I bought the Super Mario 3D All-Stars bundle back when it was available for purchase. As some might know it contains Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy. All have been remastered with a minuscule amount of changes from the originals. Some resolutions has been changed, textures updated and controller schemes changed to accomodate the Nintendo Switch.
After collecting all the 120 stars in Super Mario 64, which I'm still quite proud of, it was time to get going with Super Mario Sunshine and do the same. I've been playing it little by little for about a month. A small session in bed before going to sleep, a longer session here and there and most recently a good session in the car while traveling. Over a month I've only collected about 25 shines which isn't all that many and there's a reason for that. The game just isn't as good as I remember.
The good old days
When I was a kid playing Super Mario Sunshine on the Nintendo Gamecube I loved it. I would play it for hours on end and have a good time doing so. Now that I'm playing it as an adult, back to back with Super Mario 64, I don't have that same feeling. It started out pretty good but the more I progress through the game I like it less and less.
The new mechanic introduced in Super Mario Sunshine is the F.L.U.D.D. That's the talking water spraying contraption strapped to our back that we befriend early on. It let's us spray water to clean stuff and damage enemies or we can use it to hover and navigate the world in several creative ways. It's a cool mechanic but to me it got old quick. Running out of water is extremely annoying and having to jump back down from a height to refill your tank after spending a little to much water getting there is not fun.
It's also a little annoying to use. You can either just spray wildly in front of you in the direction you're facing or you can come to a complete standstill if you want to aim. Since the Nintendo Switch doesn't have pressure sensitive triggers you're always spraying at full blast as well. On the Nintendo Gamecube you had the choice to spray at low and high strength and everything in between. That's just hardware limitations though and they didn't really have a choice. Still a little annoying as it uses up water faster.
Boring levels
The level design feels progressively worse as we progress. It starts out fairly well with Bianco Hills which has a relatively cool, fun and memorable level design. It's downhill from here for me though. Ricco Harbor is pure pain. There's so much water which is a living hell with the awful swimming mechanics this game has. There's a ton of narrow paths high up in the air we need to navigate as well. A tiny misstep and we're down in the water with a long annoying way to get back up there. When we get back up there we just get blasted down again by a nigh undodgable cloud that pushes us off.
This isn't a unique issue to Ricco Harbor either. It's the same in Noki Bay as well only here you gotta stop every 10 feet to spray the wall to make more platforms appear. Then you run out of water and need to jump way back down into the toxic water, take damage from that, refill your tank and climb back up. I ended up rage quitting this level in the end.
The rest of the levels are pretty unmemorable for me. They don't really have anything unique or cool going for them and feel like they've been put together on a whim. A real shame.
Uninspiring collactathon
As with any Super Mario game this is a collectathon as well. You collect Shine Sprites which is the equivalent of Stars from Super Mario 64. As with Super Mario 64 each level has a set number of Shines to collect and the stage changes depending on which Shine you're after. The tasks you need to do range from defeating bosses, doing puzzles or get to some hard or high to reach place. There's also the classic task of collecting 8 red coins.
For some reason going in and out of the stages in Super Mario Sunshine feels less appealing than it did in Super Mario 64. If I somehow die and need to restart the stage it feels like a massive drag when in Super Mario 64 I had no issue just jumping back in and get going again. I guess this is up to the stages being fairly uninteresting and unoriginal. The tasks we need to do just doesn't feel unique.
Another weak point the game has going for it is the blue coins. These are a new addition to the Super Mario series with Sunshine. In short there's blue coins hidden around each stage as well as in the main hub. These can be collected, like the Shines can, and once you collect 10 of them you can trade them in for a Shine. It's not a bad design per se but the issue for me is that there's to many. There's 30 on each stage counting up to 240 in total. They're a drag to collect in my opinion.
This turned into more of a rant that I expected it to do. I'm not sure if I'm gonna continue playing this. I don't really have fun when playing it and feel like I'm playing it only because I want to complete it. I might just skip over to Super Mario Galaxy instead. That game has been praised way more than what Super Mario Sunshine has and as an added bonus I can play it coop with my girlfriend. She loves Super Mario games.
What do you think of Super Mario Sunshine? Am I being to hard on it? Should I lay it down for a while and try to return to it later? Do you agree with my rant? Let me know in the comments.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.