My
non-gamer gf suggested we try out the co-op mode in Odyssey, and we've been having a blast. It's my first time really digging into the game since it came out in 2017. Sorry Pizza Tower, you're on hold for a bit, nothing personal.
It's funny, because at the time,
I remember saying:
Secret_Tunnel said:21. Super Mario Odyssey - Like I always say: this is a Marvel movie in an industry that hasn't figured out how to make Marvel movies. It's a darn good game, but there are no other darn good games, so it stands out! (The freedom it gives the player is great.)
That's from my "top games of the 2010s" post, from 2019. And re-reading that list now, all those other games
are darn good—dare I say,
dang good.
But many of them are one-trick ponies that you can't revisit. I replayed Portal 2 last year, and it was way less fun now that I know everything that happens. Same with Little Inferno, as well as, of course, Frog Fractions. On that same note, many of the stories in these games resonate with me less now than they did when I was 15. Bioshock and Okami were in my top five games of all time back in 2007. Now? I haven't replayed them in a while, but I just can't imagine enjoying them as much. So while Starseed Pilgrim is very neat and poetic, that story-based style falls flat for me these days.
Something I've realized in the past couple years is that a game like Mario Odyssey will always be fun, and that the fun it offers is much deeper than the novelty of twisty indie games. Like, World of Goo 2 would have blown my mind just as much as the first game did, if it had come out back then, but I need a little more replayable substance than that now to call a game one of my all-time favorites. What I seem to have been gesturing at with my "the industry doesn't know how to make good games" comment was a shift in my preferences away from games that rely on style and story towards games with more fundamental qualities.
With Pizza Tower's release, I've been thinking a lot about movement tech in games, and Mario Odyssey is the unrivaled king. It's so FUN! There's so much room for experimentation and mastery.
Is Mario Odyssey better than Mario 64? With B3313 replacing my nostalgia with terror, it's a little easier for me to see that Mario 64's level design can't hold a candle to Odyssey's. The one thing 64 has going for it that Odyssey lacks is a mysterious cohesive sense of place in its castle, but if we're talking about the levels themselves? Odyssey is
way more fun and immediate and varied. Not
every moon is fun, but the beauty of its design is that you can skip the ones you don't care about.
So yeah, this is one of the GOATs for me, and if I set aside my nostalgia for the N64 games, I have no issue saying that Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild stand side-by-side as the pinnacles of their series.
(But I will
never set aside my nostalgia for the N64 games! Winner: Ocarina of Time.)