Did a quick playthrough of this over the past couple days with the 4K re-release. Some thoughts:

- Melty Molten Galaxy's theme is incredible and underrated.

- This game has an incredible sense of place. Every galaxy is memorable. The bone fish boss battle! Freezeflame Galaxy! Buoy Base! This is something I'm beginning to value more and more in games, as I realize that conveying a sort of atmospheric narrative experience through novel gameplay is the thing that a lot of my favorite games do best. You don't play Mario 64 for its platforming, yoh play it for its adventure mystery, and Galaxy captures a similar feeling.

- There's way too much downtime in this game. Wait 2-4 minutes between each level. Wait for launch stars to blast you to the next planet. Wait for little cutscenes when you ground button a button. I swear that half my playthrough was waiting to get back into the game.

- The controls are surprisingly finnicky and unpredictable when you're in any non-standard gravitational orientation.

- I don't think some games were meant to be seen in HD, let alone 4K. I first felt this with Mario 64, which Nintendo has now remedied with their CRT filter. Even Mario Galaxy suffers from higher resolution though; planets pop way harder against the skybox, and a lot of textures are exposed as very simple. At 480p, the game sort of blurred all of this stuff together with its weird lighting, but now a lot of these elements look kinda off.