Drought: The Bad of Super Mario Sunshine

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

A couple of weeks ago, I discussed the burrowing camera and liberating spurting in Super Mario Sunshine, the GameCube's pride and joy. This week, we turn our minds to darker matters as we stare into the bad and ugly of this platformer, and decide once and for all, should Shigeru Miyamoto be executed? You are about to have the vacation from hell.

Progression

If you figured out how to unlock all of Isle Delfino's nooks and crannies without a guide, you're better at this than me. Now you write the blog. Until you get the next entry done, I'll fill in and say that SMS's requirements for progression are obtuse in that:

1. If a level requires Shine Sprites to unlock, the game won't tell you how many Sprites it takes.
2. In the couple of instances where a level requires something other than collecting suns to unbolt, the game doesn't tell you what that something other is.

The implications of point one are simple: you can't feel like you're closing in on a goal unless you know what the goal is. In Sunshine and most of Mario 64, you keep collecting Stars/Shine Sprites with no yardstick for the progress you're making, because you're rarely aware of the price of entry to the next stage. But maybe it's a nice surprise when new areas spontaneously unlock.

Where Sunshine definitely shouldn't leave players in the dark is when they're trying to cut the ribbons on Sirena Beach and Corona Mountain. Corona Mountain is where we finally face off against Bowser. If we can't touch Isle Delfino's crown, we can't beat the game. To pass through the mountain's main gate, we need to complete the seventh episode of each of the seven other worlds: Bianco Hills, Ricco Harbor, Gelato Beach, Pinna Park, Sirena Beach, Noki Bay, and Pianta Village. Nowhere does the game inform you of that requirement, and most other levels in this game, and 64, require obtaining enough Stars or Shines to win access to them. You may wrongly, but understandably, think you need to do the same for Corona Mountain.

The likely scenario for the Super Mario Sunshine player is that after popping the cork on Pianta Village, they keep pocketing Shine Sprites, waiting for them to unseal another level, but getting nowhere. If you only care about completing the game and not the Shines in themselves, Blue Coin Shines, 100 Coin Shines, and Secret Shines are all also useless, but you'd never know it. This is because, beating the seventh episode of every level, you'll end up collecting 30 Shines anyway. 30 Shines is the amount you need to unlock every stage that can be accessed with Shines.

Today, you can just Google the method to enter Corona Mountain, but back in 2002, not everyone could. Even now, it's perfectly normal to feel that searching it up is cheating and to avoid doing so. If you ended up in either of those boats, you'd fall through the wall into Corona Mountain by coincidence without any idea how you got there. There's then a sub-problem of the Corona Mountain problem where we can't taste its boiling lava until we've completed, among other missions, episode seven of Sirena Beach. However, there's no stepping foot on those golden sands until you've beaten episode four of Pinna Park. Again, this is a goal that's invisible to the player. It's not like there's a narrative reason completing The Wilted Sunflowers would open up Sirena.

The need to conquer the seventh episode of each world leaves the game more linear than its hub world would initially suggest, or than you'd expect given the openness of Mario 64. In 64, you could trade off playing some of one world for collecting Stars in another and still reach the final boss fight. As long as you had 70 Stars, they'd part the waves for the bout against Bowser; it didn't matter where your pointy friends came from. 64 facilitated the custom play that we now see all over AAA gaming. By comparison, the majority of episodes in Sunshine are compulsory, with the rare chance to skip missions by obtaining red coins before you get to the red coin episode for that level. It's a model that's restrictive of player freedom. Keeping the player on a short leash can be the right approach if it leads to a more streamlined, narratively piercing, or well-paced experience, but it serves no perceptible purpose in Mario Sunshine.

Blue Coin Exclusivity

Infamously, every blue coin in Super Mario Sunshine is exclusive to one episode of one zone. Take the blue coin that appears on top of the crane cab in episode one of Ricco Harbor. If you returned to that spot during any other episode, the coin would be gone. Nintendo arbitrarily withholds these acorns from you, even when you've displayed that you have the skill to climb to the branches where they hang. Plus, scouring the canopy for all these collectables requires combing the same stages at least eight times in a row instead of just once because each world has eight episodes. The coloured bananas in Donkey Kong 64 had a similar defect; you could be right on top of them but unable to grab them because you hadn't selected the right ape.

It's not that searching for blue coins sucks across the board. I told you a couple of weeks ago that it can be fun to pick your target tokens and jump, kick, and hover your way to fortune. What's happened here is that the hunt for the currency starts off leisurely and pleasurable when it hovers all around you like pollen in the air. However, after some time, the obvious coins disappear, and if you want all 120 Shine Sprites in your trophy case, you're left looking for the needles in these haystacks.

Annoying Episodes

The two Mario Sunshine stages that have drawn the scorchingest criticism are the Lily Pad Ride and Secret of the Village Underside. Lily Pad Ride (this level doesn't have an official name) has you floating down a river on a circular platform, forced to jump and collect eight red coins as you go, only able to control the direction of your leaf by using FLUDD's Squirt Nozzle as a thruster. If you miss a coin, it's right back to the start. This is Downhill Jam from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, except your board's movement lags long behind your spraying, and jumping for the coins while trying to land back on the pad gives me a heart attack.

Secret of the Village Underside contains a subworld in which we ask enthusiastic "Chucksters" to hurl Mario from platform to platform. The direction in which they throw us depends on how we're positioned relative to them when we talk to them. Yet, the "correct" positioning for each fling is so micron-precise that it feels like you're a speed runner trying to manipulate an invisible number under the hood.

Chasing these two Sprites bites, but they are only two out of 120, and I could live with it if the other 118 were favourable. Yet, it's well-known that all Sunshine's sub-levels embitter vacationers. An acapella version of the Super Mario Bros. theme plays in these surrealist toy chests. It makes them sound adorably innocent, but their level design means seeing the word "Secret" in the title of an episode has come to strike fear into my heart. Most of these secret dimensions steal FLUDD from us, and it's so clear that the game's parkour is meant to be performed with that apparatus on our back.

Mario often jumps wide of where you need him to land, and the point of FLUDD's Hover Nozzle is to course correct. These obstacle courses call out for an ability that can rectify inaccuracies because if we fall off them, we often don't just hit a lower platform, we plunge into a bottomless pit. They also have that Mario 3D World obtuseness where the camera is often too distant or at the wrong angle for you to see how Mario lines up with the next platform he's got to jump to.

For a more subtly mismanaged warp zone than Lily Pad Ride or Village Underside, look to The Hotel Lobby's Secret. In this course, we have to cross a bridge of sand blocks that disintegrate soon after we step on them. The bridge includes a nasty ninety-degree turn. There's a gap soon after that turn. The bridge is one of a number of areas where we have to rotate Mario while he's running, but the most opportune camera placement is behind the plumber's back, so we want to rotate the camera at the same time as Mario. Because the control stick only moves Mario relative to the direction of the camera, as you push Mario forward, where exactly "forward" is keeps changing. Dealing with that directional drift while also trying to make the jump over the gap in the bridge is disorienting. You might want to take this concourse slowly for that reason, but you can't when you're walking on hourglasses.

On the other side of the bridge, there are some giant steps. RIP John Coltrane, you would have loved Super Mario Sunshine. The steps appear to be a breather between two technical challenges. They're not. Sometimes, when Mario falls from one platform onto another, he will land and stand stationary, and sometimes he'll bounce off that lower surface with a forward motion. These steps demonstrate the fault with those rubbery physics: occasionally, you can drop onto a step only to ricochet off it into oblivion. I have beaten SMS multiple times and could not tell you what makes Mario bounce when he lands and what makes him stand still. After the stairs, you have to ride on a rotating cog until you reach a pyramid, naturally. Because of the gear's rotation, its flat sides soon become ramps that will dump you to a quick death if you don't move to the next face quickly. It's not a stupid idea for a platforming challenge, but how can a new player tell how far a flat surface can tilt before it becomes a slide?

There are ten mandatory sub-worlds, although you might end up playing more if you don't realise that those off Delfino Plaza are non-compulsory, and even criticism of the sub-worlds can't speak to all the chips in Mario Sunshine's levels; nicks also appear in larger stages. There are environments like Ricco Harbor and Noki Bay where it's too easy to tumble off the level into the water or onto the ground and have to laboriously climb back up. Sometimes, you're wall jumping between two surfaces, but you're slowly and subtly moving across the X or Y axis as you do. You'll eventually fly past one of the walls and off the level. Some objectives require us to pick up items like fruit, but Mario's grabbing range is pretty short, so you can often go to heave something over your shoulder and have him freeze up because he's not close enough to it. You can also quickly arrive at some mass you want to lift and end up diving into it because it's B to grab, but forward and B to dive. This is a liability when we may have a time limit to pick up and score objects, so we'll want to run up to them.

But these are issues that blanket multiple areas. As with The Hotel Lobby's Secret, it can be the case that when an episode has a disease, it doesn't escape the quarantine of that one mission. That means we can't succinctly explain all the level design weaknesses; we have to go one by one. The Runaway Ferris Wheel has us scaling a climbing frame behind a brick wall in Pinna Park. Some wire panels in that frame, we have to spray with water to push, but there's no signalling to indicate that the panels respond to being sprayed. Additionally, the camera keeps getting trapped between the wall and Mario. Roller Coaster Balloons is another problem level in the amusement park. The constant movement of the ride, combined with your limited turning ability, makes it like trying to shoot flies from a bucking bronco.

The Secret of Casino Delfino is annoying before you even get to the secret. You have this board of revolving tiles, and you must shoot them with your Squirt Nozzle to flip them all over to their reverse sides. However, when a tile gets wet, it starts freaking out and spinning around wildly, so you have little control over which face it will land on when you douse it. When you have two adjacent tiles and one is on its obverse, and the other the reverse, you often can't flip panel A without flipping panel B because FLUDD isn't a laser pointer; it's a flashlight. Below the casino, there's a fight with King Boo that's full of giddy character, but to burn him, you need to win chillis from a slot machine, so chance plays a big part in your success.

Indigenous to Gelato Beach are Cataquacks that throw you into the air if you encroach on their territory. You can get the ol' heave-ho from one only to fall onto another who'll also flip you skyward, and then another that'll do the same. The first time it happens, it's funny, but soon, it gets irritating. And if you thought the underwater levels were too floaty in other Marios, the subaquatic episodes in Noki Bay are like trying to fire FLUDD in outer space. And well, I can't point out all the errors in the design and still finish this blog.

Back in 1996, 120 Stars were waiting to be plucked from Mario 64's castle, and the design of every 64 course was fine to fantastic. You'd think that with Sunshine having the same Shine count and being released six years later, it would have a similar or superior consistency of quality, but game dev is never that stable. It may be that Mario Sunshine ran into the same thicket that Arcade Paradise and Yooka-Laylee did. Those games tried to chase too many features and ended up with many half-developed mechanics instead of a few durable ones.

___

This looks bad, huh? I feel like I've gone "Want to see my favourite game?" and then pulled open a drawer of loose animal organs. There are three reasons our childhood favourites don't always stand up well to interrogation in the present. Firstly, we were younger and less discerning when we played them. Secondly, even adults' standards for games are always getting higher. But thirdly and less obviously, when we were kids, there were fewer games around, and we counted our disposable income in pounds or dollars. To make the most of what we had, we played with the same toys until we knew them inside and out.

We learned all the loopholes to bypass the annoying bits, trained enough to run unfair gauntlets with ease, and built up a buffer of lives that meant falling off a level several times was no big deal. Honestly, I think there's a lot of the same logic in the teen me enjoying SMS that there is in the average Soulslike enjoyer overlooking the frustrations in those nightmares. I guess there's a lot of interactive media that gets better with practice and resource accumulation. Whether you can tolerate those media long enough to get that practice in is another matter. Thanks for reading.