In the midst of some Twitter shenanigans, someone asked me in earnest about Super Mario Sunshine's status as a shitheap (I might be paraphrasing), so I decided to humor him with a rougher draft of what you're about to read. It's nowhere near the worst game ever made, but it's one I feel pretty strongly about, so hopefully this covers just about everything that makes the game such a disappointment.
So, Super Mario Bros. played a huge part in bringing video games back into American culture after the crash of '83, and had a de facto role in defining what a 2D platformer is and all that good shit. Super Mario Bros. 2, despite its sordid history and black sheep status, is a weird, fun game that introduces multiple playable characters with different traits while adding some much-welcome verticality to everything. SMB3 refined pretty much every aspect, blew out the amount of power-ups and items to the point that they had to add an inventory system, and also introduced overarching themes to the worlds of the game (which were represented in the new world map, making each one more memorable). Super Mario World took a sledgehammer to the structure of the game and put a greater emphasis on secrets and non-linearity than any other 2D game in the series to date. Super Mario 64 wrote the book on how to make a 3D action game in 1996, gave Mario a plethora of new moves, and also introduced a more open-ended approach to the gameplay.
Super Mario Sunshine doesn't really do much of anything to truly distinguish itself. Instead, it comes off as a half-baked tropical retread of Super Mario 64, but with the addition of FLUDD. This would be perfectly fine if they had still made a great game (after all, you don't have to do anything revolutionary to justify making something, even in a series with entries as monumental as the ones prior to Sunshine), but even ignoring the weight of the series' legacy resting on its shoulders, Sunshine is simply a rushed, uneven mess.
The biggest issue Sunshine has is its structure. 64 had you picking and choosing which objectives you wanted to complete, unlocking new worlds at a steady rate along the way. The only real barrier to completion was the amount of stars you needed, and the game made this pretty clear. Sunshine takes a different approach, expecting you to complete the Shadow Mario episode in each world before you can unlock the final level. This isn't necessarily a problem in itself, but this leads to several major issues. Because the Shadow Mario episode is always the seventh out of eight shines you can get in a world, you have to do the majority of what each world has to offer if you want to beat the game. This inevitably leads to situations where you're pigeonholed into missions that you don't want to do, something that can easily be made worse by the fact that the game doesn't ever actually tell you that this what you have to do. The game never communicates anything about your progression, so you're left to your own devices to figure out how to unlock Yoshi, the other two FLUDD nozzles, and the final level. If you're the type of player to save undesirable objectives for later, you'll no doubt reach a point where you're trapped between 3 or 4 bad missions, with no choice but to do them all in a single painful sequence. Even worse, this approach to progression undermines all of the shines found outside (and a handful inside) the game's seven worlds, rendering about 70 different objectives pointless for those not going for 100% completion. That might be for the best, however, as the game's mission design is so scattershot that I can't imagine anybody would want to do more than they'd have to.
You know how people talk about "that level" of a game? How a game will have one moment that just sticks out because of how disproportionately bad it is compared to the rest of the game? Psychonauts has the Meat Circus, San Andreas has the toy airplane mission, and of course, there's that one game (Just the one!) with the really shitty stealth mission in it even though it isn't a stealth game. You know the one I'm talking about. Anyway, Super Mario Sunshine is a game full of those levels. You have the Chucksters, the watermelons, the sandbird, the hotel puzzle, the dreadful Mecha Bowser fight, Yoshi's Fruit Adventure, the pachinko, the lily pad, and so on. There are so many questionable or outright bad episodes in Sunshine that you're not going to get through a session of it without running into at least one thoroughly unpleasant experience. The worst part about it is that it totally didn't have to be this way: if the game had the structure of Super Mario 64, you could've been able to navigate the minefield in a way that would minimize your exposure to garbage.
If, for some reason, you decide that you do want to get everything in the game, you'll find that Sunshine has been padded to hell and back, trying to fill Super Mario 64's shoes with feet a fraction of the size. A whopping 20% of the game's 120 Shine Sprites are relegated to the collection of 240 blue coins scattered throughout every area in the game. If not outright brainless, they're a hassle to collect (all too frequently placed in esoteric locations), and the lack of a decent tracking system for them makes it a nightmare without a guide. The game also recycles boss fights incredibly frequently. Over the course of the game, you fight a goopy piranha plant five times, Gooper Blooper three times, and chase the aforementioned Shadow Mario eleven times, with the only real difference in each encounter being the location it takes place.
This could all be forgiven to an extent if the core gameplay was solid, and sure enough, moving Mario around is one of the highlights of Sunshine. Unfortunately, this takes a backseat to the elephant in the room. FLUDD sucks. It's a decent enough idea, but it just sucks. It seems like it actually hampers your platforming ability just as much as it improves it. Think about how snappy moving Mario is in 64. How you can just flick the analog stick around and do sidejumps a flip around like it was nothing. Sunshine still lets you do this, but FLUDD seems to run counterpoint to the fluid movement of 3D Mario games, as every platforming function it serves does so in the least satisfying fashion. The hover nozzle has you ascending at a snail's pace and turning awkwardly, with gaps that would've been cleared with a simple double jump or long jump being turned into painfully slow ordeals. You'd think the rocket nozzle would be a good answer to this, but not only do you have to wait for the actual burst of water to charge up, you almost always have to wait a great deal of time to fall back down (as you're all but guaranteed to overshoot your jump by a wide margin), taking any thrill out of shooting up into the sky. The turbo nozzle, however, is admittedly a fun thing to mess around with, making surfaces of water a joy to dart around on. Unfortunately, it's by far the nozzle the game does the least with. Even the FLUDD-less high points of the game are sullied by the 30FPS frame rate and mercurial camera, resulting in a considerable drought of enjoyable platforming, a cardinal sin for a Mario game.
Finally, there's the story. Frankly, the fact that I'm talking about the story of a Mario game at all should be an immediate red flag, here. Sunshine puts more of a focus on the storytelling than any other game in the series, and it's as frustrating as it is bizarre. The game's opening moments are packed with dialogue, which is hilarious considering that the two primary characters never talk in complete sentences. Instead of having Mario or Peach interact with other characters in plain English, FLUDD and Toadsworth (a character seemingly created solely to act as a narrative envoy for the protagonists) do much of the heavy lifting, with the former spouting (holy lord I am so god damn clever) a monologue for a solid minute before having the nerve to do the old "Do you want me to repeat this?" nonsense. It starts the game off on the worst possible foot, and the introduction of Bowser Jr. and his equally uninspired Shadow Mario form doesn't help much, either. Normally, I wouldn't give a shit about any of this one way or another, but the game never once allows you to skip a cutscene, and it gets to be intolerable very quickly.
If there's one thing you can give Super Mario Sunshine credit for, it's ambition. Even if it plays out like a nightmare version of Super Mario 64 a lot of the time, there's still a distinct atmosphere to the it, and FLUDD alone is emblematic of the type of risks Nintendo was willing to take with the series that put them on the map. It's just a shame that none of those risks paid off.
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