In the comments section beneath my weekend feature, someone posted a link to a two-hour long YouTube dissection of everything thats wrong with Super Mario Odyssey. Had I seen this before writing my review, I may have been more scathing. The reviewer counts the number of moons you get from random and routine exercise requiring little to no skill. These include fetch quests, looking over ledges, and sitting on a bench and talking with someone. While some people may find collecting items from one location and, without encountering any challenges on the way, depositing them at another entertaining, it doesnt alter the fact that the majority of the moons in Super Mario Odyssey are rewarded randomly or through routine exercise.
Statistics that prove (shockingly) how repetitive and routine the tasks in Super Mario Odyssey are wont change whether or not you enjoyed the game and nor should they. But it does raise a question of whether by Nintendos own standard this really is good enough and whether something better could not reasonably have been expected.
In my weekend feature, I emphasised how important it is that Nintendo continue to innovate, push the boundaries and surprise us. But can this really be said of Odyssey? There are new ideas and it wears those on its sleeve. But are they good ones? Are they of the standard we have come to expect of Nintendo? Can a game in which the majority of the moons are rewarded by routine exercise really be called a masterpiece? Are these ideas ones that gamers could not themselves have imagined? A reader suggested that Super Mario Galaxy 2 was a cookie cutter sequel. If evaluated in terms of the number and quality of gameplay innovations there is arguably more new content between Galaxy 1 and 2 than between a handful of galaxies from 2 and the entirety of Super Mario Odyssey.
Provocations aside, the point is that if we want Nintendo to continue to innovate, they must be taken to task when they appear – as I have suggested of SupRead More – Source
