A postmortem on Super Mario Odyssey.

Man, 2017 was sure a dumpster fire of a year for the world. But on the bright side, it was a fantastic year for videogames, arguably one of the best we've seen in a very long time. If the amount of tragedy and terrible garbage of 2017 is indicative of juxtaposing the great games we got, the only way 2018 would be better was if Trump actually succeeded in starting a nuclear war while we found out the entirety of Hollywood were cannibals instead of sexual predators.

I'll be upfront, I didn't play as many games I would've liked this year. I'm ridiculously poor and the aging relic from a lost era that is my computer generally functions as nothing more than a salt generator powered by MOBAs and five-year old F2P compost. It felt more like a catch-up year for me, enjoying some older games I wanted to sink more time into while the blur of fantastic videogames I wish I could play moved on by. So I don't know how qualified I am to discuss my favorite games of 2017, but I can tell you that one of them wasn't Super Mario Odyssey. Ooh that's a hot take, aren't I contrarian for not liking the critically acclaimed love child of Nintendo's flagship franchise. Well joke's on you, I loved it. ...just not as much as I expected.

I'm going to spoil this game to an extent, but being upset at Mario spoilers would be like getting upset at finding out Ganon was somehow shoehorned into a Zelda game and there's elemental dungeons involved.

Let's be clear, Super Mario Odyssey is a fantastic game. It's a stupendous whimsical romp through a bunch of fascinating worlds and it's one of those few games filled with so much child-like glee that you just feel happy playing it. Any other year that wasn't crowded with your Horizons and Personas and Niers and Cupheads, it would be the best game to come out that year. But it's not my favorite game to come out this year. It's not even my favorite game to come out last year with the word “Odyssey” in the title. 2017 was a really fucking good year for videogames, videogames that took risks and were doing innovative or new things with massive payoffs.

Super Mario Odyssey doesn't really do any of those things. It wasn't a brand new or innovative experience, not in the least. And there's nothing wrong with that; it's a well-polished and (mostly) beautifully designed game that is among the best in its class... but it didn't do anything new. Odyssey was very intentionally designed as a revival of sorts, a return to the open-world design the 3D games in the series had with its start in Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Sunshine. And unlike Yooka-Laylie—another N64-styled platforming adventure game that banked a lot on nostalgia for its success—Odyssey does a fantastic job of modernizing a tired old genre of game without giving into some of the faults that plague those games.

...mostly.

Can I be on the nose here for a moment? I like Super Mario Odyssey, but am I the only one who thinks this game harkens back more to the N64 era of Rare platformers a la Banjo-Tooie and DK64 moreso than Mario's own 3D shenanigans? Where there's an alarming emphasis on _GIMMICKY_ transformations and minigames scattered throughout massive and in some cases vacant worlds? Super Mario 64 and and Super Mario Sunshine were very pure experiences in sense that traversing and navigation were the primary focus of the games. That seems marketedly less so in Super Mario Odyssey, and it's kind of apparent when some of the game's best levels play on that strength while intermingling the crazy hat soul-stealing mechanic with it smoothly. The Metro Kingdom was a level that made traversing it the main point of attraction and made exploring it compelling. On the other side of that coin, the Sand Kingdom felt like a momentum killer so early on in the game, and I had little desire to come back to that level because it honestly felt like a level straight out of DK64. It was a massive vacant slog with a few neat little gimmicks here and there, but felt more suited to be a part of an adventure game than a free-wheeling romp in a Mario game.

Also let's talk about the collectables and why they're awful. Part of the fun in SM64 or SMS was that every Star or Shine was a mission, it felt like a legitimate accomplishment to collect one. And if you found hidden ones in the level, it felt like it mattered. If there's one thing Mario games always did well, it was that they emphasized the importance of collectibles without having to saturate the game with them, and used them to compel players into exploring. I felt Odyssey struggled on both of these fronts for a handful of reasons. Moons are everywhere, almost nonsensically so. There's 880 of them to be earned, and I use “earned” very generously in a lot of cases. You can find Moons by sitting on a bench with somebody while they ponder their existential futility being a human NPC in a Mario game. You can find one by just staring at a taxi flying through the sky and it magically poops a Moon out. Some of these are cute and clever, just obscure enough to reward the player for showing curiosity by interacting with the game world.

I also found a lot of Moons by doing mundane things that would normally earn me coins. I found a Moon kicking a rock. I found a lot of Moons by pounding the shiny spot on the ground in the open. I found a Moon by spinning my hat on the sparkly thing. These aren't interesting. And a few Moons that seem cute at first like stacking Goombas or catching rabbits or getting the music notes in a straight line are repeated ad-nauseum without ever really growing into anything else more interesting. I can get incentivizing players into exploring, but there are a lot of recycled and utterly tedious Moons to collect in this game. And the fact that you only need a small handful to advance the story to access new levels—the remaining Moons you collect only unlock cosmetic outfits AFTER YOU BEAT THE GAME—means you can go most of the game ignoring them because they serve almost no purpose, no reward for going out of your way to collect them. The purple coins in every level hold more value than them because what you can purchase with them are immediately available, and they're sprinkled throughout levels enough that they're always worth collecting and never feel undervalued. Whereas you can ignore well over half the Moons in a level the first time you play through it. Mario's world clearly isn't immune to the economic woes of inflation because there are a ton of these things and they border on feeling worthless. I'd even argue that so much of them are unnecessary that a non-insignificant portion of them could be removed from the game and it wouldn't be worse off for it.

The possession mechanic mostly serves as an extension for the game's mechanics, but unlike something persistent like the FLUDD or the movesets you develop in Rare's platformers, a handful of them feel too contextual or shallow to really flesh out the game as a centralized mechanic. Lightning rails are basic but uninteresting, but making Mario catapult off of sentient utensil men was common enough to be an interesting mechanic. A lot of them serve as one-off minigame gimmicks, but I never felt like there were enough of them to keep it varied. The dinosaur in the Cascade Kingdom surmised the hat possession idea in a nutshell for me; I thought it was ridiculous and clever at first, but then after rampaging and knocking things over with it for a bit I went “Huh, I guess that's really it.”

The game bleeds fanservice, and I can almost excuse all of the game's problems because I can dress up Mario as a clown and ride a moped before going to the Dark Souls Kingdom, but just shy of 400 moons and I have little desire to go back. In the end the game did feel like it stumbled around the same pitfall Yooka-Laylie did, albeit while still being a very good game. It banked a lot on nostalgia and fanservice to distract from the fact that this game's been made already, it does not do much of anything that hasn't been done before. It is Mario 64/Banjo-Tooie unchained, modernizing an open-world platforming adventure on a scale that hasn't been done before. And while that deserves kudos, I never felt that the game was capable of entirely shedding the problems its inspirations and predecessors had. It's exactly what I expected out of a good, competent Mario game. And honestly it's a little bit disappointing because I wasn't really surprised, I didn't really have a lot of genuine 'Eureka' moments, just the thought of “Yep, that's a damn good Mario game.”

To juxtapose this conversation, let's bring up Breath of the Wild, my favorite game of 2017 and arguably one of my favorite games ever made. I can preface this and say that in spite of that claim, Breath of the Wild has a lot of problems. There are things about this game that can irritate the Hell out of me or disappoint me. The inventory system is obtuse and clunky, like cycling through weapons, cooking. The game has the traditional ARPG difficulty curve of being difficult early on but almost trivially easy once you're stronger than God. Horses feel pointless given Link's mobility. Stealth mechanics in any non-stealth game are universally garbage. The story is utterly shallow even by Zelda standards, a liability when you design it in a way that you can overlook and ignore it entirely in the confines of the game. And while it's created an interesting world, hardly any of the characters or plot threads are really explored well enough to make them memorable. And speaking for others, some lament the absence of “real dungeons” even though most of Zelda's real dungeons were switch and block puzzles with key-and-lock navigation masking the mundane linearity a lot of them had. But you people do you.

The beauty behind BotW is that a lot of its problems can be ignored. Barring the inventory system being kind of ass, virtually nothing in the game is necessary to completing it. If you hate combat and your weapons always breaking, almost every fight you can run away from or avoid. If you don't like using Stasis to stop time or don't remember to use Cryonis to create ice blocks, the game will almost always give you enough options that you don't have to. If you think horseback is trivial when Link can climb anything, you don't have to ride a horse. If you think the story is bad and the Divine Beast dungeons are uninteresting, you don't have to do any of them to fight the final boss. You don't have to get, let alone find the Master Sword. And if you hate the English dub, you can play through the entire game in Russian like I did, to prepare for Putin's America that Trump is setting us up with.

There is almost always something you can find to like in Breath of the Wild. It's an experience that grants such an unprecedented level of agency, even among other open-world games. Anywhere off in the distance you see, you can go there and there's probably at least something of mild interest waiting. You can choose to go through the story in whatever order you choose to. You can collect lore and information on almost every single enemy and collectible scattered throughout the world. You can help develop a town. You can even achieve the wildest fantasy of them all and become a homeowner. It's a game that provoked a level of curiosity out of me that no game has in years. Where I could just abandon what I was doing and get sidetracked for hours scouring mountains for resources. Where I can bring up the game at work or among friends and go “DID YOU DO THE THING?” and they'd go “YEAH I DID THE THING, DID YOU OPEN THE GIANT ASSHOLE DOOR ACROSS THE SHIT RIVER WITH ANAL BEAD BOMBS” and you'd response “NAW I USED MAGNESIS TO NAVIGATE THE HYLIAN DILDO OF TRUTH INTO IT INSTEAD” and both your minds would be blown because everybody's looking for secrets on their journey and the puzzles are open-ended enough to be solved in multiple ways.

A game like this shouldn't exist, not at this scale. In this era where corridor simulators cost 40 billion dollars and FFXV can be in development for years and still get only half finished, an open-world game this expansive is an anomaly. And coming from Nintendo of all companies on their first attempt is even more baffling. Breath of the Wild upended nearly three decades of tired and worn-out tradition, and it's obviously going to upset some people. But to undermine the success that the game has had, and how much of a risk it was burning everything down for the sake of reinvention is so admirably psychotic that it should be recognized. All for the sake of being able to freeze a rock in time and beat the hell out of it so much that I can ride it through the sky like a cannonball after it leaves stasis.