Super Mario 3D World vs Super Mario Odyssey

Of all the 3D Mario games, the two that seem the most different are Super Mario 3D World and its successor, Super Mario Odyssey. 3D World is a level-based platformer with a deep love for nostalgia. Odyssey takes Mario to new places with vast open worlds built around hunting for Moons. One is about restricted pre-designed experiences, the other is all about the freedom to make your own adventure. Nintendo shifted gears completely in design philosophy for Mario in just four years.

On paper at least, last year's Super Mario Odyssey seems like the superior game. It's a big, exciting new direction for this series. Mario is traveling the world, interacting with weird new art styles, and he can wear a sombrero. It's a return to that now-classic Super Mario 64 and Sunshine structure, where the entire game is one big scavenger hunt full of things to discover. Only that scavenger hunt is now on the Switch, so Mario's environment looks more beautiful than ever. The various locales are brimming with unique textures and personality at a scale never before attempted. Odyssey should be everything I could ask for from a new Mario game. In comparison, 2013's Super Mario 3D World should be conservative, retro, and dull.

Clearly then, Odyssey is the bright future for this series and 3D World is your grandmother's Mario. Yet between the two games, I prefer Super Mario 3D World. Twist ending: I was Grandma the whole time!

Mario Odyssey has the most potential between the two games but the worse execution. I'll never not love the idea of Mario wearing a sombrero so Odyssey is still a very good game. Yet it tries to be everything at once with nearly 1000 Moons and doesn't accomplish any one thing particularly well. Meanwhile Super Mario 3D World bleeds every drop of imagination and possibility from its small slice of gameplay. That title knows exactly what it wants to do and does it brilliantly. Odyssey is a decent collectathon, however 3D World is a near-perfect platformer. Grandma knows what she's talking about sometimes.

AAA Mario

Most AAA titles today offer sheer ridiculous vastness. Their developers are not making games you finish in a week or a month, they're creating addictions that eat huge chunks of your life. If you're gonna pick up something like Assassin's Creed Origins, you're looking at like 100 hours of content if you go for full completion. The standard today is for gigantic games with huge worlds and just as huge menus full of choices. It's all about the freedom for you to go where you want, do what you want, and play how you want. AAA Games aren't just one genre anymore, they are everything and anything, a big over-stuffed pile of possibility.

Nintendo is a developer that follows its own rules, but it isn't immune to trends. With The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild they made a game perfectly adapted to modern open world gaming. (For mostly better and a bit worse, honestly.) I don't think they adapted Mario as well with Odyssey.

Odyssey looks unlimited... but you'll find the limits eventually.

Odyssey does have bigger worlds, more celestial objects to collect, and more moves than ever. Right from the start the game hands you a lush array of jumps, rolls, flips, aerial cancels, and dives. 2017's Mario controls better than he ever has before. The camera also has never been smoother, with full 360 movement. This means if you want to try for insanely-difficult speed-runner jumps instead of following the easier, more obvious route, you can. On top of this, thanks to your new friend Cappy you can posses nearly every enemy in the game. Not only does Mario have more ways to get around, he also has more transformations than ever. You can go forward as regular Mario or if the occasion calls for it, you could play as a Bullet Bill, a Goomba, or even a tree.

The various Kingdoms Mario visits in Odyssey are more open than the worlds have ever been before. In Mario 64 each stage had only six Stars and you generally had to follow the planned route to get them. You gotta beat Whomp in his Fortress first before you can can get the second Star at the very top of the tower. There's some sequence breaking sometimes, but generally you gotta follow Nintendo's script step by step. In Odyssey that's not the case. In most of the Kingdoms you can almost do anything right from the moment you land.

You're also not kicked out of levels after getting a Moon, so the process of collecting is one continuous run of gameplay. (There's no hub world anymore so I don't even know where Odyssey would kick you out to in the first place.) You can grab Moon after Moon with no break in the action. There are some scripted boss fights or events in every world, but they're a small fraction of the total content available. The story in Odyssey is an after-thought, as usual.

"Basically Okay" Repeated Again and Again

However, my problems with Odyssey begin when the 999 Moons end up as such mediocre challenges. The average Moon is worth way less than a Star or a Shine Sprite. Odyssey even basically confirms this outright because major boss fights reward you with three Moons instead of just one. Most Moons in this game come after completing very basic tasks. You'll get them for searching around a corner, jumping up on a roof, looking around, or just ground-pounding a shiny spot. There's not 999 unique interesting challenges in Odyssey, just 999 tasks of very uneven quality to find.

After 300 Moons in Odyssey, I actually got very bored with this game. That's not really a negative. 300 Moons is far more than is required to reach the end credits. But that still that was 30% of the game and it was already too much. On top of that, it only took me a few days to complete Odyssey, not the six months of lifestyle interruption that Breath of the Wild could be. Indeed, I finished Odyssey faster than every other collectathon Mario. The collectables were just too damn easy.

You don't need to finish many advanced platformer sections, the mysteries are not very involving, and many of the tasks are repeated over and over again. This also means that the Kingdoms are a lot less memorable than could have been. Each Kingdom should have unique challenges but they don't. It's always chasing the same rabbit whether you're on the Moon or in the snow. It isn't that older games did not repeat tasks - in Sunshine I got very sick of Shadow Mario. But Mario Odyssey repeats to an industrial scale. A lot of the kingdoms, like Lost Kingdom end up utterly forgettable. They have one unique transformation and nothing else of note. You're not pushed to really test your gaming skills or your ability to use possessions, so everything ends up a kind of vague bland sameness.

The first time you sexually please a Goomba is amazing. The third time is just another job.

Worse, very few of the challenges you find are actually unique. Early on I transformed into a Goomba and was able to build a tall Goomba tower to impress a visually aroused female monster. She was so turned-on by the tall drink of Goomba water I had presented her she gave up her Moon. This was hilarious and spontaneous and typical Nintendo genius. But then I found myself building a Goomba tower for this She-Goomba with dreams of Pornhub stardom three more times. It stops being a memorable special event and just becomes another check on the long list of busywork Odyssey has for you.

I think with Odyssey Nintendo just did not know how to build Mario at this scale. It isn't that they don't know how to make a fun game, Odyssey is a lot of fun and has wonderfully celebratory moments. Pauline's musical numbers are as great as they seemed in the trailers. I'd have to be a real piece of shit to not feel the magic at those times. But while trying to fill up a massive checklist of things to do, Nintendo wound up spreading it all way too thin. The difficulty doesn't even ramp up in a meaningful way. The post-game Kingdoms are as easy as the starting one.

A lot of the times Odyssey introduces what seems like an interesting idea and doesn't do enough with it. In the Lake Kingdom there's a side room where you open a path by turning into a zipper and tearing walls into platforms. This seems like it could be a decent puzzle, but Odyssey never does anything with the mechanic. You follow the short route and within a minute you have your Moon. The trailers were very proud to show us that Mario can become a T-Rex, but you can only use that transformation in one small area. Instead of terrorizing cities or eating lawyers off toilets, all you can do as a dinosaur is break a few walls. It's a waste.

My real problem with Odyssey is that with only 30% of the game completed, I felt like I had seen all of Nintendo's tricks. In fact, I had seen a lot of them twice or more. (If I have to carry one more goddamned seed across a level to get a Moon I will throw Mario into a pit.) Finishing the main game was a decent experience. But 100%ing this thing? I guess that depends how tolerant you are for basically okay gaming repeated again and again. You'd have to be either a dangerous lunatic or the most boring human being on the planet to get every Moon, I'm not sure which.

Retro Futurism

Now as for Super Mario 3D World, that isn't aiming to be a modern AAA game. It isn't in any way open, it isn't giving players infinite options, it doesn't want to be "the last game you'll ever play". It just wants to be a series of fun platforming levels with a pleasant jazzy soundtrack. 3D World is so old school that only indie devs make games like this anymore. I finished this game in a weekend a year ago and I think that was the perfect length of time. My life wasn't eaten by the game, but I think I'll ever quite forget its best moments or its catchy music.

If anything, Mario 3D World is more restricted than Galaxy or Sunshine or 64. It's a weird game because it was born from the wake of Super Mario 3D Land, a largely okay-to-mediocre attempt to fit three-dimensions of Italian plumber onto the puny Nintendo 3DS. For 3D Land, Nintendo made a lot of compromises to the controls and the camera and the overall style of Mario. Mario's movement is limited to eight-directions, he lost a lot of his fancy long-jumps and flips, the camera is stuck in an overhead view, and instead of large worlds, Mario goes through linear levels.

However, Nintendo seemed to get inspired by the limitations they set for themselves with 3D Land. Super Mario 3D World came out on the WiiU so the game could have been as big and open as Mario Odyssey. (The game did need to accommodate four players so maybe that explains some choices.) 3D World is a million times better than 3D Land thanks to having a better... everything. But it also becomes a legitimately great game not in spite of its limitations, but because of them. Creativity is often driven by restrictions. Nintendo constrained themselves to a few tools and did everything they could with them.

3D World is like the ultimate Mario toy chest. It is overwhelmingly pleasant.

3D World's art philosophy is based on the question "what if we took 2D Mario and just added a dimension?", which matches the gameplay. The whole game is seemingly built from a grid, with the environments full of square hills, floating rectangular islands, and right angles everywhere. The camera is locked into an upward position, increasing the feeling that you're looking down at a big playset full of Mario toys. Nintendo brought back the cast from Super Mario Bros. 2 (American style), so you can play as Peach or Luigi or Toad. But for the first time these characters gets small when they take a hit. Tiny Peach is just absurdly adorable by the way. Most enemies are recreations of old 2D Mario sprites, some of which had never appeared in a 3D game before. 3D World has a singular retro vision - so retro that the game doesn't even have dialogue. The entire game is one cohesive texture.

Jump and Explore

The main goal for 3D World is to just follow the path and get to the flagpole. (Similar to Mario Galaxy 2 which was also mainly linear.) In a nod to the 2D games, Nintendo even brought back the clock ticking down. However, 3D World is not a rush to the finish line. That catchy soundtrack sets the tempo of how you should play this. The game has wide avenues and full options to turn around and comb over the previous areas. You're not expected to dash through blindly, you're expected to take your time, enjoy the jazz, and look around.

That's because 3D World didn't remove the Stars or collectathon elements. The main goal is still to jump to your platforms and finish the levels. But you also have the choice to hunt for Green Stars. They're usually hidden away up on hills or within side rooms or in somewhat more difficult-to-reach areas. The Stars shake things up in a good way. 3D World has a lot more variety than its single-minded art style would imply. You might go down a pipe and find a room where you need to grab the Star in ten seconds. Kill both enemies or jump on a switch or something else, or else you lose your Star. Plus just having things to find adds a dimension to 3D World. You can't turn your brain off and bum rush the game.

The Green Stars also are a clever way to reward skillful play. Lots of platforms place collectables in  such a way as to bait players to try for more difficult jumps. Mario has been doing this since Super Mario World with the Yoshi Coins. Also a lot of Stars are gated away so that they can only be grabbed if you keep your power-ups. The Cat Suit is the signature transformation of 3D World and it gives Mario and company the power to climb walls. Many Green Stars are hidden up in high areas, so you can only get them if you didn't get hit. Otherwise you have to go back and start over. It's a gentle way of saying "git gud", without overtly failing you out of the level.

What the Green Stars do for 3D World is combine just a bit of that Super Mario 64 exploration element to what is otherwise a very NES-inspired game. These Green Stars aren't nearly as complex as the Shine Sprites from Sunshine or anything. They're simple tasks. But these simple tasks are about as difficult as most of Odyssey's Moons.

3D World starts out like a gentle stroll. But in later levels it pushes its platforming to the limit.

The difference is that Odyssey's entire game is the Moons. It lives and dies by its collectables. If you aren't collecting Moons, there's nothing else to do. And if collecting Moons get dull, then the game is over for you. 3D World has that collecting. But it has its authored platforming sections as well. These are the real stars of the show. The levels start easy but grow increasingly manic and intense. By the end it becomes a decently challenging platformer. The final Bowser World is about as tough as the last levels of Super Mario Bros. 3. 3D World starts gentle, but this becomes a wild ride by the end.

Importantly though in 3D World most levels are about one idea. Some feature Mario jumping around on trapeze poles, some having him launching forward on race tracks, one particularly brutal level has him jumping around a rotating block over lava. The idea is presented, then elaborated on. Usually you'll get a simple introduction to teach you the concept, then 3D World increases the pressure and makes things more difficult. Every little idea is given a proper arc and full exploration. They aren't just dumped carelessly.

Use Every Piece of the Blooper

I want to make this clear: I'm not complaining that Odyssey is too easy. (3D World isn't exactly Celeste either by the way.) What I am saying that is that Odyssey doesn't push its mechanics far enough. 3D World gets miles and miles out of its Cat Suit, to the point that the last Bowser fight has him wearing it too. Meanwhile Odyssey brings in Yoshi and only lets you use him in one Kingdom. I could imagine Yoshi being useful in some way in just about every stage of that game, yet he's just another brief under-cooked ingredient. You could build whole games around the things Odyssey uses once and tosses carelessly away. I couldn't name a single thing I wish 3D World had added or done more with. It took every piece of the Blooper and found a use for them all.

The difference between these games is one of minimalism versus maximalism. 3D World cuts itself down to just the bare necessities, the very fewest possible parts to make a Mario game, then builds creativity from there. Odyssey tries a million things at once but never really gets to the heart of any of them. It feels like a road trip vacation. Mario isn't really getting to know the people or the land, he's just a tourist trying on the hats and collecting trinkets, then moving on. You get a tiny bite of a lot of things, but I want a dish designed by a chef, not a buffet.

I probably won't write a review of Treasure Trackers. But this is a 10/10 Game. 

I don't even use review scores but it's 10/10.

You can see the benefits of minimalism further in Captain Toad: Treasure Trackers, one of the most perfectly precious little games I've played in years. It's so simple you can't even jump, but Nintendo still made lots of involving unique puzzles. Treasure Trackers is 3D World to the extreme, which is fitting since the game was born out of 3D World minigame.

Then there's maximalist games like Far Cry 5 (or basically any Ubisoft game these days) that are trying for so many things there's not even connective tissue. The game barely makes any sense at all. It's not a cohesive whole. Sometimes AAA developers seem to have given up trying to even make a game. "We don't care what this game is, just enjoy it, make it whatever you want." Odyssey is never that bad, but it's also not as satisfying as a game with more structure.

There's still a lot of life left in the Nintendo Switch and Mario Odyssey came out very early in that system's life span. I could easily see a scenario where we get an Odyssey 2 that maybe takes things up a notch. Add a few more systems and a few more layers of complexity, if even some kind of meaningful progression and Odyssey isn't just slightly great, it's great-great. If I had to rank Odyssey among 2017 games (which I should, I mentioned this game right in the title of that post), it would actually be something like the thirteenth or fourteenth best. But find more uses for the T-Rex and maybe it's in the Top 5 someday.

Keep the sombrero though. Sombreros are cool.

Super Mario 3D World, however, is not a tourist's game, or a buffet, or a spineless Ubisoft creation, or any of the metaphors I just mixed together. It's a game with a singular vision and singular structure pushed as far as it can go. That's certainly a lot less ambitious, yet scale does not equate quality. I don't want a Super Mario 3D World 2. There's no need for it. Nintendo got it right the first time. I'd love a better Odyssey though.

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Small Note: I would be remiss to not mention Joseph Anderson's exhaustive (and exhausting) two hour review of Super Mario Odyssey. Some, or many even many of his ideas bled into this post. I'd prefer it if everything I said here was 100% my own thoughts, but that's impossible without the use of extreme brain surgery, or a time machine to play this game back when it was fresh and new. Also, nothing I've written is entirely original.