At first glance, the Gamecube entry doesn’t really tinker too much with the 3D Mario formula. Super Mario Sunshine received a rather tepid reception on its release. It felt marvelous, and still feels marvelous. Your main foe wasn’t strange tasks, but an incredibly well-realized physics system that forced cognizance of speed, momentum, and distance. They spiced up sequences which the developer set in advance as time trials (since they only lasted a short time, contrary to the permanency of Mario hats in the previous titles). Your basic move set of jumps, attacks, and abilities remained fixed with small additions like the various hats. Arriving six years after its genre-defining predecessor, Sunshine managed to present a stiffer challenge while changing the physics engine irrevocably with strange, stifling additions and gimmicks.Īnd you might say “but Super Mario 64 was completely full of platforming gimmicks”, to which I would reply that most of it came strictly from the level design. There’s a host of reasons why, but I believe we can pinpoint many of those errors on Super Mario Sunshine in particular. For once, I agree with the common consensus, and Nintendo did not improve on the three dimensional Mario formula since.
