
That spirit of reinvention sees EAD Tokyo regularly combining familiar ingredients in thrilling new ways. So, it says, you liked the gravity-flipping 2.5D sections of the previous game? Now what if up changes to down and vice versa on the beat? And if you haven’t had enough of rhythmic twists, try Flash Black Galaxy for size. Here, you’ll climb up a haunted house from a side-on view before the camera shifts to a more conventional thirdperson perspective, then tackle a 3D platforming gauntlet where the stage is only illuminated for a second – foom! – every two bars of Koji Kondo’s underground theme.
That old standard is remixed, of course, as is just about everything else. Because when Super Mario Galaxy 2 isn’t seeking new perspectives on old paradigms, it’s finding ways to switch up ones it’s only just thought up, reinventing itself at every turn. Shiverburn Galaxy’s fire-ice combos are particularly ingenious: you’ll carefully cloud-hop your way over a lava lake to a switch that freezes the entire surface, before crossing a fiery sea using rocky platforms that scroll by like a semiabstract, modernist take on Frogger. Then it reverses its earlier trick, as Mario glides over ice, dodging lava pools that spread outwards in a perfect circle as fiery rocks fall from above to melt the surface. In Freezy Flake Galaxy, by contrast, you roll snowballs to create paths so Mario doesn’t burn his feet.
This torrent of ideas never stops; if Galaxy is a kid rummaging around in a chest for new things to play with, its sequel flings open the lid and tips it upside down,
YOU WALK ON WALLS UNTIL JUMPING UP INTO AN UNDERWATER SECTION FEELS THE MOST NATURAL THING IN THE WORLD
spilling every last toy out across the floor. There’s barely a wasted metre of real estate, with secrets stuffed into hidden nooks and teleporters placed on rare empty spaces, spiriting you away to tackle quick-fire challenges against the clock to earn more coins, star bits and 1-Ups. Its powerups are better, too: Rock Mario’s runaway boulder bowls over skittle-shaped enemies and rolls down narrow walkways on a one-off level that could quite easily be a Super Monkey Ball course.
The Spin Drill allows for more puzzlefocused sequences, as you shake the Wii Remote to power through dirt, bouncing off walls and tunnelling through planetoids. Doing that in Cosmic Cove Galaxy releases the water contained inside its core, letting you swim around in it; a delightful moment that’s matched in the same stage when you turn it into a translucent ice rink and walljump between a pair of frozen waterfalls leading to the Power Star.
Some of its most transformative items aren’t even reserved for Mario: Yoshi has rarely been used more effectively than here. When he’s not gobbling fruit to become a blimp or gulping a hot pepper that fires him up ramps and loops like a surrogate Sonic, he’s using his tongue to uproot Piranha Plants, or dragging platforms out of walls, or latching onto floating flowers like a grappling hook. Using the Wii Remote’s pointer and motion controls makes it more tactile than its predecessor: not just a better Mario game, but a better Wii game, too.
Even so, we sense that Galaxy 2 is less fondly remembered than most Mario adventures; perhaps the inevitable result of the first game’s cosmic impact, which made it a much harder act to follow than the original’s divisive predecessor. It’s also true that it works its most powerful magic in the moment. In pushing you through more challenging and complex arrangements of platforms, enemies, shifts of perspective and gravity; in forcing you to play on instinct; in pummelling you so relentlessly with new concepts, perhaps it doesn’t give your brain the time and space to process it all. Still, it’s undoubtedly worth rejoining the joyride to be dazzled anew. As Nintendo reaches Mario’s 35th anniversary, it feels like the game that rang in his 25th may have been the ultimate Mario celebration, a greatest hits collection with his most irresistible choruses.