The Patreon Letters - 11th November, 2017

Hi everyone, M here. It's been kind of a rough few weeks for me, so you'll excuse me if I just get right to my point today. I want to talk about Mario Odyssey. Yes, again, sorry. It's really the thing we've been focused on at AM HQ. 

Two days ago I 100%ed Mario Odyssey, by which I mean I got all the naturally occurring moons on the game's in game list (880). There's one more thing you get in the game for 999 shines, but you have to just grind coins and buy them for the shops which seems like really poor design? One can't help but wonder if DLC would bring that number up to 999 in the future. 119 moons seems like a goodish number for a DLC. That's like two worlds.

I'm not really here to talk about the overall quality of what Mario Odyssey is. I enjoyed my time, but have a lot of caveats. The best 3D Mario it is not. But I do want to specifically talk about the ways in which it suggests a different game in some of its best moments. I want to talk about the cap-throw-and-leap jump. I want to talk about koopa races. I want to talk about Tony Hawk.

Jackson, when they were writing last week's letter, talking to me in private about their biggest lingering disappointment being that in moments Odyssey offers a suggestion that Mario could be a make-your-own-fun challenge of jumps and flips and capture flings all chained together to make breathtaking traversal the point. Instead, the game focuses on doing one or two things to get a moon, and then shutting it down for the next discreet challenge. Even the hardest super secret final level in the game is gauntlet of capture bits, where it asks you to do the same two actions a capture can do in every capture moon, just over and over again without checkpoints. Underwhelming, thy name is Darker Side.

The first time you set down in New Donk City, the game seems to suggest this type of game. Buildings rise up so high, with multiple paths around the edges to get up. Do you climb up the terraces with somersault jumps like some sort of vanilla jump man? Do you capture the flag poles and fling yourself up? Do you, a genius, use your galaxy brain and the electric wire to get up to the top of city hall and then hop on a scooter and ride off the mile-high racetrack to fly across the map only to land perfectly atop any building, kickstand down, Mario ready to putter across more rooftops? The choices are yours!

But outside of one or two moons, none of this matters. It's a playground without reinforcement, in a game that instead spends every waking moment asking you to ground pound glowing spots and stack goombas for the 10th time and look at the backs of people's heads to see if they're wearing a Cap Kingdom hat instead of a normal, non-ghost hat. None of these things are movement based and honestly none of these are actually interesting. They're just lines on the incredibly long checklist to get you to 880. 

There are some exceptions. I was almost universally excited to go into a Moon Block pipe or a hat door because what was behind them would almost always be an interesting traversal challenge. These are the moments the game gets closest to the level design structure of 3D Land (the best 3D Mario, don't @ me) and when Mario's incredible movement arsenal is meant to be really broken out. Don't even get me started on those Scarecrow Doors where you have to leave your hat and, Mario Sunshine-like, tackle the challenge with nothing but your jumping arsenal. *chefs kiss*

None of this is exemplified more than in the Koopa races, which show up in every kingdom as you beat them and are you and four Koopas doing whatever you can to be the first to get to the finish. The first time you run these you can kind of sloppily just make your way over there, so long as you're diligent, and be fine. But when you win and try again, a gold Koopa shows up and that guy? That guy knows how to do the Mario. He'll break out rolls and captures and hat toss jumps like nobody's business. If you want to beat him? You better know the level enough to pick a wild shortcut route, have your entire move set down, and be ready to show the world you're the fastest platforming hero in town.

These challenges aren't easy, and might actually be unreasonably hard compared to some of the moons, but that's only because every other moon regularly asks so little of you. This wouldn't necessarily be bad, Mario games have regularly locked the hard stuff into the end game, but Odyssey went so wide it basically forgot to go deep outside of maybe two dozen of its nearly 900 moons. Which means the hard parts seem harder because it never gives you the framework for getting good, and the moment to moment on every moon is either quick and easy or easy and tedious, especially when you get into clearing out the list away from the flashy story-focused early moons in every level.

I've played every Mario, most of them multiple times and many of them to completion. So I get that what I'm asking for is probably for an extreme niche of players. But as people on my timeline start finishing Mario and getting into the endgame, all of them seem to have this same creeping sense that for all the early promise the actual game is just ... empty? It's a good idea rarely built past the tutorial, and the novelty of using a capture wears off when you literally use them in the exact same way for the fifth or sixth time. 

Odyssey was advertised on a sense of novelty and freedom that the game just isn't actually about, and once you get past the story what's left is some low key things to do, but for Mario? That's not enough. It's not good enough for what the games have had before, it's not good enough in the face of the exceptional difficulty curves Breath of the Wild had six months ago, it's not good enough for platformers in 2017. I love how many ways you have to use Mario in Odyssey, but what does it matter if you never have to? 

Until next time, friends.