Topic: My Super Mario Sunshine Rants And Revelations

I am coming up on 60 hours with Super Mario 3D All Stars. I know a good deal of Nintendo fans have already played all three of these games countless times over, but I am not one of them, because the Switch is the first Nintendo system I have personally owned since the OG purple GBA. In other words, I skipped all three of the consoles that are represented on this cartridge, and so obviously did not play any of their respective Mario games.

But this isn't about what I think of the collection as a package. This is about what I think of Super Mario Sunshine. This is a game I never knew was so divisive until the 3D All Stars collection came out. Sunshine, Galaxy, and Galaxy 2 were never much on my radar at all when they released, so I wasn't paying attention enough to notice that there is a vocal group out there that HATES Super Mario Sunshine. I do remember in the past seeing screenshots and videos and commercials for this game and thinking it looked like a lot of fun but that was always where my interest ended.

My experience with Sunshine started out rocky. I actually quit the first time I played it on the 3D All Stars cartridge and moved on to Galaxy. I got 100 out of 120 stars on Galaxy before moving back over to Sunshine, and immediately remembered how frustrating it is and why I gave up the first time. For the entire first stretch of 8 levels, I was annoyed, frustrated, and disappointed that such a cheerful and fun looking game was so incredibly flawed. I couldn't get the hang of the jumping or the jet packs, I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be doing in ech level, I couldn't figure out the swimming or timing on anything, etc.

And that is the deep running flaw with Sunshine. Because where most Mario games take only the first one or two levels for you to get the gist of how the game works, Super Mario Sunshine takes a lot more time than that to settle in. It's one of the best video game examples I can think of for the phrase "diamond in the rough". I was about halfway through the second "world" before the game really clicked for me. It was just so hard for me to feel comfortable in that world for so long, that I came really close to giving up on it for good. Struggling for that many levels in a Mario game makes it feel very un-Mario.

So yes, I fully admit, the controls are sloppy, the camera is a pain, the water stuff is way too hard to control, there's way too much backtracking when you fail (and you will fail a lot) and the missions are sometimes random and dumb. This game clearly needed some more time in the oven before going gold. But I feel like at some point I mentally overcame those bad controls and general flaws, and once that happened and I could play the game without having to constantly think about what I was supposed to be doing, it definitely still has the Nintendo/Mario magic. It's just not immediately obvious for the impatient.

Aside from all that, Super Mario Sunshine is, just like all other Mario games, a stepping stone to what would come after it. Super Mario Galaxy/2, Super Mario 3D World, Super Mario Odyssey, were all far superior games to Super Mario Sunshine, but took all its best elements and moved forward with them. Super Mario Odyssey in particular I find to be an absolute masterpiece, and I have all those games before it to thank for that.

So Super Mario Sunshine went from the game I thought I might skip in the 3D All Stars collection to the game I can't seem to put down. That's a complete 180 degree turn that I did not expect. I'm so happy I gave it a second chance, because I'm truly enjoying it now that I'm about halfway done with it.