In 2007, Nintendo decided to revive Mario from the dead once more, and blast him into space. While the original Mario Galaxy was an obvious attempt to top anything they’d made previously, somewhere along the line Nintendo decided this no longer applied, and instead of reverting to some parallel universes or completely changing the game mechanics, they added a “2” onto the title, made a few new levels and shipped it for another £40.
Super Mario Galaxy 2 is a game which almost completely disregards the first, where some text boxes imply that the first game never even took place, making my original unimpressive sixty-odd stars on it completely pointless. This comes with some upsides though, the most important being that you are not forced to listen to a sad story about a lonely Luma (which, for those who have yet to play the game, is basically a fluffy, cuddly Power Star). Instead, this time, you ride around the universe on Mario’s face, directed by a much larger, overweight Luma, who only seems to be interested in you if you have a funny number of coins or star bits, like 1,000 or 777.
Galaxy 2 features a number of very minor additions or changes, the majority of which are quite welcome. Levels are now traversed via a world map, meaning all levels can be found in the same place. Prankster comets are no longer forced, which stops the frustration of wanting to do one star while a prankster comet decides you aren’t allowed to, and that, instead, you have to race your shadow around a level.
The big addition to Galaxy 2 that was hyped almost as much as another CoD map pack was the ability to ride Yoshi. This isn’t quite the same as we’d imagine, as someone replaced the voice of our favourite fluorescent dinosaur with a much more gentle, cute one, which feels strange, after listening to the poor thing try to suppress the feeling of constipation every time it made an attempt to hover in mid-air for so many years. Yoshi can still use his extendable tongue as in previous games, with the annoying difference that it is controlled with the wiimote. I think Nintendo need to learn that just because a console has (completely unresponsive) motion sensing doesn’t mean they should force it onto a game that otherwise doesn’t need it.
The more I play recent Mario games, the more I get this strange feeling that Mario secretly wants to be Kirby, and has the chance to transform into more variations as the series progresses. In this alone, Mario has the ability to spawn clouds, throw fireballs, turn into a giant rock, transform into a bee, become a spring, and so on, and while I respect that Nintendo are trying to add some original ideas, some of these abilities will only get used once in the entire game.
Past all the new features of the game, there are a number of obvious similarities, which are almost getting to obsession-level when considering Mario games as a series. There are still 120 stars to collect, the ending is still after about 80, you still have to rescue Princess Peach, and it’s still from Bowser, only now he's stole all the mega-mushrooms in the land. There are even a number of levels which are copy-pasted levels from previous games.
At the end of the day, I can’t insult this game as much as I’d probably like to because I actually enjoyed playing through it. I got so into it that I found every last Power Star, got the secret ending, and went on to begin the Green Star quest (which adds another 120 stars to pre-existing levels without telling you anything about them). If you enjoyed the first game, then you’ll probably enjoy this as well, because, to be frank, it’s “more of the same and a little bit more”, and it’s definitely fun, which is the most important thing.
I feel a little empty after being so nice to a game.
Something completely unrelated, but true; Bulletwitch is shit. There we go, I feel much better.
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