Super Mario Odyssey Is A Fantastic New Adventure For Nintendo’s Mascot

Every Nintendo console needs a Mario game, and everything about Super Mario Odyssey says that this could be one of the very best. For one thing it’s gorgeous, and shows just how good games can look on the Nintendo Switch, but as is customary for the main Super Mario series, it has a new hook, a new idea that runs right the way through the game, even as it explores other concepts here and there.

That idea is Cappy, a sentient hat that takes on the form of Mario’s traditional cap and joins him on his journey. Cappy leads to the most singular source of joy in the game, that of being able to take control of many different things in the world. This was notably introduced during the E3 trailer when a T-rex stomped into view, but it extends to so many other characters, objects and enemies.

You can hop into a pair of binoculars and boost up into the sky to get a good view of the level ahead, you can embody a spark of lightning and move along electrical wires to cross gaps quickly or zip right up to the top of a building, take control of little stone monuments that shuffle round the world and reveal secret areas or my favourite, take control of a Bullet Bill and boost around the level with its delightfully slippery handling.

Whatever you want to achieve, you’ll soon be throwing your hat at everything in sight, just to see what it does. Importantly, you don’t need to do so. If you want a purist 3D Mario game, it seems that you can get it. Where I zipped up the side of a building, I quickly discovered that there was actually a platforming path up through its centre, and wherever there were Bullet Bills, there were also moving platforms that I could have used instead.

It’s a combination of Cappy and a return to the more freeform level design of Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine that gives Odyssey this feeling of freedom. Dropping into New Donk City in Metro Kingdom, you can get on with the main quest as given to you by Mayor Pauline – a lovely little nod back to Mario’s very first game – to find enough musicians to hold a festival, or you can simply run off and bounce on yellow taxi cabs, scale as many buildings as possible, and bother its citizens by repeatedly bouncing on their heads.

You’ll have to explore each world and level anyway in order to find enough Power Moons to fuel the Odyssey ship and unlock more kingdoms before eventually putting an end to Bowser’s plans, but there’s no prescribed order to these and many are simply hidden away as little collectables. You might spot one in a metal girder and have to find a way to get inside, there might be a minigame, such as where you capture a citizen who’s playing around with a little RC car, or it could simply be bumping into the rather familiar face of Captain Toad. Grabbing a moon no longer ends the level and sends you back to the beginning either, letting you just carry on and keep on exploring new places.

It’s a less overt facet to the other level I played, in the Sand Kingdom, which juxtaposes desert like rolling dunes of sand with huge icicles. Passing through the small town of Tostarena and into Tostarena Ruins, it feels like a more direct and traditional Mario platforming game. There’s plenty of platforming challenges, such as moving platforms, the little swarms of Goombas that come your way, and even sections where you pass into a 2D world on the environment’s walls, not too dissimilar from The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds’ signature trick, but with a hint of Super Mario Maker in the way Mario’s costume persists in this setting.

It’s not something that you’d really expect from a Nintendo game, but there is just something ever so slightly off about some of the controls, making them a little tricky to get the hang of. With the smaller size of the thumbsticks on the Switch, Mario is just a little bit too twitchy, but there’s also a somewhat unhappy balance between motion controls for the hat moves and the button based equivalents.

Throwing the hat is simple enough, and as an attack that can happily dispatch enemies, it goes a long way to dispelling the skill needed to reliably jump on enemy heads in a 3D game – the game’s also easier in simply deducting 10 coins if you ever die and not having worry about fall damage. However, it’s tricky to throw the hat and then jump onto it to jump further, as you need to hold the button in place while also pressing jump, but then the hat spin attack seems to be by far best with motion controls and flicking both Joy-Con in a direction. That’s compared to spinning the left analogue stick and then pressing the throw button. With roughly 30 minutes to play the game, I still hadn’t got a hang of this by the time we finished, and it’s something Nintendo need to refine with an eye on playing in handheld mode.

However, underneath it all, Mario has all his usual moves. There’s the triple jump, the butt stomp, the ability to grab onto edges, twirl on the spot, and plenty more. The foundations here are solid, but Nintendo are still in the process of refining the new additions and ideas.

Even with the minor flaws, Super Mario Odyssey is shaping up to be another landmark game for the venerable Nintendo mascot.