Island Time: The Good of Super Mario Sunshine

Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for Super Mario Sunshine.

Between the Giant Bombcast and GB East's Steal My Sunshine, you might say that this site has extensively covered the second 3D Mario. Yet, I still haven't seen my Super Mario Sunshine experience represented here, and what is the world about if not me, personally? SMS was the first game I received for the second home console I owned: the Nintendo GameCube. My first console had been the original PlayStation, home to more fun than you could shake a stick at, and it was often a serious kind of fun. You had your mascot platformers like Spyro and Crash, but Sony also had a reputation for unsaturated racing simulators like Gran Turismo, grimy horrors like Silent Hill, hot-barellled war thrillers like Medal of Honor, and so on. All of it was packaged in an unassuming grey rectangle, made to look right at home alongside your TV and VHS player, which Sony might also have manufactured.

The GameCube was Nintendo's last foray into traditional consoles before it started installing bespoke features in its devices, a bid to catapult them to broader appeal. There was the touch screen for the DS, the motion controls for the Wii, the portable/home console hybridism for the Switch, etc. But what a last leg for the GameCube was for classic Nintendo machines. In its appearance and catalogue, it promised a more cheerful flavour of excitement than I'd known from the PS1. Its playful violet and nifty carrying handle harkened back to its creator's history as a toy company. Alongside the cool head of the PlayStation 2 and the 00s edginess of the Xbox, the GameCube's games were, on average, more vibrant. Sunnier.

It was Super Mario Sunshine that welcomed me to the GameCube, and if you'd asked me what I thought of SMS a few months ago, I would have easily ranked it among my top three platformers. During a summer heatwave that felt just as sweltering as any on Isle Delfino, I revisited Mario's vacation spot, but it wasn't as I remembered. I have a whole document ready to paste into this editor about where SMS failed to meet my expectations, but I'm keeping that locked in a drawer for now. This week is about good vibes. This week is about the Super Mario Sunshine I love.

A Joyful World

Here's an opinion that will ruin some friendships: I think Super Mario 64 is a revolutionary platformer that is monstrously ugly. A camera that too often breathes down Mario's neck prevents us from taking in the whole panorama. It leaves our faces mashed up against the textures, rendering them blurry. At this distance, objects with holes in them are jagged and aliased, and a profusion of grotty stone, brick, and chainlink gives some levels all the charm of a builder's yard.

Mario 64 is one of innumerable fifth-gen games that fell into the fissure between 3D graphics becoming standard and them becoming high-fidelity. By the sixth generation, games like Mario Sunshine had been able to crawl out of that hole. From the golden sands of Gelato Beach to the shady stands of the main plaza, Isle Delfino is colourful and bustling. While Mario has an Italian accent and diet throughout his series, the trip to this volcanic paradise is the first time his surroundings feel Mediterranean. Isle Delfino's Piantas and Noki would also set the stage for subsequent Mario platformers to include more talkative friends. The Piantas ran so the Luma could float, or something. That shared interest in NPCs probably isn't a coincidence. Yoshiaki Koizumi, the director of Super Mario Sunshine, would go on to direct Super Mario Galaxy.

Besides some stops in Mario Odyssey like New Donk City or the Luncheon Kingdom, the 3D Mario platformers don't have another location as lived-in as Isle Delfino. It's what lets Sunshine sell itself as a holiday; you feel you're going to another country and not just another natural region. It also allows the series to jump from "Courses" to "Episodes". Where Mario 64 more frequently just presents objects and enemies around towers or in pirate coves, Sunshine has micro-stories in which normal island life is disrupted by a dog mummy's Chain Chomplets getting loose, or a big, wet octopus blocking the helipad. Not that narrative media is inherently superior to non-narrative, but I think this Inconvenience of the Week format nails the cartoonish chaos that Mario is going for. It comes through sharply in the bosses: Petey Pirahna and Wiggler are living setpieces. Another nice little detail: you can see some zones in the skyboxes of others, asserting the geography of the island even when you are sequestered in one stage.

Blue Coin and Secret Shine Pursuit

Super Mario Sunshine's blue coins get endless flak and not without good cause. Yet, up to a point, I get a kick out of lining my pockets. If you grab ten of these collectables, you can trade them to some raccoon dogs for a Shine Sprite, this game's equivalent of Stars or Moons. I've been bowled over by the accessible but self-directed play that's occupied recent Nintendo titles such as Bowser's Fury and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The blue coins in SMS were a preview of how we would collect Cat Shines and Spirit Orbs in the future. They're scattered around Isle Delfino like Easter Eggs, and we can choose to collect or ignore any one of them without formally selecting a mission objective.

The Blue Coins might sound like any other video game collectable, but Sunshine has enough to fill a small safe (240), meaning that during the early game, there's a giddy abundance of them. Unlike traditional collectables, many of the coins require you to complete micro-missions. You'll have to clean off a muddy Pianta or spray one graffito and run to another before the timer runs out. The extra Shines in the hub of Delfino Plaza are similarly diversionary. If you want to nab the Shine Sprite in the radio tower or ace the minigame where you smash all the crates, you don't need to select a dedicated mission. These are simply objectives off the main path, allowing you to drift into or out of them breezily.

The Camera

Mario Sunshine was developed before Halo: Combat Evolved popularised today's twin-stick movement and camera scheme. SMS also lives on a console with a slightly stubby right stick. Both of those issues apply drag to your platforming. Still, the GameCube gamepad having a stick labelled "C" for camera in its bottom-right would prepare it well for the coming generation, and SMS uses that nub to blow Mario 64's camera control out of the water. How much can I write about Super Mario 64 and still pretend this is a Mario Sunshine article? It doesn't matter. It's fine.

The Mario 64 camera can be almost survival horror in its rigidity when it should be flexible, given the need to frequently check what's in another direction and reorient Mario. When the camera is uncomfortably close to our plumber, I also want to be able to turn it to scan all the peripheral space that gets left out. Yet, you can't move 64's viewfinder continuously, not in its default mode. Without manipulation, the camera sits roughly behind Mario, but there are preset volumes in the environment that turn or tilt it. You can knock the camera a set number of degrees clockwise or anti-clockwise with the directional buttons, but this requires hitting a key multiple times for one camera movement. Worse, conflicts between the camera and other objects mean it's frequently impossible to fix the camera to the point you want, or a hitbox may push the camera back in the opposite direction you swivelled it. There is also a mode which prevents the volumes from automatically moving the camera, but that leaves you babysitting it, and would require three thumbs to handle while running and jumping.

Sunshine is the first 3D Mario game to include a camera that we can turn continuously in any direction. It's also far less likely to refuse our transformations, preferring to clip through a wall rather than leave vital geometry out of sight. In general, Mario 64 had me adjusting my play around the camera. In Sunshine, I can adjust the camera to how I want to play.

Movement Mechanics

The more fundamental an aspect is to a piece of media, the greater a determinant it is of its quality. Movement mechanics are the underlay to any platformer, and Sunshine's movement is dazzling. My one-sentence pitch for this game would be that this is Mario with a jetpack. The series has always been about triumphing over gravity and steely aerial control. FLUDD is the perfect amplifier for those characteristics, manifesting as the chance to stay in the air and keep adjusting your position a few seconds longer. It is a subwoofer to heighten the oomph of Mario's existing moves and add plenty of new ones, augmenting his parkour with three nozzles: Hover, Rocket, and Turbo. Each nozzle emphasises one aspect of movement in a game about running and jumping:

• The Turbo Nozzle allows for faster running.
• The Hover Nozzle allows for longer/more sustained jumping.
• The Rocket Nozzle allows for higher jumping.

Or, to think of it another way:

• The Turbo Nozzle increases our speed across the X or Z axis while on the ground.
• The Hover Nozzle increases how long we can move across the X or Z axis while in the air.
• The Rocket Nozzle lets us move further up the Y axis.

Yoshi allows for a double jump, but with a spicy twist in the middle. He arcs once, but if you continue to hold the A button, he pauses in mid-air before rising a second time. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention I'm a Yoshi defender. Where the jump in Super Mario Bros. feels like a cross between bowling a softball and quickly bringing a glider in to land, the hover in Sunshine is like trying to flap your wings a few seconds longer so you can make it to that next roof.

There are two non-FLUDD and non-Yoshi moves also worth mentioning: the spin jump and the side somersault. A kind of spin jump existed in Mario 64: there were enemies that you could stomp to turn into a human helicopter. Once in the air, you'd float dreamily down to the ground. Unlike the Mario 64 spin jump, the Sunshine spin jump is no parachute, and it's a little messy to execute. It requires quickly rotating the control stick and then pressing A. Because you're twiddling around the left stick, you can shift on the X and Z axes and end up slightly off-target before you jump. However, the jump lets you trade a loss of lateral air control for greater height.

Mario 64 also had a side somersault, but as with the spin jump, the similarity is mostly in name. In the 90s platformer, you can run in one direction, turn 180, keep running, and hit A to flip. In Sunshine, the "side somersault" is a super jump that you can unleash from a standing start. Some moves in Mario 64, like the crouch jump, came close to scratching the same itch as the Isle Deflino somersault, but you can't activate any of them as spontaneously or with the same flourish. In Sunshine, all you need to do is pull the left stick back, then push it forward and press A. The somersault takes slightly more effort to perform than a regular jump, meaning it doesn't supersede the standard hop, but sending Mario flying feels like being a cat springing one of those door sproingers. It's perfectly elastic.

There's enough depth in the player abilities that once you're familiar with these base moves, you can then combine them with FLUDD to fuse them into powerful compounds. You can spin and squirt to spread a little water in your vicinity, or you can flip and hover for a high jump into a sustained glide. You can also splash water on the dirt and then dive into it for an exhilarating equivalent to a sprint. When I combo together the gymnastics, I feel like I have a real mastery over the tricks. All the moves fold together perfectly like a well-packed suitcase. Lord help me, I'm agreeing with Dan Ryckert, but he was right when he said that the water jetpack is the best thing that Nintendo ever added to a Mario.

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Super Mario Sunshine is sometimes seen as the ugly duckling of the 3D Mario platformers, and the game does have its foibles, but it's also bubbling with design touches I love. Mario has not since felt as liberating as he did on Isle Delfino, and I'd love a return to the FLUDD style of traversal. That being said, the sun can't shine forever, and when it comes to the downsides of Super Mario Sunshine, there's a lot to discuss. That discussion is something to look forward to, or maybe dread, for next week. Thanks for reading.