Topic: RFN RetroActive #39: Super Mario Sunshine

[Crimm]

Feeling eager to collect 100 coins? How about play some human Pachinko? Hunt for purple? Clean IS better than dirty! So post your comments for our RetroActive here in this thread, and they may find themselves into the episode.

[Morningshark]

  TL;DR: It's a fun game, with great music. It ages decently for me, who has a good understanding of the controls because of years of playing, but it's still glitch ridden and can present a real challenge to players. It's extremely creative and takes many innovative steps for the series.


I grew up with Super Mario Sunshine, being a more youthful listener at the age of 20. I replay it occasionally because this was one of those games I played aimlessly as a kid; running around spraying everything, finding the most absurd routes to get the Shine Sprites, and just using my imagination to make Isle Delfino feel much bigger then it really is. I never actually collected everything in the game growing up, but I did make that my goal this week when coming back to it. And I succeeded. The only levels that I struggled with are the 8 Red coins/Lilly Pad/Poison River game (took three tries) and that infamous Pachinko level (took fifteen tries).


I loved the platforming sections without FLUDD, and even when it was brought back for those 8 red coin challenges. You can see some Super Mario Galaxy inspirations there. One in particular was fun to come back to, which was in Noki Bay (Secret of the Seashell). That level stumped me for quite a long time years ago, because it asks for some very difficult jumping for a kid to complete successfully. I found that after years of practice, I control Mario extremely well in this game, while other players often complain that Mario is difficult to control in this title. I think I can chalk that up to years of messing around as a kid and trying crazy things with what options were available to me. For example, in Pianta Village (The Goopy Inferno), I managed to beat the level as a kid without going under the city. I swam up the river near the waterfall, and when I jumped out, water would clean small bits of the goop, slowly making a path to the golden Mushroom where FLUDD was located.


One of the things I really like about the game is the outlandish plot. Mario was a simple story for me until I played that game. It was so cool as a kid to see an evil Mario imposter (whose design is still kind of awesome to this day) steal the source of happiness to those jerk Pianta people and frame Mario. Sure that court system was ridiculous, but it was in a Mario game. It helped me realize that I do enjoy when Mario games go weird, and it makes it that more excited to play Odyssey. That confrontation in Pinna Park where Shadow Mario's eyes glow red and he stands  like Moses ontop of the Mecha-Bowser, while the water is parted is ridiculous, but again I loved it. I didn't mind the voice acting (I liked it as a kid), except for Bowser. His voice did take me out of the experience. But all of the others sounded just like the usual grunts and one-word lines we usually get. Peach and Bowser Jr. sound like they do even now (and I suppose Bowser Jr.'s voice now is based off that initial voice act). It's also cool that they did some world building. Mario doesn't really need world building, but for me, I really enjoy when they connect the games (E. Gadd from Luigi's Mansion designed the Magic Brush, FLUDD, and the nozzles). I think I enjoy the world building because


As for the Blue Coins, I did collect them all. I found about half of them by the time I beat the game. I did't mind going back and looking for them, because a lot I had just passed over. But some of them are incredibly hidden, to the point that the last 30 or so, I did use a guide. Even after years of joshing around in Pianta Village, I never sprayed the sun on top of the tree to find a blue coin. What signifiers are there for that? I wish there had been a reward for collecting all 120 shine sprites (Maybe unlocking Shadow Mario? Plays the same as the regular glitchy Mario, but shoots out Goop instead of water?). You can tell this game was sent out unfinished. It's full of glitches (look no further then Pianta Village and Pachinko Machine), and that is a shame. It does make me hopeful for a remaster someday. It's definitely still the hardest of the 3D Mario titles. That horrible camera haunts this game. It's so easy to see more of this game like it would look in Maya or Unity because the camera can so easily reveal the un-modeled areas of the island.


All in all, this game is by far one of Nintendo's most creative takes on their existing series. Yoshi vomits juice, watermelons are rolled around the beach, Mario fights a mech while riding a roller coaster, the entirety of that Phantamanta fight at Sierna Beach, King Boo looks drunk, Bowser implies Peach really is the Mother of his child, it's remarkably insane. But it's still a great time all around. A lot of people say it doesn't "feel like a Mario game", because he has a jet pack, and he cleans up goop, etc. I think this was Nintendo's attempt at trying a new form of platforming, because it was the second 3D platformer from the series. When all is said and done, I loved the game. It's still glitch ridden, and frustrating at times, but is fun to explore and listen to. The music is still just as great as I remember, filled with tropical sounds that can be happy an exciting, or mellow and chill (or impish and mocking in some of those harder levels). Greg's ending music from a few RFN episodes ago was the "Sky & Sea" theme, and he's right in that it's a good calm song for some of the hardest levels.


That's about all I have to say on the game (well actually, I'm sure I could write another essay, but I fear no one will read it and reply). I hope my comments here are helpful in the discussion. Would love to keep up the talk. Thanks for making this the RetroActive. Looking forward to hearing the show, and playing Super Mario Odyssey!

[lolmonade]

I'm eager to participate, this is a gap in my Mario game experiences.

[ClexYoshi]

My plan is to dig my copy out of my closet and get the component capture out to do a Super Mario Sunshine stream on wednesday at some point. I actually have a lot of fond memories of playing this with my friends over and them complaining that it made them thirsty whenever i played the game.

[lolmonade]

I've played about an hour's worth of this game, and while I won't go into deep details yet (I want to get more game under my belt before giving impressions), my reaction is....mixed.

[ClexYoshi]

same boat. I streamed a bit for the folks in the NWR Discord (Shout-outs to Lemonade for coming in and watching!) and kept it brief.

I found myself as I was playing giving the game a lot of grief and encountered a few mild (but amusing) bugs like accidentally clipping through the ground and landing in a section of delphino sewers, or findin a spot that had been walled off that Mario went into T-pose when I tried to push up against. There's other little things i know about like rocket storage and other speedrunning tricks from some of the youtube channels i watch, but I'll not get into that right now.


No matter what gripes I may have, This game is still mechanically solid, content robust, visually striking (besides maybe the really, REALLY bad graniness on the FMVs) and masterfully scored. there's a lot of games I haven't retained much of over the years, but Super Mario Sunshine is still with me, and it was a joy to boot up, even as I remembered a couple of things that minorly annoyed me.

I did realize that maybe some of my bellyaching about BLue coins was due to a lack of mastery over the controls that I lacked in those days. I remember HATING the Blue coins that involved shooting the birds or spraying a bit of graffiti and then making a beline for where the other coin spawned, but I now realize that those instances are a lot better designed than I remember them being.

I remember thinking there was a lot of sloppiness in this game as a kid... the blooper race stuff, the pachinko thing everyone complains about, any time you have to control a raft, that part in Noki bay where you have to spray the eel's teeth in that big underwarter part, the watermelon festival any of the casino stuff in Serena Beach...

Like, I'm sur ei'm going to get to some of this stuff and it's going to be as Jank-tastic as I remember it being, but i have hope for the future that maybe I'm remembering some of the more frustrating parts of Super Mario Sunshine wrong.

[lolmonade]

Bland.


That's the word that comes to mind 5 shines into my experience with Super Mario Sunshine.  The hub is a bland town with weird noodly NPCs.  The two Mario 64 style levels are competent but don't have the same kind of flow I've come to expect from 3D Mario games.  The visuals all have this muted color to them, where Mario 64 almost always had bright colors that popped.  You're in a sunny island, and everything looks overcast, and like someone has put a blur effect over everything.  It's just not visually pleasing.


It's the word that comes to mind when I hear the music.  The ukulele-laded jingle that strums through the hub world and the levels I've played so far.   It's not bad, it's just not memorable or compelling.  It's elevator music.


Annoyance


That's the word that comes to mind when I think of FLUDD.  It's a ball-and-chain on what I want to do most in a Mario game - RUN AND JUMP.  Maybe if the jetpack function moved you quicker or ascended you higher, it'd have a bit more utility or feel fun to move around in it.  But end result is it currently feels like a game mechanic that was shoehorned into a Mario game because they couldn't decide how to make a full fledged stand-alone game based on it.  Washing off paint isn't fun.  While it produces some cute visuals when you fill an enemy's mouth full of water, it's not fun to use a jetpack in an enemy fight, currently.

Now, with the voice acting, "awful" is the word that comes to mind.  They give Peach and a geriatric Toad a voice, and do it poorly.  No wonder they didn't give Mario any lines.  Makes me appreciate Nintendo being hesitant to barrel into voice acting as a trend for their games.


Now, after all my griping, some praise:


The game still feels pretty good to play from a core movement/jumping standpoint.  Levels have fun little throw-backs to classic Mario games from what I've seen so far, which is a neat touch.  The boss battles I've encountered are a little more varied than the typical " jump on them 3 times" you often see, which is nice (I'll note that while FLUDD is a required use item, it's not necessarily spraying water on them that makes these battles more varied or fun).  Despite how bland the hub world is, I have had some mild fun just exploring the town and seeing what I can/cant reach, and what collectibles I can pick up.  Also appears there might be some small tasks you can complete for the NPCs and get things from them.  In some ways, i'm more curious about seeking those out than finding the next Shine.


A friend of mine used the "pizza" analogy when describing Mario games - Even when they're bad, they're still pretty good.  I have a long way to go in beating this game, but so far, I think that's a pretty apt comparison, here.

[ClexYoshi]

Bland.


That's the word that comes to mind 5 shines into my experience with Super Mario Sunshine.  The hub is a bland town with weird noodly NPCs.  The two Mario 64 style levels are competent but don't have the same kind of flow I've come to expect from 3D Mario games.  The visuals all have this muted color to them, where Mario 64 almost always had bright colors that popped.  You're in a sunny island, and everything looks overcast, and like someone has put a blur effect over everything.  It's just not visually pleasing.


It's the word that comes to mind when I hear the music.  The ukulele-laded jingle that strums through the hub world and the levels I've played so far.   It's not bad, it's just not memorable or compelling.  It's elevator music.

My internet ate my last post, and I loathe to type up the multi-paragraph opus again, but I want to highlight how much I disagree with this.

When I muster up the insanity, I'm going to talk about how this game adheres to it's artistry  in a masterful manner.

I also will talk some music theory and how this game's soundtrack is fucking BRILLIANT and how I prefer it to Galaxy 1. Yeah, that's right, I went there.

For now, though... I'm pretty steamed that I lost about 3000 word essay attempting to debunk such an opinion.

[lolmonade]

Look forward to your thoughts, Clex.  Bear in mind i'm only 2 hrs in, I understand fully this is subject to change a bit.

Sorry about your post, I've had that happen a few times on this site and others, just sucks the air out of your desire to try again at that point. 

[ClexYoshi]

Right, I think I'm ready to do this agian.


Delphino Plaza started out muted on purpose. the lack of the Shine Sprites literally sucked the brightness out of this normally super sunshine-y resort. Super Mario 64's color choices were often very Primary Color (of light) based and had little to no texturing going on, so obviously when you see lots of bright greens, reds, and Blues with no real shader technology to filter out the bright and the dim, you'll naturally get a game that visually pops.

Super Mario Sunshine's palette airs towards the warm most of the time, with buildings of bright beiges accented by reds, roofing tiles of multi-colored greens, pristine and bright and and grassy hills... even Rico harbor's industrial metals tend towards wamer and brighter shades of sky blue and white.

I deeply admire the attention to detail this game gives, not only in it's profoundly good water effects, but also the artistic consistency of the world. for as goofy and abstracted some of the enemies can look, Delphino Plaza does a lot to make itself feel lived in and alive and cohesive with the NPCs who often change places as you go through the game, as well as the way the buildings and streets are structured. I love how all the areas of the island can be seen from one another. if you look over the wall to the right at the start of Bianco hills, you can see Rico harbor down the hill, and waaay off in the distance, the big ferris wheel of Pinna Park looms. it's such an amazing attention to detail.

besides in the little bonus areas, the archetecture of Super Mario Sunshine tends towards the realistic. It's probably the most realistic a Mario game has ever gotten with it's set designs. Houses are archetecturally sound, awnings are placed appropriatley, instead of straight up floating platforms or such, there's always either supports holding up girders or they're windmills or something that is functional and adheres to the rules of gravity. Nothing ever feels as Abstract or absurdist as it does in the backgrounds of other Mario games.

I feel like Piantas and Noki are natural fits to the Mario Lexicon and were never the parts that felt out of place. If anything, it's the complete redesigns of almost anything remotely familiar in a mario game.  Little things like Strollin' Stu or the bizzare looking boos or koopas look FAR more out of place than any of Isle Delphino's natural inhabitants... but even then, I think that's intentional, given that it's implied that a lot of these things are abstracted from the doodlings of a child with a magic paintbrush.



To accompany this artistic cohesion of bringing together this well thought out resort island is the Score, which takes cues from Koji Kondo and Kazumi Totaka's works with Super Mario World and Super Mario Land 2 respectively. those games employ a sort of central theme song that uses the same chord progressions and chromatic scale in the composition and then see how far they can stretch that singular catchy tune via use of different time signature, Rhythms, and musical genres to then disguise that one centralizing track. It is a technique to video game composition that I feel creates a similar sense of cohesion as the world's art assets themselves.

Yes, the Delphino Plaza version of this central tune is this little ukalele strummed out jingle that is meant to make you feel like you're relaxed and on vacation, but still posesses the subtle excitement one might have while exploring someplace new and deciding which tourist trap you want to hit up next! the way Kondo and Shinobu Tanaka (Mario Kart DS, Luigi's Mansion) changes the instrumentation, tempo, and musical genres of this one tune to fit the various stages is masterful in how it manages to keep it's relaxing feeling. At Gelato beach it loses a lot of the energy for something far more laid back with steel drums and the Sax, whereas the Rico harbor version of the tune drives a bit more, but still gives the sense that even in a place of pianta industry that Delphino is a relaxed place. The music really works to help build the personality of each level, while at the same time give the game the cohesion of all being at the same place.



Presentation is Super Mario Sunshine's strong point. it's a subtle thing rather than being loud, but i can well and truly say that from these aspects alone (Voiceacting nonwithstanding) that Super Mario Sunshine always makes me feel like I'm on vacation.

[lolmonade]

I did read what you wrote, and I think a lot of it I need to wait to reply with until I get more time in the game.  One thing I want to broach:

Delphino Plaza started out muted on purpose. the lack of the Shine Sprites literally sucked the brightness out of this normally super sunshine-y resort. Super Mario 64's color choices were often very Primary Color (of light) based and had little to no texturing going on, so obviously when you see lots of bright greens, reds, and Blues with no real shader technology to filter out the bright and the dim, you'll naturally get a game that visually pops.

I've since learned through conversations with my friend this is the case.  I don't personally think doing that for a story conceit was a good trade-off.  First impressions matter IMO, and from my view, Sunshine starts out as too muted, too grainy/blurry, and while not ugly, I associate Mario games more with those bright, stark colors.  Not just in Super Mario 64, but also the Mario games that followed Sunshine.

Finally, regarding the music.  I wasn't deriding the music as BAD, only that it doesn't stick out to me as something special.  The overworld music fits the location, It's just in most other Mario games, the main themes aren't all bombastic, but they are memorable tunes that are denoted with a very clear melody that stands out.

[ClexYoshi]

That makes sense, Lolmonade.

Anyhow, I streamed a second session. I'm actually trying to make an effort as far as blue coin collection goes, although I know i'm probably doomed to miss a few along the way. I don't know if I'm going to go for secret shines within stages. they usually consist of a REALLY obscure easter egg (I know there's one in Noki Bay that requires you shoot a random ass yellow bird with water ) or having to redo the nervewracking FLUDDless bonus stages, but with a timed red coin challenge. I want to see how many shines I can get before the Retroactive discussion airs so I can have the fullest refreshed opinion of Super Mario Sunshine.

42 shines is the minimum required shines in the game in order to see the end of the game (at least according to people who any% speedrun the game), actually. The only requirement to make the way to Corona Mountain open is the defeat of Shadow Mario on Each Course. some of the courses will let you get a shine out of order and thus skip earlier missions. there's a whopping 16 shines hidden around Delphino plaza, a 100 coin shine for the airstrip post-credits, and each course has 8 or 9 or something.

But yeah, I COULD just make a beeline for the end of the game, but I felt like giving the game a fair shake, and experincing some of the more Dubious shines. I've already hit a couple of patches of real frustration, weather it be from input delay with my TV/Capture Card's upscaling, or me just being bad.

I do find it funny though... that the shadow mario missions that are so integral to finishing the game are by far some of the ames EASIEST shines if you're even remotely proficient with how Mario moves around.




Also, for people playing this for the first itme or not remembering it, there's a LOT to mario's moveset in this game, even if it is strangely missing some Super Mario 64 staples like the Long Jump or... anything to do with crouching. I'll be going over some of the more helpful techniques in my next post.

[lolmonade]

A fun one I discovered, Mario has a spin jump where if you run around in a circle and hit the jump button, He jumps pretty high and spins like a top.


To be clear - I'm not beelining to the end of the game, i'm taking my time with this and exploring nooks and crannies.  I'm not going to 100% the game, but I want to explore to see fully what this game has to offer, not play through the story beats via line of best fit.

[azeke]

A fun one I discovered, Mario has a spin jump where if you run around in a circle and hit the jump button, He jumps pretty high and spins like a top.

Super Mario 3D World has it too.

[ClexYoshi]

Yup, yup. you can also cancel the spin jump animation with the dive and get sent flying CRAZY far and fast if you do it RIGHT after mario launches off the ground from a spin jump.

He also can spin on the ground if you rotate the stick and use FLUDD when it's not on full blast.

Fludd can shoot a shotgun style spray if you hit R+A. this is actually great for speed runs but eats through Water pretty fast.

it's always best to do a jump of some sort when you almost have Rocket Nozzle ready to blast to give you that little bit of extra height.

The most important technique though... is the Slip n' slide.

Mario's dive becomes this wanton physics breaking speed boost if you simply spray a strip of water and belly flop onto it. you can actuallly do crazy things like pick up speed going up hills, slow down, take a corner, then speed up again,a nd things that really SHOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE by sliding around on one's belly that is mildly doused in water.

The belly slide makes getting Blue Coins that are tied to spraying grafitti in one spot and moving to get the blue coin at the other matching piece of grafitti much easier.

[ClexYoshi]

Pardon the double post, but I feel this is unrelated enough of a post to really make it it's own thing.

I've hit several of the real 'frustrating' shines that people always complain about when talking about Super Mario Sunshine. I'm talking about things like the busted Pachinko mini-game, the Red coin challenge that involves bringing Yoshi out to a lone island on the outskirts of Delphino Plaza, The Watermelon festival, and the Pinna park Balloon popping roller coaster.

I only suffered one or two death/failures on each of these tops, and I think the frustration from a lot of these stems from simply not understanding how each of these frustrating Shines' unique mechanics work. These are new player traps (or in the Pachinko game's case, really busted physics that don't work right) that in the end merely take some understanding of some counter-intuitive mechanics, and...

Yeah, I think that's probably the central theme for SUper Mario Sunshine as far as it's detractors are concerned. It's an ambitious game that did a poor job at sticking the dismount on many of it's mechanics.

A PERFECT example of this is BIRDS!

Super Mario 64 sports birds and fish and other wildlife that occupy it's various landscapes and such.  they're programmed to get away from Mario if he nears, and even if you manage to catch up to one, they really cannot be interacted with.

Super Mario Sunshine sports birds and fish and other wildlife that occupy it's various landscapes and such.  They're programmed to get away from Mario if he nears, and MOST of them cannot be interacted with. That being said, there are various birds of paradise around Isle Delphino. they come in green, blue and yellow. Spraying these birds will make them flee, but if you spray them repeatedly, they'll drop coins, Blue Coins, and Shines respectively! a weird and interesting note of this is that Yoshi can eat birds to insta-kill them and earn mario their delicious contents.

Oftentimes, Birds will hide in areas that are far too complicated to reasonably bring yoshi to them them to get them in one shot with a tongue.




I am at 53 shines total. I've done episodes 1-8 for Bianco Hills, Ricco Harbor, Gelato Beach, and Pinna Park, gotten a vast majority of the Plaza shines that aren't blue coins, and I've tried to be diligent about Blue Coin Collecting, although I KNOW I don't have all of them. not by a long shot. I'm saving 100-Coins and Secret shines in levels until the end because I do want to see Corona mountain before Retro-active gets recorded.

Tomorrow I start with Sirena Beach, which has the largest concentration of shines I remember not liking. Let's see if once again if I'm blowing things out of proportion, I've become a better gamer since I was a teen, or if I just got lucky today?

[Morningshark]

I 100%'ed a bit ago. Honestly only had trouble tracking down the last blue coins, and the 5-6 shines.

[ClexYoshi]

I'll likely stream again this evening. in the meantime, I want to bring the forum-goers attention to a couple of youtube channels and videos.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLignB5Xr1L18PluS0_-Lcw/videos




EDIT: For prosperity's sake, I got some screengrabs of my own use of Invisible Plaza glitch.

[Lemonade]

I have been watching James and Clex stream the game. I now remember why I dont like the game very much. Its a lot of awkward platforming and falling off things.
I havent played the game in a very long time. I never finished it. After looking at the list of stages, Im sure I only ever got up to Pinna Park.

Basically, I think this is the worst Mario game.

[ClexYoshi]

I have been watching James and Clex stream the game. I now remember why I dont like the game very much. Its a lot of awkward platforming and falling off things.
I havent played the game in a very long time. I never finished it. After looking at the list of stages, Im sure I only ever got up to Pinna Park.

Basically, I think this is the worst Mario game.

I'd take Super Mario Sunshine over say.. New Super Mario Bros. U. I'd rather be frustrated than bored.

and that's why Sirena Beach took the wind out of my sails during that last stream. What a boring and Unfun level. At least with Painta Village's Bullshit or Corona Mountain's awful boatride I'm prepared to rage and have... SOME energy. Sirena Beach is just... not good. at all. I can break it down by each shine why it's not good.

1.) Manta Storm is a frankly annoying boss that operates on RNG and kills speed runs. the idea of this sillouette that can't hurt you if you have a roof above your head might have been novel had it not been for for the shock paint and the overall random nature of a boss that promotes you to just use Spam-Spray.

2.) By far the best shine in Sirena beach. it's a little flow breaking to talk to an NPC to transition areas, but getting to the secret room is as easy as doing a calculated wall jump between the pillar and the guard rails. generally one of the easier, but still fun FLUDDless challenge areas because it doesn't quite demand as much movement over instant death as some other ones do, and iterates on challenges introduced in previous ones.

3.) This shine is actually awful if you don't know the whole gimmick to it. For some bizzare reason this one also has a unique set of blue coins in comparison to later ones. it also requires a fair bit of backtrackingwhen all's said and done. I really don't like the boo designs. This is also where you realize that a large portion of this level's map is a boring maze.

4.) this one is a lot of standing around and combatting RNG after not one, but TWO instances of needing to talk to an NPC to transition areas. for some reason there's no real good way to control any instance where FLUDD shots are used to manipulate some sort of physics based spinning device. it either hits the thing next to what you are clearly squirting, or applies way more force then a gentle squirt of water should. Oh, Bad FLUDDless challenge is your reward for enduring the penny slots of d00m too.

5.) this one is funny because it's probably one of the few instances where Mario is actually serving his community service. Spamspray is your friend here.

6.) this is a boss based on RNG. if you die to him, you get ejected out of the level and get to endure 3 tensionless scene transitions from two NPCs and a slow moving elevator. This also kills runs since you can't clip through a wall like with Missions 3 or 4.

7.) Pretty benign Shadow Mario mission with lots of bad camera because of the tight enclosure. This is about where I realized that you effectively need to sweep these stages on each individual mission if you want all the Blue coins. Uuuuugh.

8.) Timed red-coin challenge in what is effectively a 4 story labyrinth gated with many one-way doors. ask yourself if that sounds fun.


Like... I get what they were going for with Sirena Beach with it effectively being the Hotel California or somethin'. it's something a little different then the usual Mario Haunted house misleading the player thing... usually though, those games establish an atmosphere and while the trickery is indeed that, it usually doesn't involve all the random BS and doesn't confine itself to a space meant to be functional. There are a lot of rooms in the Hotel that are just... rooms! yeah, there's secret passages that connect some of them, but sometimes you're just dropping in through the ceiling of a honeymooning couple, the NPCs yell at Mario to GTFO, there's MAYBE a blue coin there depending on the mission you choose, and... that's it. you leave the room, it's locked, and you have to go back down to the first floor men's shitter to enter the maze and go through the sequence of rooms to get you up to the air vents again.

the outside area is woefully underutilized. they literally couldn't come up with a good challenge for there outside of the Manta that started the whole thing, so they literally put the one mission where cleaning up paint gets you a shine based on the volume of paint you clean up. there's hardly any Clue coins even (at least on the missions I looked around outdoors) and the kind of open space that plays to Super Mario Sunshine's strengths just doesn't get used besides for Cleanup on isle five because it probably WOULD have been rage inducing to have a mission where you scour each room inside the hotel to clean up paint in a time limit.

I actually remember very little about Noki bay besides it having a secret shine that made me pull my hair out and the whole putting on a fish bowl for semi-unresponsive underwater controls. Fun fact about that segment, though. If you use the Y button to go into first person mode, you can make far sharper turns when doing the diving hover nozzle segments. otherwise, I really only remember that there's a Il Piantissimo race, a mission involving boat control, and the helmet things.


Speaking of Il Piantissimo, fun fact about the little goober in the Pianta mask...

[pokepal148]

I like how literally the only shines that are worth a damn are the Shadow Mario ones and the ones you need to unlock the Shadow Mario ones. Gone are the days where you could decide that you really don't like that stupid manta racing stage so you're just going to go get your 50 shines you need to fight bowser elsewhere. No siree. You'll do the Sand Bird and you'll like it.

If anything that's what killed this game for me. Not the many other issues this game has but that the game basically removed one of the greatest things about Mario 64 which allowed you to choose your battles for the most part.

I'd say the thing about Mario Sunshine is that I can think of better 3D platformers like Ty the Tasmanian Tiger that were released in that same time-frame that I can go back to and enjoy much more than how much i'm enjoying Sunshine and considering that Mario platformers are usually the creme of the crop compared to platformers made by other companies at that time that's saying alot. Part of it is that those games aren't Mario games and thus don't carry the kinds of expectations I have for Mario games but a lot of it is because they are just better games that weren't clearly rushed through some development hell to meet some deadline the way Sunshine was.

Clean may be better than dirty but Super Mario Sunshine is still a mess of a game.

[ClexYoshi]

Bowser's Bathtime fun is over, and I currently stand at 86 shines. I feel like at this point there's little pressure for me to push on for 120 shines,  and that I can give a refreshed and educated opinion on Super Mario Sunshine.


and that verdict is that the game is REALLY good but hits a couple of harsh snags with so many little things, and that people's ill opinions of this game are a sort of 'death by a thousand cuts' other than one central big thing besides Camera and slope physics.

That being said, I breezed through Noki bay with 0 deaths (9 shines collected!) and had pretty minimal resistance on Pianta village's front too. my only real deaths this last session were from me messing around and clipping through Delphino plaza to a death plane, and... Corona Mountain, but i'm not ready to harp on Corona mountain.

The next several paragraphs will be about Super Mario Sunshine's virtues, because you will find PLENTY of venom about this game otherwise from the people who grew frustrated with it over Retroactive. Heck, there was a point I was pretty frustrated!

First of all, Mario's movement rewards high skill in SUCH an incredible way. Mastery of a few key advanced Techniques make this game a far more rewarding and open ended to play. knowing how and when to apply spin jumps, dives, flips, Wall Jumps, the rope spin (a technique originally from DK94), the shotgun-like "Spamspray", and the Slip n' slide are all vital to BLAZING through Super Mario Sunshine's tougher shines. when I played this game as a lad, I was disappointed by the mysterious disappearance of Mario's melee attacks and the long jump and back flip, but now I truly understand just how crazy mobile Mario is. It's a level of mobility that Super Mario Galaxy only manages to match when you start putting powerups, yoshi, and the cloud flower into the equation.

the granular nature of Blue coin collection I think is something the folks at EAD tried to pick up from the Rare teams, and it works inasmuch that it gets you to explore the levels on offer, and explore them on a mission by mission basis. a true 120 shine run of Super Mario Sunshine will likely mean intimate knowledge of the game.

there's a LOT of bold ideas for shines here . Blooper Races, the underwater jetpack based shines in Noki bay, The Watermelon Festival, the Fluff Fluff Festival, The Sand Bird, the chain chomp stuff in Pianta village... of course, it's easy with hindsight to say the Galaxy games did similar, and did it better, but there's a lot of pioneering that went on here.

In a previous post, I praised this game for archetectural and artistic cohesion, and that still stands. Outside of maybe Rogueport, Delphino Island is one of the most striking and distinct settings a Mario game has ever taken place in. the music is great in almost every level, and the game isn't afraid to let things get abstract for a self contained little thing, even if it doesn't make much sense (I'm looking at you, Magic bottle, literally every secret area...!)

for how WILDLY this game changed in development, and how relatively short of a time frame they must have turned this game around judging from the fact that they probably wanted it out sooner then they managed to get it out, I think Super Mario Sunshine turned out wonderfully...!









BUT...


those dozens of little things of shine missions falling flat on their face, the physics engine borking itself sometimes, the lack of checkpoints anywhere, the 100 coin shines or secret shines ejecting you from the level, the lack of tracking and outright obtuse Blue Coin placement, the idea of any "required" shines outside of the initial Airstrip shine, underutilized mechanics, inconsistent mechanics, and the whole of Sirena Beach CANNOT be ignored. I feel like I'm coming out of this FAR more positively than some of my peers, and I even have a boatload of stuff to bitch and moan about.


EDIT:



did one more stream to bump the shine count to 109. I just have Blue Coin shines left.

[Mop it up]

I'm surprised Khushrenada never jumped in here, seems like his kind of topic.

[lolmonade]

I'm about 10 or 11 shines in, and I don't think i'll finish this game in time for retroactive.  There's just too far a gap of uninteresting shine challenges to fun ones.  I don't mind repeating a boss battle (piranha plant from the first level), but it has to be a fun twist that makes the boss difficult for the right reasons, not one that is frustrating because of it being tedious.  Having to chase around that flying overgrown weed isn't fun when there's paint splotched everywhere that drags down your movement. 


I'll probably get around to beating this game over a longer span of time, but this is the kind of game that I would have more likely been more tolerant of its flaws when I was younger and had an endless amount of time to play through the game and appreciate it in its totality.

[Khushrenada]

I'm surprised Khushrenada never jumped in here, seems like his kind of topic.

Maybe because I just discovered this. I've said many a time that the Podcast forum is one I rarely venture into. I just happened to notice a headline about Super Mario Sunshine when posting in Talkback which led me here. Yeah, there's a lot I could say about Sunshine. ClexYoshi has been making a lot of good points. I'll have to finish up reading up on things to see if I do want to add anything.

Although, truthfully, I did a replay of Sunshine a couple years ago to get it fresh in my mind again in order to do a big write-up on it. It ended up being a long write-up which is probably to be expected by you all with my propensity to be overly verbose at times kicked in but there are a lot of things I wanted to cover and say about it. It got to be so long that I was thinking of doing a feature in the Review section where I divided it up into 5 parts and released a new part each day. However, I never did finish it from what I recall. I suppose I could see if I still have it and dig it up to finally post it on these forums although it appears to be late to have any of that be a part of this discussion. Too bad. Retroactive could have probably have just read my whole take on the game and it would probably cover most everything that would have been said about it and filled whatever the running time for the podcast is.