Super Mario Odyssey

have to say it again cos i played it again that New Donk City festival sequence is amazing. like that's just a fun level to play on top of all the crazy meta stuff. i like how you have to turn on the power to get to the festival. the NPCs are celebrating Mario for starting it all, this complements the meta celebration of Mario as a kinetic "superstar". Mayor Pauline was a very cool character and puts a nice twist on the whole game-within-a-game.

i loved the art deco style around the whole thing, the film noir suits, the spotlights, the skyscraper. i have always been a fan of Mario as being influenced heavily by the old silent film stars Lloyd/Keaton/Chaplin/etc. and that pre-War (well post-WWI pre-WWII) era of animation as well. cool to see this style embraced somewhat by the game. the 8-bit segments are introduced as ancient hieroglyphs you discover while excavating rock walls, by the time you get to Metro Kingdom are turn on the power they are a jazzpunk hologram, the ultimate Super Mario Bros.-Donkey Kong level mod officially made by Nintendo. i think my favorite part is when you are jumping upside down and there are coins in the windows of the skyscraper and there are spotlights shining across them, it all looks so damn good.

wait - what? there's more than one Yoshi level???

ive come across a few now. you can find him at the Mushroom Kingdom castle but he's also in the post-game side moons as well. the one i describe above is "Yoshi Under Siege" and it's on the Dark Side.

can’t put my finger on what it is but i’m not enjoying this game at all. i loved the hell out of every other 3d mario (including sunshine, excluding 3d world because i’ve never played it) but this one is doing nothing for me.

i’m up to the snowy level with the bouncy race thing and am struggling to stay interested. meanwhile zelda is costing me sleep.

okay reading through the thread it turns out i'm not alone, thank god. sleepingbag's

like overall it's pretty good, but a) they put a bunch of unfun, typical platformer shit in here

is otm, it's very good at all the things it's doing, but it's not a zelda-scale genre reinvention. it's a hell of a lot more like galaxy than people having been saying it is, and the cap thing is the next in a very long line of 3d platformers that entail possessing a thing/wearing a suit and having new mechanics.

Even in the main quest, the inconsequentiality of each achievement started to just feel.. "the opposite of sweeping".

especially when stars/shines were always an explicit reward for an explicit achievement, but too often in odyssey it’s just “well you were walking this way anyway so have a moon”

millenials expect a moon for just walking a way anyway

Used to kick a koopa shell in the street

yeah they def just hand you moons during the main quest but that's probably to keep up pace. by the time you beat the boss of each world you have more or less all the moon needed to move on right away. the post-game moons are where the difficulty and exploration really take off.

btw i think the snow level was my least favorite (visually found it kind of dull) but the adjacent beachfront level was one of the best in the game. levels that i was not very impressed with during my first run i have grown to appreciate as i uncover the mysteries and partake in races and such to find the shortcuts.

yeah the beach level started off as Ugh A Water Level but it grew on me a ton in my second pass through it. and that bossa nova bgm! agree that the snow level is the weakest in this one.

kinda hate giant food land as a concept but it also was ok.

i’m holding off on the beach level for now because i’ve been going back and clearing up some of the earlier levels. happy to keep it as a nice surprise for later tbh.

it’s a very decent game obv, but not in a once-in-a-generation way, e.g. new donk city was promoted to death but it could be brightly coloured textureless cubes for all it matters to the gameplay. it’s like playing quite good mario fanfic.

the festival or whatever is amazing, though

it’s like playing quite good mario fanfic.

this is exactly right

my only real complaint is the lack of Boos. yeah the hat is kind of a polymorphic floating ghost thingy and the Cap Kingdom is Tim Burton-y but this game needs Ghost House DLC.

i’m mega pissed off about the main quest ending but don’t want to spoil it so

that completely tone deaf aspect of the story notwithstanding, i'm now up past 300 moons and am just lurching from kingdom to kingdom looking for x markers on maps. as far as i can tell there's no compelling reason to keep going.

people seem to praise the camera but it seems far worse than sunshine and galaxy. i've died a load of times because the camera's flung off in some stupid direction, or because it keeps jumping back to a default angle that immediately puts me at a disadvantage. also some of the creatures you can capture have weird or terrible controls, mainly the goombas (way too easy to lose a heart to those bastards) and that woodpecker thing.

also, a lot of the level bosses or tricky platform bits send you way too far back when you die, so you're having to traverse the dull bit before the challenge over and over again. after like the third attempt i'm no longer revved up to get back and try again, i'm turned off. this aspect feels really dated.

on that, there's also a pretty heavy whack of nostalgia to all this, which is fine but reminds you that the developers are looking backwards. zelda is 100% forward-looking and it pays off incredibly. odyssey is more a very long greatest hits set in beautiful but weirdly sterile places.

all that said, the good stuff is top notch. the art design, sound design, animations are all incredible, and tossing your hat at an enemy and accidentally finding you can possess it is delightful. it's worth the money, it's just... eh. easily my least favourite 3d mario.

surprisingly few image results for "bowser weinstein"

zelda is 100% forward-looking

hah i felt the opposite. 3D Zelda was always hand holdy this felt like closer to TLOZ than the series has been in decades. it even starts with an old man in a cave

i think u mean ‘reassuringly few’ xp

I've come back to Zelda after Odyssey, and Link's movement feels so sluggish now

and being unable to climb or grab a shrine ledge that is 10 cm taller than Link is even more frustrating

zelda is 100% forward-looking

hah i felt the opposite. 3D Zelda was always hand holdy this felt like closer to TLOZ than the series has been in decades. it even starts with an old man in a cave

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, December 21, 2017 12:14 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, they were definitely trying to get back to the mission statement of the original.

"let's make the player rearrange furniture within the belly of four divine beasts. you know, get back to the jamiroquai Link of the original"

...with many enhancements in regards to specifics

I'm with the future-vision - instantly felt like they incorporated so much 2000s design sense into Breath, from Portal, Assassin's Greed, GTA, etc.

very crazy. on the north end of Metro Kingdom there is a despondent city dweller about to jump to his death. if you dress Mario as a clown you can go to him and cheer him up and save his life. for saving his life he will give you a power moon. i thought this was so rad - i don't know if i've ever saved a suicidal npc in a videogame before. you really do everything in this game...

after hitting 500 moons i'm playing it through again. hell of a lot more fun the second time. also, getting a peach amiibo for xmas (instant life-up heart anywhere) has made some of the tricky moons loads easier.

my god, Nintendo has solved depression

im so happy now

now that ive seen a clown

this game clearly didn’t anticipate america’s two defining moments of 2017, scary clowns and harvey weinstein

playing this & galaxy 2 these days and comparing. galaxy 2 is so superior

yeah idk I like this way better than the Galaxy games. some people just don't like the collect-a-thon format as much i guess

2D mario is a better gimmick than small planets with high gravity

anybody have any luck w the talkatoo glitch? i wanted to use it to get the 100 jump ropes but i can't seem to get Mario to hover in the air.

if you throw cappy over talkatoo's head and then talk to him when it is less than a hat's distance from the bird the camera does the weird freeze thing. i believe that if you can roll away from talkatoo before the camera freeze and get him out of frame, you can control when the camera freezes.

supposedly after the camera freezes you can jump up and freeze Mario in mid-air but that part isn't working for me. anybody have any luck with this? i wonder if it's been patched out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzlqVbXU6po

finally pulled off this glitch and got 100 jump ropes via levitation! to pull this off:

1) find a talkatoo and face it w the jump rope course in the background
2) jump and throw cappy (y)
3) talk to him while the cap is in the air and it will freeze. if it is close enough to talkatoo the glitch will register
4) go through the talk dialog and immediately roll away, hitting R to reset the camera. there is a second or so of grace time to do this. (from this point on if talkatoo is comes back into view with the camera, the camera will freeze and Mario's Y position will also freeze. the action of talkatoo coming back into frame is what triggers the freeze.)
6) walk around the jump ropers, careful to keep talkatoo out of frame. get ready to jump into the jump rope from the left. when i pulled this off i started near the fire hydrant.
7) jump into the jump rope and hit ground pound (ZR) and camera center (R) at the same time. im not sure the ground pound is 100% necessary but doing other jumps (ie dive jump) may cause Mario to slide across the X axis after freezing. also be careful of motion controls, you might get the gitch and then accidentally shake the controller during jump rope, causing Mario to jump off in a crazy direction and ruin the trick.
8) Mario is frozen in mid-air, the jump ropers continue to go through the numbers beneath him, and you can use this trick to get both 30 and 100 jump power moons easily.

the funny thing, i got that one legit. it's the dang volleyball one i cant do

yeah idk I like this way better than the Galaxy games. some people just don't like the collect-a-thon format as much i guess

it's the pace of Odyssey that makes it less satisfying for me to play - the moons are more like pellets in a maze - you get one, it doesn't really feel like it matters much, keep right on moving, some of them are just hanging around in the trees. the gameplay itself is a wonder, I'm not saying the game sucks, but the pacing/rhythm of it makes the story & characters feel pretty incidental - like, I can't imagine other Mario games reskinned as Banjo-Kazooie or w/e. this one feels like a mechanic that was big & fluid enough to say "we'll give it to the Mario franchise, it's impressive enough to get the gold ring"

the 2D integration would only fully work with mario or another game that existed long ago in 2D anyway. also can't imagine browsing banjo pants and stuffed jinjos at the shop and caring.

the new donk city festival was also the best part of the game, had to be mario, and felt like the peak of what can be done with the game's underlying design.

a lost memory type story may have helped tie artifacts, moons, and characters together, but they already did it with the other blockbuster open world feeling game

the 2d gimmick was cute the first time but they did pretty much nothing with it

there's maybe two sections where the 2d-to-3d passage is allowed to be interesting, the level design within those segments is not interesting enough on its own, and you end up -- as with most of the other interruptions to the central mechanic -- putting down your fun to pick up hm-maybe-fun-but-like-not-as-much-fun

this is the perfect mario game for anyone who got bored of mario 64 after a half hour and decided to play goat simulator

possessing bullet bill vs finding a power star. it is a mario game.

will grant that food land and first-crash-landing island levels felt a bit mario-kazooie

I think the main thing I enjoy in 3d Mario is verticality, my favorite levels in 64 were the mountain ones and my favorites in this are the city and the wooded kingdom. The Galaxy games have a few vertical levels but not on the scale I want, they tend to be content to shuttle you between lots of miniatures rather than one big thing to climb

Yeah, I really hate neon pukey soup land. I hate being a slidey lava monster so bad.

this game owns. I'm up to about 390 moons now, I think.