My appetite for 3D Mario was not satiated by 100%-ing Mario Galaxy on the Switch a week or two ago, so I ordered myself a copy of the sequel and finished playing through it to nearly the same extent. When I was younger, I had gotten all 120 normal stars in the game, but my older brother had told me that the green stars that follow them are awful and not worth getting, so I never tried. This time I DID try for those, and got all of them! I only let one star slip me by, since I simply didn't have the patience for the incredible gauntlet that is star 242. It took me a little over 20 hours to nearly 100% the Japanese version of the game.
The story of Mario Galaxy 2 is even more bare than that of the first game, but is largely just a more simple retelling of that game. During the shooting star festival, Bowser comes down to heck stuff up, steals Peach, and disappears off into the sky. Only this time, Lumas are already on the ground when Mario is trying to rescue her the first time, so they launch him up into space to chase Bowser. Mario finds himself on a planetoid with the rather chunky Luma Lubba (Ruuba, in Japanese) who turns it into a spaceship shaped like Mario's head. They then use this spaceship to go from galaxy to galaxy, hunting down grand stars to get to where Bowser has gone. It's a very threadbare story, and it's a logical progression to the nearly totally absent story in Mario 3D World. That said, I think it's perfectly fine. This is Super Mario, not Final Fantasy, and as long as the art and level direction are tip top, I don't really care about the story. Luckily, the art and level direction are indeed tip top! This game controls more or less how the first game does, but it feels like Mario's movement has been tightened up just a little bit (but it does quite help). He's not quite as nimble as in Sunshine, but he can definitely pull off backflips a little easier than he could in Galaxy 1. Your spaceship eliminates the hub world found in previous 3D Mario games entirely, serving effectively as a cursor to select which level you want to go to. The planetoids that populate SO much of Mario Galaxy 1 have also been, not eliminated entirely, but significantly reduced and improved. It's now much less of that gravity-bending stuff for the sake of it (so far less of those awkward controlling "can't stop running in circles" moments), and a lot more micro stage concepts put together. Even Luigi is playable much earlier than he was in the first game, and he doesn't have his own separate mode either. The 120 green stars that unlock after the first 120 normal stars are just a part of the overall refinements to how the first Mario Galaxy approached its level design. Each galaxy now has only one prankster comet, not two, so the obligatory purple coin missions are gone. You also need to collect a comet medal in a stage for the prankster comet to show up there in the first place, giving you an extra 50 collectibles through the course of the game on top of all the stars (one medal for each stage). The aforementioned green stars appear once you've beaten the game, and while they aren't totally new content, they're newer content than the "play the whole game again as Luigi" concept that the first game used for its extra 121 stars. The green stars go and hide in all of the old levels, and they make a distinct twinkling sound and sparkle quite brightly in the first place. This turns it almost into a quest of both hunting them down in the stage (a task usually not THAT difficult, but there were two I had to end up looking up the location to), but then also doing the often quite tricky jumps required to grab them. It's not the most compelling content in the world compared to the original 120 stars, but I still enjoyed my time grabbing them. That isn't to say that I had absolutely no complaints with the game, however. In regards to the normal stars, the manta ray surfing minigame from the first Galaxy has been replaced with flying on birds not unlike the flying in Skyloft in Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and this doesn't even have Motion Plus to help it out. Those sections are so aggravating to control that I'm super glad there are only two of them in the whole game. Beyond that, I have a few more comments rather than outright complaints. The Grandmaster stage at the end is very much like what the Darkest Side of the Moon would be in Odyssey: a morale crushing gauntlet with no checkpoints and only one hit before you die, and I just wish it were a little more forgiving (although given its name, it's certainly not inappropriate that it's this hard). And last, given that there are a few levels that are more simple enemy killing gauntlets or platforming challenges around a certain gimmick, there are also just a fair few stages where the green stars don't really have anywhere interesting they CAN be hidden, so it's mostly just replaying those stages several times to get their green stars. The base game is absolutely fine and totally worth playing, but I can't help but wish at least a little that the post-game green stars felt a little bit less like a fan-made hack of the game, pushing more content into already finished levels. The presentation of this game is also fantastic. This is easily one of the prettiest looking games on the Wii, and I think just playing this on my Wii at 480i via component cables looked better than the upscaled Mario Galaxy 1 I played on my Switch a couple weeks back. That colorful, whimsical design of Galaxy 1 has been amped up a bit to make things that much more bright and cheery now that the story isn't treating itself quite so seriously (although it isn't Mario Sunshine-levels of bright). Your Mario Head spaceship even gets populated by the little aliens as you complete missions for them, giving you tons of little friends to get hints from or just admire the fun designs of. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is an excellent refinement of the Mario Galaxy formula and still super worth playing. While I will admit, through this replay I absolutely rediscovered just how much I dislike motion controls as a control method, I nonetheless still had a lot of fun playing this (I just really hope that this gets a re-release on the Switch like the first game did). Mario Galaxy 2 isn't JUST the first game with new movement gimmicks tossed in (although that isn't a totally unfair description), it also comes win with a far refined approach to level design that would pave the way for future 3D Mario games. This replay really helped me appreciate this game way more than I did the first time around, and all it's done is make me want to play more 3D Mario instead of whetting my appetite for it like I hoped it would XD
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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