Tonight I realized that the airship theme is the same one they came up with for the SMB1 Airship levels in Mario Maker, which is neat because I like that theme.
There’s a lot of not so subtle nods to both SML games Moai/Sphynx characters, the girl Broodal becoming a old sci-fi flying saucer during her boss fight, and one kingdom just straight up set on the moon.
Also, holy shit at the brief detour into a level that would not have looked at all out of place in Dark Souls 3. I mean take out the cartoon swords in the ground and the texture/modeling could be imported wholesale.
The paper board samurai bit in Bowser’s Kingdom behind the hat shop felt like something directly out of a WarioWare game.
I think I am very close to a credit roll, but I am trying to remember how long it’s been since I literally hoped that a game was just not going to end, and it’s gotta be as far back as like MGS 3 or something? I can’t believe how much surprising, novel, and well-designed stuff is crammed into every moment of almost every level.
There’s a fairly significant amount of post-credit content; it’s not going to end for some time longer. Every world virtually doubles up on available moons, there’s new sections to explore too in a dumb adorable fashion and you can buy up new clothing options like Peaches’ wedding dress and veil and Bowser’s tux and top hat
You’re not wrong, if you’ve been to every level you mentioned in your post. I deliberately avoided getting every moon in each kingdom so I would have reason to revisit them; this was hilariously unnecessary.
I’m into post game moons now. I keep wishing the dive/roll was as snappy as sunshine’s dive into slide into jump cycle was. Also wish roll picked up more speed on flat ground to make it a bit more worth doing unless there’s a trick to it I haven’t picked up on it yet. I know that if you press B at certain times in a roll you do a short hop that gives a touch more speed but nothing super satisfying.
Otherwise, as an experience it has been super entertaining with all the different toys and gimmicks it has in its toybox. I love how well it sells you on being a tourist traveling around seeing the sights and even dating your moon pick ups so you can look back on past exploits. I love how alot of the enemy “captures” feel very well explored that they could be their own games instead of just being keys for locks.
In my mind, I Imagine Nintendo made Forrest World just to show SEGA how a proper Sonic level should look in 2017. Something tells me Sonic Forces probably won’t have the same level of quality.
I’m noticing other platformers (I’ve also heard Spyro mentioned elsewhere) come up a lot in the discussion of this game.
It seems to me that while the words this game means to elicit are “weird” and “creative” and “fresh”, what it’s concretely doing is pulling in fairly common platformer concepts that had been considered “non-Mario-like” in the past. Where 3D World is basically the ultimate synthesis of “proper canonical Mario” as conceived in 2016, Odyssey turns Mario into an omni-platform-game whose identity amounts to “the best and most”. How it draws on abandoned Mario games like Sunshine is really the tip of the iceberg of it pulling elements from every non-Mario platform game as well.
I just finished reading the Three Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu. In the third book in particular, there’s a lot of really intense and creepy stuff related to forcefully unfolding 3 dimensional space into 2 dimensions in order to eradicate regions of the cosmos. This lent the 2D platforming sections of Mario Odyssey a very weird vibe for me in a way I’m really appreciating. Especially that wild Mushroom Kingdom moon where you have to stay in a moving 2D plane over a 3D backdrop, and enemies cross between 2D and 3D when they intersect with the plane.
Allowing Mario to move between 2D and 3D space, and depicting the 2D space exactly like Super Mario Bros. has some REALLY weird implications for the cosmology of the mario universe. Did the entirety of Super Mario Bros. happen in the 2D plane behind a pixelated pipe?