By all accounts, Super Mario Galaxy should be my favorite game starring the red and blue plumber. I love all forms of sci-fi, and the Galaxy games are Mario’s only sustained foray into outer space. Your home base is a starship. New worlds are grouped by galaxy. Each level has you jumping from planet to planet with the cold expanse of space in the background. If you fall at certain moments, you fall into a black hole.
I grew up on Star Wars, The Matrix, and Alien — I should love this stuff. So why don’t I?
My Many Attempts To Explore The Galaxy
Super Mario Galaxy launched at a time when I was obsessed with video games. 2007 was an incredible time for the medium, and I was lucky enough to own both a PS3 and Nintendo Wii, allowing me to get stuck into all the hottest games. I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Wii Sports, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, and BioShock. Galaxy should have slotted right in.
And yet, it’s always left me feeling a little cold. I never owned it, instead renting it sometime circa 2009. I had a decent time, but it didn’t leave a strong impression on me. I returned to it after the 3D All-Stars collection launched in 2020, but never finished it then either. This weekend, in a rush to get to 52 games completed by the end of the year, I returned once again, hoping to finally fall in love.
I didn’t. But this round left me with a better understanding of why. Galaxy is quite good; it just doesn’t do what I want a Mario game to do anymore.
Sunshine Shining Over The Galaxy
Super Mario Sunshine has always been my favorite 3D Mario game. It wasn’t the first I loved — that’s Super Mario 64. Nor is it the best — that’s probably Odyssey. But it’s the game in the series that has the best vibes. It’s a tropical vacation that costs me nothing besides the time it takes for Super Mario 3D All-Stars to reinstall. And part of the reason it hits so hard is that each of its levels is designed to feel like a real place.
Obviously, this is Mario we’re talking about. It isn’t straightforwardly realistic. You ride squids like jet skis. Each town is filled with NPCs whose appearances split the difference between chubby hula dancers and living trees. You reach those towns via paint splotch. Piranha Plants are a much bigger problem than they are in our own world and you fight them with jets of water fired out of a sentient backpack.
As fantastical and outsized as the events Mario encounters on Isle Delfino are, each area is built to resemble a real space. Delfino Plaza feels like a real resort town center. Pinna Park feels like a real amusement park (albeit a very small one). Gelato Beach feels like a real beach where you would relax on vacation and knock back a few small beers. The game isn’t strictly realistic — it’s brightly cartoonish and, even if it was aiming for grit, it launched in 2002 and wouldn’t hit the target by modern standards. But it feels lived in.
Super Mario Galaxy is the opposite end of the spectrum. It is impossible to imagine anyone living within its levels. Most planets are only a little bigger than Mario himself. You can run around them in seconds. Each feels more like a jungle gym than a real place. The cold black sky, always in the background, heightens the feeling that you are experiencing fun in a vacuum.
Some of my sourness about this game may stem from the fact that the camera controls are pretty dire, even in the 2020 version.
Besides the brief glimpse of the Mushroom Kingdom in the game’s opening, Rosalina’s spaceship comes the closest to feeling like a real space, but only in parts. The library, for example, feels like you could curl up and read a book in it. But the ship as a whole feels like a wedding cake held together by rainbows, not a place you could actually imagine yourself.
I want to be clear that I don’t care about realism. But for a place to be somewhere you want to be immersed in, it has to feel possible, on some level, to live in it. I can’t imagine living in this galaxy. But it is a nice place to visit.
