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Mario Odyssey is elegant

What I played of Mario Odyssey (before I bought my own Switch I played like half of the game on my friend's console), and yeah it's an ok game. Mario is getting stale for me.
 

tassletine

Member
Very well programmed but I wish it was more of a platform / exploration game. There's not much to really see, just places to get to, and I was rarely surprised.
 
If reading this thread taught me anything, is that a game franchise can evolve and improve upon its mechanics consistently over every installment;

And some of you STILL reminisce about how good you had it way back to N64 while complaining key franchises in gaming fail to evolve with sequels 🤦🏽‍♂️

Damn if you do, damned if you don't.
 
Was a good game and fun but not really memorable imo. Just the typical ninty platformer, don't understand how it got such high scores though.
 
S

SpongebobSquaredance

Unconfirmed Member
There are some real gems on the switch but the volume of shit indie games is overwhelming.
As it is with any successful console, so moot point really. With a library of almost 4000 games it's almost ridiculous to say it is small, making Corgi's statement, like 98% of what he talks in general, biased.
 

Kev Kev

Member
a video game is elegant........

tenor.gif
 
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NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
It's easy for a game to be 5.7 gigs with low res textures and no voice acting and zero fidelity overall.
The new Tomb Raider trilogy has probably wasted more GBs in those useless Lara voiceovers giving trite descriptions of the heaps of garbage you can find in the games, than the total GBs of all Mario games combined.
No voice acting is the secret best feature of smartly-programmed games.

Anyway, I don’t even know why I even enter threads praising Mario at this point. So much vitriol and negativity.
Before Odyssey: ”Meh, that secret room in Mario only had a bunch of useless coins in it! Fuck you, Nintendo!”
After Odyssey: “There’s a fucking moon everywhere you turn! Fuck you, Nintendo!”
 

AJUMP23

Gold Member
Mario Odyssey is a delight from start to finish. I really enjoyed that game a lot. When you go to the moon and your jump changes that is a nice surprise and a fun experience.
 

Davey Cakes

Member
Mario Odyssey is a bloated game, but it's still a blast to play. Cappy is a refreshing gameplay element and Mario's agility just brings the play control to the next level.

Cut out the Ruined Kingdom and Cloud Kingdom entirely. Combine The Cascade and Wooded Kingdoms. Remove either the Lake or the Seaside Kingdom or combine them in some way. Drop the Power Moon count to 300 and remove the ability to buy Power Moons. Then you'd have a game that rivals the Galaxy games.
 
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kevm3

Member
Eh? It can be different and also the worst. So if you have a list of things and you rank them from best to worst, the most different can't also be at the bottom of the list?

It is a bit different. It's also the worst of the 3d Marios. It's not a bad game but it's poor by Mario standards.
Worst 3d Mario is an opinion. I find 3d world leagues better than odyssey. Odyssey was extremely easy and dull.
 

kevm3

Member
Was a good game and fun but not really memorable imo. Just the typical ninty platformer, don't understand how it got such high scores though.
Pretty much the fact that it's from nintendo, so it gets the nintendo boost. If you inject other characters and stamp another company's logo on these games, a lot of them would get getting 80s scorewise. I found both BOTW and Odyssey as extremely dull, despite them getting praised to the high heavens. I'll have to go with the other mention of Luigi's Mansion 3 being the best switch exclusive (not counting wii u ports).
 

fart town usa

Gold Member
It is.

Wish I enjoyed it more though. I don't have anything against the game, not gonna bad mouth it or anything like that.

I put a few hours in a few months back and just wasn't feeling it. I dunno, just isn't for me. It's definitely one of Nintendo's best efforts in years though.
 

fart town usa

Gold Member
I like 3D World, but the digital directional movement is so much worse than the movement of Odyssey, Galaxy and Sunshine. I also like 64's movement much much more.
It's not a bad playing game at all, especially at 60 FPS on Switch, but it kinda feels gimped compared to other 3D Mario games and lacks the "elegance"
I think the digital movement works great though. Levels with super narrow platforms, feels great with being locked to a specific direction. Gave me a great sense of urgency and chaos, felt like I would fall to my death at any moment but being locked in to a specific direction felt fantastic. I don't think it needs to be applied to other games, I just like it in Mario 3D World.
 
hey I might revisit it thanks to this thread. Thing is last time I opened up a switch I was amazed at how slow everything is, the lack of an ssd is painful. I got used to the ps5 way of loading.
 

Rubik8

Member
I found the game really boring. I hated the "musical" vibe with Paula and found the majority of the world really dull. It did absolutely nothing for me unfortunately. The last great Mario game was Galaxy 2 for me. Subsequent games have all bored me. Maybe I've grown up or something.
Lol remind me to never ask your opinion on anything ever.
 

Azelover

Titanic was called the Ship of Dreams, and it was. It really was.
It's a polished game, VERY polished.

I was a little surprised because there is nothing out of place. Every inch of Mario Odyssey feels incredibly thought out. It's not like BotW where there's room for chaos. There is no chaos or possibility of chaos in Mario Odyssey.
 
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As a person that hates unnecessarily hard games (but platinumed cuphead). This game is grossly easy. SMB3 is actually mario. Idk what that baby game is.
 

tr1p1ex

Member
I still have to play a lot of this. my kids took over at the time and that was that. But yeah very smooth. This is why people buy Nintendo platforms - just because this level of polish is hard to find if it even exists elsewhere.
 

Daniel Thomas MacInnes

GAF's Resident Saturn Omnibus
I finally grabbed Super Mario Odyssey last week at Gamestop, which had it on sale for $39.99. I've only played for an hour so far, I'm at the desert world with the Mexican village. I'm really enjoying it. It certainly has that roam-everywhere-and-goof-off quality that made Super Mario 64 so special, and the controls, as always, as just sublime. I absolutely love the 2D transitions where you turn flat and move along the side of buildings (didn't Zelda on 3DS also do this?). The ability to control different enemies is a nice touch and smashing everything with the big dinosaur is a lot of fun.

Is this "better" than Super Mario 64 or the Galaxy games? Too early to say, and such claims are always subjective. SM64 had the unique quality of introducing a new paradigm for videogames, and so Nintendo had the freedom to just let you wander around and marvel at the 3D worlds. You can't quite get away with that once 3D platformers have become an established genre. And Galaxy has those wonderful vertigo-inducing stage designs where you're being hurled in every direction imaginable, yet the course layouts are far closer to the obstacle courses of Super Mario Bros 3.

I'm glad that Nintendo takes their time with Mario games and doesn't simply recycle the same schtick every single time. They do try new ideas and continue to innovate, and for that I am deeply grateful. Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta go play some more Odyssey.
 

boutrosinit

Street Fighter IV World Champion
it's probably the worst 3d Mario but even if you like it, I wouldn't say it's elegant at all.

It's definitely in my bottom 2 Marios, but Sunshine for me was the shiniest of the Mario turd-blossoms.

The Galaxy Series was peak excellence in contrast (for me anyway).
 
Pretty much the fact that it's from nintendo, so it gets the nintendo boost. If you inject other characters and stamp another company's logo on these games, a lot of them would get getting 80s scorewise. I found both BOTW and Odyssey as extremely dull, despite them getting praised to the high heavens. I'll have to go with the other mention of Luigi's Mansion 3 being the best switch exclusive (not counting wii u ports).
True. Recently played Astro's playroom and while short and simple, it was a better platformer than Mario Odyssey imo.
 

NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
Yeah i totally agree it's a really small library of games,

oh! wait. Yeahhhh totally small library
ynZmunN.jpg
yelling the lord of the rings GIF




Pretty much the fact that it's from nintendo, so it gets the nintendo boost. If you inject other characters and stamp another company's logo on these games, a lot of them would get getting 80s scorewise.
The Nintendo boost is a sort of necessary counter-bias.
Game “critics” have gotten over 3D platformers a long time ago. They wouldn’t even consider the genre as possible GOTY candidate, were it not for Nintendo’s stellar efforts in the genre. Mario is the only thing that makes them pay attention - they’d never even consider giving a 3D platformer such high marks, even if it was better than Mario. They’re just too biased and really don’t care. Put the very same SM Odyssey on the PS5 at 4K and 120fps as a PS exclusive, and it’s suddenly a mid-80 Metacritic that wouldn’t even list in the 2017 top 10. That’s the real bias here. So the way I see it, the Nintendo boost is really more of a way of tipping the scales in the right direction, not the opposite.
 
Been trying to figure out for years why I am so bad at mario games and for years I have not come up with an answer. The only thing I can say is that even when they are easy, they stress me out for reasons I am too dumb to figure out. The exception is Mario spin offs like Paper Mario, and Mario Sports games. I love the games, but they do not love me back.
 
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Aldric

Member
I think it's a mechanically exceptional game with probably the best movement mechanics of any 3D game ever made and it had the merit of making Mario weird and creative again with its themes and ideas after years of bland iteration but I wouldn't call it a great game.

The level design is too inconsistent with lots of pointless empty space that doesn't take advantage of the aforementioned movement and a lot of the gameplay scenarios are repetitive and not very engaging, like stacking Goombas together to make Goombette swoon was fun the first time it happend but it's not the kind of activity that should be repeated again and again, same for the countless moons obtained after stomping a shiny spot on the ground or breaking blocks/crates/nuts to find a moon inside.

Still I'd recommend people to watch the speedrun because the skill ceiling is insane and what the guys who mastered Mario's abilities can do is one of the most spectacular and entertaining things I've seen in a videogame but overall Odyssey shows that mechanics aren't everything, the game built around them has to be as good and it doesn't really succeed to do so.
 
Potentially minority opinion: I would very much like them to go back to the side scrolling flagpole style of Mario games rather than these open world/open zone style games we have been getting since Mario 64 (I think was the earliest?) where progression is locked off based on how many Stars you have and need. I don't like feeling forced into getting the bare minimum in order to progress to further areas. Keep stars and moons if you want, but don't say "you need 30.50,70,ect in order to move forward any more. That's me though.
 
Potentially minority opinion: I would very much like them to go back to the side scrolling flagpole style of Mario games rather than these open world/open zone style games we have been getting since Mario 64 (I think was the earliest?) where progression is locked off based on how many Stars you have and need. I don't like feeling forced into getting the bare minimum in order to progress to further areas. Keep stars and moons if you want, but don't say "you need 30.50,70,ect in order to move forward any more. That's me though.
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GUEST_c2398e9b-9045-4caa-96f7-6b0c81ac185d
 

Cutty Flam

Banned
Harshest ratings I can give are:

Super Mario 64 = 9.8
Super Mario Sunshine = 9.6
Super Mario Galaxy = 8.8
Super Mario Galaxy 2 = 7.2
Super Mario Odyssey = 7.8

Odyssey’s best level is Tostarena. The rest after that are pretty good but where this game excels, is in its charm on a few levels and the way you can control Mario. The story is short but it’s extremely good too; I loved the rivalry and the ending. It’s difficult to rate this game because it’s enormous but I’m glad Nintendo went this direction even if I wasn’t in love with it like the rest. The next Mario game should be more refined and a lot more fun. Not to say it wasn’t fun, Odyssey is a joy to play but I miss the days when each star or shine sprite was like a mini adventure. A mini grand adventure for many of them. You don’t feel that in any of the games that follow after Super Mario Sunshine imo. They’re mostly entertaining tasks that can be a lot of fun tbh. Can’t be upset with Odyssey too much though, it expanded on a lot of ideas and took Mario to a whole new level. And that’s what makes the next game to follow so exciting to think about

Nintendo has done a great job with this game, but as much as there is to it, it does not compete with most of the greats before it
 

Intoxicate

Member
Mario has developed more than any other video game character.
I don’t get anyone who is annoyed about collecting moons, but likes to get into the 100. shooting/fight in other games. Or the same non failure climbing activities. It’s just a video game, how much better can it get? Odyssey for me was a love letter to what I liked about Mario so far.
 
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