Super Mario Sunshine is the flagship Mario game for the Gamecube, and the next game in the 3D platformer part of the series following my beloved Super Mario 64. The premise of the game is that you find yourself on a paradise island, but a shadowy version of Mario is polluting the island. Using you new found water dispersal device, FLUDD, you have to clean up the island, stop Shadow Mario, and rescue Princess Peach (of course).
The game controls very similarly to Super Mario 64, with FLUDD and its various upgrades taking the place of Mario's powerups from 64. You'll go through a series of instanced levels, undertaking different challenges to get enough Shine Sprites to have access to the final dungeon and rescue the princess. You have a few different abilities here, but the jumping is very similar.
The game's visuals are surprisingly good today, with a ton of focus obviously being given to the water, which looks great. All of the enemies look nice, and the polluted materials just jump of the screen as extremely sticky and nasty. The environments are diverse enough, but all have a tropical island feel to them, in keeping with the theme of the game.
The controls are pretty slippery, and playing this after playing Super Mario Odyssey makes this game feel like an absolute dinosaur. The FLUDD controls make it impossible to both be precise with your firing of the water while also staying in motion, and any future remake/remaster (they should definitely do this) would absolutely demand a twin stick approach. The wall jumping gets very ornery at times, as you're not limited to jumping in the opposite direction of the wall. This allows for some very creative uses of the wall jump, but more often than not, you'll go flying in a direction you didn't quite intend. Odyssey does a better job with the FLUDD idea in its one watery level featuring the mechanic, and the wall jumping is wildly better. It's a bit unfair to compare a game to another one released fifteen years later, but I also feel like the controls are significantly better in 64, which is a much more fair comparison.
The soundtrack is excellent, and is one of the best in the Mario series. The main theme of the game that plays in the overworld is iconic, and it exemplifies the quality of the music very well.
The game feels far too similar to 64 in its structure, with an almost identical concept and execution. The fact that the gameplay is worse really nails the coffin for this one as a quality game that just lacks behind its peers in most ways.
The camera is very bad as well, and is also something that I would love to see fixed in an updated version. You'll get killed by the camera countless times if you play it. I will say that this is a very common issue for 3D platformers of the time, save for those that take a fixed camera option like Crash Bandicoot.
Despite these critiques, this is a solid game. The challenges to find Shine Sprites are frequently fun, the environment is delightful to explore, and it has a boatload of Mario charm to it. It's just hard to recommend to someone in a universe in which 64, Odyssey, Super Mario Galaxy, Crash Bandicoot 3, Donkey Kong 64, and numerous other, better 3D platformers, exist. But those options do exist, and smart players will spend their limited time there, first. I'll give this one an 8.0/10.
I already teased my next game, so stay tuned! Hopefully I'll be reviewing it next week at some point.
-TRO
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