BIT LIT

Ambition: Thy Name Is Sunshine
The ballsiest Mario ever

In the fall of 2002, Nintendo elated fans by releasing Super Mario Sunshine, the sequel to the highly-lauded Super Mario 64. This was Mario's next step, a push to a more thorough experience, the one that would lead them all into the future of 3D platforming.

So why, then, do gamers look back at it and say, "Super Mario Sunshine? MEH."?

Some may argue that it changed the formula. Untrue. The hub world was still there. The portals were still there. The missions within those portals were still there, as were the number of missions. The game was largely the same thing as Super Mario 64, just prettier. Critics loved it, and it sold over 5 million copies. So why, nearly a decade later, is there so much hate?

Playing the game, one finds the answer:
Super Mario Sunshine is the most ambitious Mario game ever released.

The game did everything you're not supposed to do in a Mario game. The changes were numerous:

1. No Mushroom Kingdom
The game takes place on the remote Isle Delfino. Gone are the toads, and the goombas, and everything we've known before. You meet new enemies, and new characters call Piantas. Why so? Mario and Peach are taking a vacation. Simple enough. But as they land, they're met with opposition. The local police have spotted a supposed Mario spreading sludge around the utopian island. Which brings us to another departure:

2. Anonymous Enemy
You play through most of the game without even knowing what enemy you're fighting. All you know is an iridescent Mario clone is running around, ruining Isle Delfino by painting muck over environments and even citizens. Only deep into the game is the true enemy revealed. Then, there's another enemy. (Betcha can't guess who that is.)


3. No Power-Ups
No power mushrooms, no fire flowers, no capes. What? How are you supposed to survive? Meet FLUDD, a water gun. Seriously. For the first time, Mario was tied to his weapon. It could spray like a hose, provide lift like a jetpack, and even transform into a rocket or propeller. And it could talk. It added a shooter element to the Mario world, and this is probably the most controversial of all the new additions...unless you count when...


4. FLUDD Disappears?
There are random levels in the game where things go from open-world 3D with FLUDD to traditional Mario, hopping and jumping with deft timing through difficult platforming areas. Even worse? These levels had no floors. So a misstep led to death, every time. (This, it seems, would inspire large sections of the next game, Super Mario Galaxy.)

5. WTF Shines?
We had just decided to start collecting stars in Super Mario 64. Now we're collecting shines? And Shine Get! isn't even proper English.





As previously stated, the game was a huge hit commercially and critically. Gamers who have, for years, begged for innovation, now turn their noses up at the game that had the most originality of any Mario game released. In truth, though, the problem lies with canon. People feel there shouldn't be any break in the line of events, even though the series is nonlinear (because the same thing happens in every game. How you go about fixing the problem is different each time, but the story remains unchanged). The experience is jarring, and it does stick out when you think about the typical Mario game.

Running and jumping had become shooting and floating. Yoshi made his first 3D appearance (at least, in playable form), but that experience had been modified too. Everything we had been taught about Mario had been flipped onto its head. A small core group of people call it the worst Mario game ever made due to this departure, but in truth, it's the most ambitious franchise game yet, and it led to key elements of future Mario games. Plus, it's actually a fantastic game. The new location allowed Nintendo to craft whole new worlds based around completely new concepts. Canon didn't matter because it didn't have to. Had Super Mario Sunshine taken place in some tropical section of the Mushroom Kingdom, there would have been no innovation. No stars? Of course not! The Shines are the Piantas' version of stars. The fact that there was mystery to our enemy kept us guessing, and FLUDD actually let you explore the world without simply pressing A to jump, as you always had before.

Super Mario Sunshine gets unfairly hated on because it experimented; but the truth is, experimenting isn't bad. Without experimenting, there would have been no Super Mario 2. There wouldn't have even been Super Mario Bros. We've been playing video games for so long that we get caught up in what video games are "supposed" to be. If video games were supposed to simply stay with what we've known, we would have permanently turned off our systems years ago. The reality is this: The experiments are the ones that shine.