RetroPiece Theater: Super Mario Galaxy

Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo EAD, 2008)

Kept you waiting, huh? It was April the last time I posted one of these. And it was March when RetroAchievements finally included the Nintendo Wii console as a viable platform for their particular service of rewarding and acknowledging accomplishments in older games, with the Wii itself officially becoming a retro system (as in, at least twenty years old) later next month. Naturally, the first port of call for most of the dedicated RA audience, including our own Shawn McDowell, was checking out the achievement set for the first major Mario game for the console: 2007's Super Mario Galaxy.

Mario Galaxy bucked the formula established by both Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine by forgoing the more open exploration style to instead return to a largely linear stage-based format, in addition to a novel gravity-based platforming approach that was debuted, in a manner, by a memorable boss fight from Yoshi's Island. Each stage is comprised of planets both big and small (though the game confusingly calls these stages galaxies rather than star systems) and most of these planets possess a gravity well of their own, allowing Mario to walk all the way around them in many cases like some colossal, globe-striding Italian. Though a little tough to get one's head around initially, the gravitational mechanics featured were an impressive display of both the system's capabilities and of the Super Mario's team design ingenuity alike. In conjunction with this format was the imaginative utilization of the Wii's innate IR motion controls, used here to help Mario pull himself towards certain targets as well as collect "star bits": an edible material that could be spent on transforming the adorable Luma creatures into new planets and galaxies to visit (or shot at enemies to stun them briefly).

I didn't forget which month it is, so here you go with some true cosmic horror: two Luigis.

Revisiting the game, the awe-inspiring nature of its construction has not diminished a jot in the near two decades since its release. The surfeit of ideas that are executed upon here, which has always been Super Mario's strength as a platformer series as a whole, is nothing short of a masterclass in game design and a feather in the cap of the programmers that had to figure out how to make it all work. Conversely, what I will say is that, in comparison, Mario controls a little worse than he did in the previous two games: his jumps are floatier, with or without the effects of low- or alternating gravity sources, and certain techniques like the 180 flip jump are strangely difficult to pull off. In a sense, these techniques feel vestigial. When Mario 64 released and we all had our first hands-on experience with moving a 3D Mario around there was a feeling of experimentation, that the developers were figuring out what moves they could implement into this engine they'd built, but when it came to the level design precious few of those techniques were strictly necessary for more than a handful of Stars, if any at all. With Sunshine depreciating their value further by instead emphasizing the abilities of new addition F.L.U.D.D., it feels by the time this suite of 3D platforming techniques had passed forward into Mario Galaxy they were largely an afterthought and thus even more inessential to the vision the developers had in mind for the game, only finding retroactive utility for glitch-based sequence-breaking and speedrunning. As such, though I still love what Mario Galaxy does and its prodigious display of level design innovation (along with the orchestral soundtrack with its theremin-heavy sci-fi twist) Mario 64 is the one I'm more likely to want to boot up for a quick session, if only to stretch my (or really Mario's) legs a bit with a nonpareil 3D platformer control scheme.

Just Luigi, skulking around his crush's bedroom. Probably fine.

Even despite that, Super Mario Galaxy remains one of the best games of its genre ever made (along with its sequel) and an easy excuse to finally figure out how to properly emulate a Wii game in Dolphin with the Wii Remote—I'm glad I still had my Wii U set up so I didn't have to fork out for a separate sensor bar peripheral—in order to start earning some of these achievements. And, boy, does it have a lot of them: 160 in the core set with another hundred-plus in its subset. I'll get into that subset later, since I have plenty of words reserved for it, but for now let's wander deep into the weeds about what is involved with earning a Super Mario Galaxy mastery.

RA Challenges

While there are plenty of generic progression achievements, for both Mario and Luigi alike (the latter becoming unlocked as a separate mode after procuring all 120 stars with the former), almost every stage has its own unique challenge achievement. These range from time trials to no-damage runs to keeping a power-up suit active the whole time to collecting a large number of star bits along the way to other miscellaneous goals more specific to their stages, like completing an underwater stage without ever coming up for air or defeating a boss using the minimal amount of firepower (at least in the case of the Kamella or Bowser Jr. fights where you toss green shells at them).

I've listed some of the trickiest of these challenge achievements below in ascending order, to give you some idea of what you might be in for if you attempt to master this set yourself:

Controlling the Conjured Shells: "Defeat Kamella in "The Underground Ghost Ship" in Deep Dark Galaxy without throwing more than two shells."

I sort of love achievements like this where there's a riddle that needs solving. Kamella is the female magikoopa that you end up fighting twice in Super Mario Galaxy, and each time she fires both red and green spells at Mario: the red ones produce fireballs you have to avoid while the green ones produce green shells that need to be thrown back at her to do damage. However, she needs three of these to be defeated, and the achievement only calls for two.

The trick, since I can't use spoiler tags here any more, is that after she gets hit once she starts hovering around inside the arena instead of floating outside it. When this happens, you can just jump into her while holding a shell to inflict damage (and take damage yourself) and it technically doesn't count as throwing it. Sneaky stuff.

Money Machine: "Complete "Gizmos, Gears, and Gadgets" in Rolling Gizmo Galaxy with at least 100 coins."

The Rolling Gizmo Galaxy is one of those where you're balancing on a ball and have to roll it around by tilting the Wii Remote from a vertical position. This stage has tons of coins but they mostly involve smushing goombas and navigating the more perilous narrow paths snaking through the level, sometimes even jumping across gaps which always makes my heart skip a beat. I sort of love these levels for as stressful as they can be, since the gimmick is used sparingly (I think this game only has the two) and they have this fun synchronization aspect with the music, as notes play slower the more cautious you are when moving. Almost like it's calling you out for how chickenshit you're being with all this gentle rolling around.

I realized far later that I could've picked up every coin here beyond the 100 needed for this achievement (there's 123 total) and saved myself a return trip for the all-coins subset.

Fungal Five: "Collect all five 1-Up mushrooms on the Comet Observatory in a single use of the flying transformation."

Though there's literally zero dangers involved with this, it requires both a level of mastery over an underused power-up and a keen sense of pathfinding to pull off. The Comet Observatory is the hub area, where if you fall off you'll just get quietly moved back onto solid ground no harm done, and there's 5 1-Ups hovering around the place: one's in a box in the helipad area next to Captain Toad and his crew, one's underneath the entrance to the Kitchen levels, one's on the rotating platforms underneath the stage, and the other two are high up. Since the flight power-up only lasts about a minute here (as opposed to the minute and change you got in Super Mario 64) it's tighter than it first seems. One benefit is that, even if you fail, you'll always have more 1-Ups than when you started (and there's a few other of these 1-Up collection achievements where that applies too).

Legendary Surfer: "Complete "The Galaxy's Greatest Wave" in Loopdeeswoop Galaxy in under 1 minute."

I never cared for the manta ray surfing here or back in Sunshine but the motion controls aren't quite as deleterious as I was dreading. You do have to be accelerating pretty much the entire duration if you're going to hit that goal time though and many turns get hairy without some preparatory banking. What tended to throw me off, both figuratively and literally off the level, were the sections where you'd drop and then rise again where the river gets steep (I'm not quite sure how that works, physics-wise, but the universe is a strange place) which also obfuscated any turns coming up on the track.

Sometimes it feels less like I'm tilting the Wii Remote towards the TV and more like I'm tilting at windmills.

Loopdeeswoop Galaxy is the special trial version of this race rather than the easier variant you can play much earlier on, though that one also has a similar time trial achievement. At least the all-coins challenges for these two are easy enough, since the game uses rows of them to highlight upcoming turns when they're less obvious.

The Unseen Halls: "Complete "Matter Splatter Mansion" in Ghostly Galaxy in under 1 minute."

If the name doesn't ring a bell, the Matter Splatter Mansion (ew) is the one where there's moving patches of reality on the ground that you have to jump between before they disappear and drop you in the void. It's a neat if slightly eerie effect that many later Marios would also employ for ghost house type levels (one could argue you have something similar in Super Mario World too).

Big hurdle here is a massive long jump between two circles near the start of this run that you need to make to save enough time but it's near impossible to do as Mario, so I actually had to come back with Luigi (and his superior air time) to reach the end quickly enough. There's a few of these challenges, particularly the speedrun ones with a lot of dramatic long jumps to cut corners, that are easier as the little brother so a recurring bit of advice I've seen in the comments of these achievements is to wait until he's available.

Lung Capacity: "Defeat Kingfin without taking a breath."

This is the underwater boss fight with a giant undead shark. SMG doesn't go the horror route often, and when it does it's the Boos and their mischief, but the low light and underwater conditions probably triggered a lot of thalassophobia even if the surface is within easy reach for the whole fight (not that it's useful for this achievement though). The biggest issue here really is grappling with the game's underwater controls and camera. You have to be on point to defeat the boss in a single lungful of air, given he takes five hits rather than the usual three or four and is spitting adds at you the entire time which will gallantly jump in front of your green shells to protect their master, but it gets easier once you memorize the path to where the more accurate red shell spawns.

A different underwater level but just as annoying, since I have to figure out how to kill all 17 underwater Boos and grab their coins before they vanish. My kingdom for a new edition of Sega Boos Fishing.

Fun fact! This is a terrible one to do as Luigi since he loses a big chunk of his oxygen meter every time he spins underwater (which you want to do to speed up and grab nearby shells from further away).

Graduate Level Turtle-Toppling: "Defeat Bowser in Bowser's Galaxy Reactor in under 2 minutes and 15 seconds without taking any damage."

This would be the final boss, and the only achievement that's both a no-damage run and a time trial simultaneously because RA set contributors just do be like that sometimes. It's not easy, it probably goes without saying, in part because this is a three-phase fight and you can't afford to screw up an opportunity to strike because it'll eat too much into your precious time to wait around for another fireball/stomp cycle to conclude.

All that said, the boss fights in this game ain't exactly Elden Ring level and Bowser in particular has the same pattern in every one of his duels give or take, so as long as you don't get pelted by an errant fireball during his last phase (he gets real pissed by that point and so would anyone whose achievement attempt gets voided right there at the finish line) it's very doable. Fortunately, you don't need to have completed the rest of the level beforehand in the same manner: this achievement tracker only starts ticking down once the fight begins. As someone who doesn't particularly care for any of the Mario Galaxy boss fights, I will say that having these extra challenges attached to them usually makes them a little more compelling. Just not the no-damage types.

The Master Maker: "Complete "Luigi's Purple Coins" in Toy Time Galaxy with all 150 purple coins."

Anyone who knows what stage this refers to reflexively shivered in dread. The purple coin challenges show up after defeating the final boss once and act as a tough post-game leg to Mario's journey, with the standard requirement of having to locate 100 of these purple coins in the stages they're involved with. Some of these stages give you far more coins to find but also a strict limit to how long you're allowed to take: the most notorious being the one where you collect the coins across a giant 8-bit Luigi in three minutes. The issue here is that every green "pixel" of Luigi is a square that disappears after you touch it and every yellow pixel is a block that starts twisting in place after stepping on it which makes it awkward to use again, unless you time it right.

Getting 100 coins here is enough of a challenge, prioritizing those that can be earned quickly in batches while choosing a route that doesn't double back on itself given that there's little left you could stand on once you've passed through a section once, but grabbing all 150 requires near perfect planning in addition to perfect execution if you're going to complete the full circuit in the time provided. There's also a challenge for getting 100 coins (and the star, once it appears) within two minutes rather than the three allotted, but for as tough as that might be it's more like a victory lap after the above.

RA Discoveries

Not too many discoveries that weren't obvious enough in a casual run but I did appreciate little Easter eggs like a hidden rupee made out of star bits in one of the ball-rolling levels or that the first of the Hungry Luma galaxies available from the hub can be flown to with the late-game Flying Mario power-up, in addition to the far more convenient launch star.

This is very cute, and Zelda would of course go on to return the favor with a sequel that has even worse motion controls implementation (Skyward Sword).

Plenty more secret tech can be discovered in the all-coins runs though, as well as a surprising amount of glitch exploitation...

The All-Coins Subset

The all-coins achievements make the challenges in the standard set feel like Babytown Frolics in comparison. These things can be absolutely monstrous, largely based on the fact that the game never intended you to get even half of the coins in any given level: outside of the purple coin challenges there's no benefit to collecting the standard golden variety other than the health recovery effects they bestow and a 1-Up for every 50 found. They're meant to be a little awkward to find largely so you can be pleasantly surprised that you managed to pull yourself back from the brink with a bit of good fortune when one drops unexpectedly.

While it is strictly possible to collect every coin in every stage (barring a few exceptions where there are no coins at all, such as the one-hit-kill Daredevil Comet challenges) in several cases you'd need to exploit some known glitches to reach them, largely around wonky gravitational fields where you leap out into the unknown and somehow lock onto a planet on the opposite side of the stage. This is often because the coins that exist in routes that lead to some stars are still extant in others, so you have to find some off-piste means of reaching them since the usual launch stars won't be active.

In other cases, you might need to pull off some incredibly precise jumps and tech that are almost TAS level, such as destroying cannonballs with star bits and grabbing the coins in the brief moment before they fall off the stage and disappear. Even in the cases where glitches and risky jumps aren't required, it'll still mean exploring every nook and cranny without ever dying once since that'll reset your coin total and will likely drop you off at a checkpoint, often making it impossible to return to earlier areas for the coins left back there. Suffice it to say, you also can't kill enemies by using the spin, since that typically turns them into star bits instead of coins: accidentally clocking one of those cockroaches or a piranha plant with a mis-timed spin (usually as a means of increasing the height of your jump to get high enough to land on them) is a frequent source of failure and frustration.

The subset is comprised of many 5- and 10-point achievements, which are straightforward but still require some careful investigation and platforming to find everything without dying in the process, but then you have the 25-pointers which might involve harder coin retrievals—like the 80 you can temporarily summon in Freezeflame Galaxy in the starting ice pool area or the multi coin blocks which require near-perfect jump timing to extract all ten of their coins—but usually requires either glitches or risky strategies. Then there's the 50- and 100-point achievements which will almost certainly demand both. I eventually conquered the Mario 64 coin challenges with enough patience but I'm completely out of my depth here: it's going to take a SimpleFlips or GrandPooBear to earn even half of these and at some point you just have to sit back and acknowledge your limitations, even with a series as genially approachable as the Super Mario games. At least the 10-pointers and some of the kinder 25-pointers have made for compelling challenges.

Another good reason to use Luigi for most of these all-coin challenges is that he gets this massive extra lives buffer whenever he starts a new session. I'll burn through these pretty quick.

At the very least that core achievement set is entirely possible (and I'm pretty much there; the only things I have left are Luigi progression achievements as I collect all 120 stars again with the Green Goober). I'll point to one of the videos the RA community made to demonstrate the sort of skill level (and brass balls) you'd need to conquer that subset, and I don't doubt it'll intimidate you as much as it did me. (The cannonball coins were bad enough but the part with the three spiders made my blood run cold.)