Super Mario Odyssey
The reason you play videogames
It’s impossible not to love Super Mario Odyssey. It takes everything that’s great about videogames and amplifies them tenfold, delivering a blistering amount of fun that will have you giggling like a child and wondering how Nintendo keeps on coming up with fresh new ideas for its most iconic mascot.
Odyssey’s premise is as slight as they come, and once again revolves around Mario rescuing Princess Peach from Bowser – only this time Bowser is intent on wedding the beleaguered Princess. Our plucky hero is having none of this, of course, and teams up with Cappy – whose own girlfriend has been kidnapped by the monstrous villain – to plan a ridiculous globe-trotting rescue attempt that sees the dynamic duo travelling across some of the most fantastical worlds of the Super Mario universe. It’s a pathetically slight story, for sure, but it’s backed up by some of the most compelling gameplay we’ve yet witnessed in a Mario game.
Previous Mario adventures have had numerous gimmicks to sell them to fresh audiences and Odyssey is no exception. Mario’s ghostly new friend Cappy has the ability to possess a variety of different enemies, all of which give Mario access to an insane amount of different skills. Dinosaurs, long-beaked birds, Goombas, Hammer Bros and countless other foes can all be manipulated in some way, allowing Mario to fully interact with and explore the beautiful worlds that he finds himself in. Some of these enemies you might only use one or twice in your ten-hour-plus odyssey, while others will be used more often, but every single one makes you really think about how you tackle each new challenge that Nintendo’s game throws at you.
Power Moons replace the stars and Shines of earlier games and are needed to power the flying ship, which transports Mario to each new world. Some of these moons can be purchased in the new shops that Mario can visit on each world, but most are earned by
completing challenges. The challenges themselves have their DNA in the ones found in Super Mario 64, but are no less entertaining. Indeed, it’s the sheer amount of variety in Odyssey ’s Power Moons that make them so compelling to collect. One moment you’re possessing a fish so you can retrieve several pieces of a broken moon, the next you’re using a Chain Chomp to make your way past some impenetrable blocks, or taking control of a slab of meat in order to entice a giant bird. Then you’ll be using a Samurai costume to gain access to an otherwise out-of-bounds room, outrun a Tyrannosaurus Rex or complete a puzzle by possessing one of the pieces and manipulating it around the board. There’s always something new to do in Odyssey, always something else to see and always something else to possess and the end result is a game that’s always pushing your expectations and almost always exceeding them.
The worlds of Odyssey might pale in size to some of the locations found in other popular triple-a games, but for a Mario title they’re truly gargantuan and absolutely packed with things to do. The structure of the main game is clever enough that the levels feel on par with the likes of Super Mario 64 or Sunshine, but once you start exploring you realise just how impressive the size of these stages actually are. It’s most telling when you return to the Odyssey ship that helps you on your quest to revisit past worlds and realise just how many Power Moons you’ve actually missed. So good is Odyssey’s design, so brilliant is its structure that you’ll want to return to those earlier worlds to mop up those missing Moons. In fact, you don’t really have much of a choice, because as with every Mario game before it, reaching the end of its story isn’t the end of the game and Nintendo has plenty of fantastic tricks up its sleeve once those credits roll, including a… well, that would be telling. Part of Odyssey’s brilliance is discovering its magic for yourself and it’s something we’re loathe to spoil for you.
There’s no such thing as a perfect videogame, but it’s hard to believe how Nintendo could improve upon its latest epic platformer. The controls are exceptional, the variety of the game is astonishing while the sheer amount of fun it offers will take you back to when you first discovered the medium. The sheer confidence on display in Super Mario Odyssey is exceptional, more so when you consider the franchise’s rich legacy. We’re confident that you’re not going to play a better platformer than Odyssey until Nintendo decides to make a new one. It’s peerless, it’s faultless, it’s the reason we love videogames.