Playing A Game Super Mario Odyssey Switch

Okay, I found something to actually complain about: the controls. Foremost, that - despite the game's insistence on mapping some moves to motion-only - the gestures for things like throwing Cappy in a circle, or in particular directions, don't work well at all. Yes, even when using two detached Joy-Con controllers, as the loading screen continues to annoyingly recommend.

(Which, by the way, just isn't as comfortable as using the Switch's Pro Controller. The right-hand Joy-Con's analog stick is difficult to use, since pushing it requires loosing your grip on the controller itself.)

It's kind of a shame that, more than a decade after the Wii - and six years after Skyward Sword finally got some working gestures - Nintendo is still pulling shit like this. Especially when the button-mappings aren't all being used -- "X" and "Y" do the same thing! as do "A" and "B" most of the time. Just let me use buttons!

... anyway. It sounds upsetting, but in practice the controls are rarely a real problem. Only a handful of the game's 800+ power moons have given me trouble that I'd really blame on the controls.

And aside from an annoyingly-lengthy final boss fight (i.e. having to re-do the first two phases because the third kept killing me), and a few similarly-bullshit double-secret probation fights and levels; almost everything you can do in Super Mario Odyssey is really damn fun.

Dozens of hours later, I'm still enjoying running around in Odyssey's big, imaginative worlds; following scavenger hunt-style hints, or keeping my eyes peeled for anything shiny or purple. Even with a minority of collectibles left to collect, I haven't yet resorted to looking up all the answers online (though I probably will soon), because the aimless exploration is still enthralling me.

Also, playing dress-up with Mario continues to be hilarious.

It's interesting to me that this feeling - the exploration, not the outfit-collecting - is really only possible due to the world-building approach in Odyssey; other recent 3D Mario games have favored large quantities of smaller-scale levels, while this one has less, but larger ones. It's hard to say that one approach is universally better than the other, since Odyssey does lose out on, say, brief slices of ghost house, or throwback levels.

Super Mario Odyssey is an amazing journey through awesome worlds, with a ton of thrilling and entertaining things to do. It has some really unique and memorable content, and it's a blast just to run around in.

But since its critical-path story is as throwaway as Mario's ever had, I don't think it's easy to say that this deeper-but-narrower world design is a total victory over, say, 3D World's prolific level count.

Better than: Super Mario Galaxy 2
Not as good as: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
About as good as: Super Mario 3D World, albeit in different ways.

Progress: 782 moons

Rating: Awesome