I hated this game and that joseph anderson or whatever’s video on it i think hits at some of my big issues with it. there is nothing engaging to be doing in this game unless you’re trying to use mario’s movement tech to try to “break” the game but even then it’s either trivial or are speedrunning tricks so outlandish that it’s incredibly annoying to do and not worth the effort.
all the moons are either incredibly boring dull tasks that just feel like an enormous waste of time or tutorials for a main game that doesn’t exist. the game never challenges you on mario’s platforming abilities because it is so concerned to try to force you into boring captures instead that have no skill curve to them and have very limited utility. you spend a whole world using a boring capture only to go to the next world and use that next world’s boring capture instead of actually playing as Mario, the character who, yknow, actually feels good and interesting to control.
i get that we won’t get that experience of playing super mario 64 for the first time again. of understanding 3D spaces like it’s our first time playing a 3D videogame, while learning with baby steps all the nuances and complexities of mario’s controls, coupling these two intertwined learnings into moving smoothly through environments you have now acquainted yourself with, yet still manage to find new discoveries about them. we can’t have that again because we sort of know how mario should control in 3D, we’re too literate in how games operate and how to operate in these virtual spaces. so now mario 64 feels less like a limitless world to keep digging into and more like an overhyped toy that feels annoying as hell to do any sort of platforming with because he’ll bonk into walls or spin in a wide radius like a car if you try nudging him slightly to adjust his positioning.
but like, man, I feel like I would’ve just preferred to play Mario 64 with Odyssey’s much more refined camera and controls than this. And I’m saying that from a position of liking only a handful of Mario 64’s levels and thinking the rest is total dogshit. The only fun I’ve had with Odyssey was in two spots: First is New Donk City, because it is the only world that actually feels like a playground for Mario, and second was a very specific challenge room that you have to jump as the frog from platform to platform avoiding waves of poisonous water, and even -then- I only had fun because I refused to play it as the frog capture and did it with regular Mario instead, which de-trivialized the challenge.