Beaten with 120 shine sprites. I've played through Super Mario Sunshine a few times in the past, but I was surprised how challenging this second 3D Mario platformer was. The quirky addition to the gameplay with the FLUDD water-shooting mechanic serves to mix things up nicely, though it's easy to become over-reliant on the hover ability that this provides and I do miss the long jump from Super Mario 64. Sadly I played before the announcement of the patch to add inverted camera controls, which didn't help with the playability! I also prefer to see more variety to the game environments, but I can see that the exploration of the tropical theme serves to add cohesiveness to the game as a whole.

Mario squirts everywhere and shouts wahoo, just like me.

This game was definitely rushed, but I honestly prefer the open-world gameplay to the more linear Galaxy and 3D-World. Additionally it feels just the right amount of hard, not as janky as 64 but still challenging.

Comparing the port to the original: Yeah, it could probably be 60fps, but it doesn't need to be. The HD textures and greater view-distance look amazing all by themselves, to be honest.

This is a tricky game to rate. Sunshine has a lot of things working in its favor: the island theming, the music, and the delightfully colorful visuals. Unfortunately, these strengths are often overshadowed by game design that is well below Nintendo's usual standards.

Repetitive missions, janky controls, and some odd QOL decisions (like kicking you all the way out of certain levels after dying) make for an often times frustrating experience.

I finished the minimum requirements to make it to the credits (avoiding some of the game's most notoriously despised missions). I did really enjoy the game at times, but there were other times when I considered abandoning it.

It will likely never happen, but I'd love to see a Sunshine sequel with the polish of Galaxy or Odyssey.

Part of Mario 3D All Stars

Completed main story w/ 67 shines in approx. 18 hours

Good setting, fluid movement, and some stupidly cryptic puzzles. Very meh final boss. Definitely needed more fine tuning but nonetheless a solid game.

Played a ton as a kid, finally beat the game for the first time as an adult.

The last couple times I tried to play this in the last few years I got frustrated and gave up, but this time I had a pretty good time.

+Vibes/beach vacation aesthetic/music are all immaculate, some of the best no doubt. Taking Mario to this kind of setting was a bold choice, and one that I think paid off in terms of the sheer visual diversity both within itself and against the Mario series at large. Delfino Plaza is a five-star hub.

+Fludd is a fun addition too because it works with Mario's platforming instead of replacing it entirely.

+I will also say that the game has a momentum to it. I beat it in 2-3 days representing 10-12 hours of gameplay.

But for all of that, it's also very clearly deeply flawed and may have aged worse than 64.

-Punishments for failing levels/getting game overs I would refer to as "somewhat cruel." If you get a game over, you're booted to the start of the hub world. If you lose your footing on an obstacle course where the goal is to climb, you go all the way back to the bottom of the level. If you lose a single life outside of the secret levels, you get booted to outside its entrance in Delfino.

This game has a weird penchant for feeling the player needs to waste 2 minutes reattempting a challenge as punishment for either losing a life or attempting to solve an open world puzzle in a way that's not exactly the game's preferred way of doing so.

I also found some of the required challenges needlessly hard (or at least bullshitty) for a game with as many camera freakouts as I experienced (not to mention a few collision detection issues). I have no idea how kids beat some of these levels without employing 3D Mario acrobatic tricks.

I don't think I'd actually mind the difficulty so much if Sunshine wasn't so needlessly punishing. The level design is excellent and I love a platformer with some bite. Mario also feels really good to control even despite some aforementioned issues. But when an otherwise excellent game so frequently decides to waste my time for deaths that don't always feel like my fault per se, it's hard to summon anything more than a soft, well-asterisked recommendation.

It's finally time for Mario to face his biggest enemy yet; not Bowser, not Bowser Jr., not the camera, not even the slopes... but the legal system.

Super Mario Sunshine is weird, yeah I know, what a daring statement, but I’m not referring about its presentation and ambience, I’m talking about how it manages to be an amazing and incredibly fun platformer that I would even go as far to say that holds in store some of the best parts in any 3D Mario period… and an absolute mess of a game with glaring flaws in both pacing and design that make it at various points flat out infuriating, frustrating and tedious. I’m baffled at how they screw up in some areas, ‘cause I really cannot stress enough how much of a home run is the good stuff in here.

Delfino Island and its locales amount to what it’s perhaps the best assortment of levels out of any Mario game, at least thematically that is. Peach’s Castle in 64 was a pretty good main hub, and the rest of the series followed suite and they all have fantastic central areas that hold up very well in their own regards (except Odyssey I guess, mainly ‘cause it really doesn’t have one), but none of them hold the candle to Delfino Plaza; not only it’s a fantastic starting point full of secrets and side-quests and a playground to experiment with the mechanics and F.L.U.D.D. as well as very neat introduction to the whole concept of shines and how the isle operates, but it also feels like central area, one where, even if you still have to use paintings and pipes to get to the levels, everything feels interconnected naturally. Being able to see other places from certain levels or the Delfino Plaza itself helps a lot on this regard, but what sells it all it’s how every place works together to form a strong thematic feeling; Mario games aren’t really that into having a particular theme, the only other exception maybe being Galaxy with its space setting, but Sunshine is just on a whole another world: the playful and whimsical nature of Pinna Park, the striking sunset and seemingly endless hotel rooms of Sirena Beach, the ancient and massive looks of Noki Bay… The concept of platforming across the different places in a tropical island was already good, but Sunshine uses this idea and takes it to its fullest potential. With the exception of maybe Pianta Village which fills a tad artificial and purely focused on the platforming challenges, every single one of the main areas are real places in which the inhabitants live or the tourists go visit or have fun, and it just so happens that they are fantastic places do some platforming; of course I’m not saying that there aren’t parts that don’t feel gamified, in fact there are a lot of subareas that are completely obstacle-course focused (we will get to those later), but in the moment to moment gameplay this immersion is only matched by a few other platformers, it’s creativeness it’s only paralleled by the joy-filled sounds and soundtrack, how well these places are designed and how fun it is to traverse them… ‘cause yeah I actually adore the movement and platforming in this game AND I SHALL DIE ON THIS HILL.

It's honestly shocking how despite limiting Mario’s base movement compared to the last entry and putting a focus on vertical movement, Super Mario Sunshine lends itself to be a joy to control using all the capabilities at your disposal to the maximum and being a ton of fun… or at least 50% of the game does… again, we will get to that later. F.L.U.D.D is obviously the star of the show; it’s completely unexpected and bonkers to focus the sequel to motherfucking Super Mario 64 on water and how to use it as a movement tool, but despite only being able to do a handful of things, this water tank trumpet looking-ass is a game changer. The squirt nozzle is a great way to expand of combat and making boss fights WAYYYYYYYYYY more interesting than they ever were, but it’s with the hover nozzle that the game goes insane; hovering in itself is a super cool ability, but in this game not only is mandatory to use it for certain sections, not only it is highly convenient and a life saver in multiple instances, it is what gives you the chance to break entire missions in half, having this tool makes you think outside the box and a ton of the fun of the game comes exactly from that. The missions themselves are also mostly fun (emphasis on mostly), some offer really cool platforming challenges as I said, but a ton of the levels do actual story progression within each of them, having small narratives that advance as you complete chapters and gain shines; it’s a really compelling way both gameplay and story wise to make me just keep playing chapters aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand Shadow Mario stole F.L.U.D.D. … Uh-oh.

Yeah… the fludless levels are by far the most disliked part of the game by many, and while I do think there are some fun levels of this kind here and there… yeah no more often than not they are highly frustrating. It’s really strange to me that the developers decided for this to be such an important and mandatory part of the game considering how every single part of the experience is designed around having F.L.U.D.D., which includes the moments you don’t have the goddam thing. A lot of people say that it feels like Mario’s shoes are slippery or on soap, but I think that’s not exactly the problem: again, I think Mario itself controls pretty well, it’s move set is focused on verticality yeah, but by itself there’s not much problem with it… until you can’t hover, and that’s when you realize the physics on this game are atrocious. I swear whoever designed these sub-areas must have had a terrible day, not only there are some almost mean design aspects that make them overly difficult, but if Mario as much as touches a slope, that plumber is already dead. And ignoring the almost comical aspect of Mario letting himself be stolen by Bowser Jr. MULTIPLE times, it’s terrible how some of these sub-areas connect to the main mission; some do it fine enough, but in other’s you’ll be doing a totally normal and actually fun mission to then be immediately teleported to one of these with no reason at all and suffer! Isn’t that fun?!. All of them having the exact same song and visually similar doesn’t help in the slightest, and it juts results and a bunch of stuff that you really don’t want to do… and that’s something that not only affects these obstacle-courses.

Look, Sunshine isn’t the hardest game out there, and despite me not being the most skilled player out there, I actually didn’t find parts of it as other people said they would, hell, some stuff like the sand bird or the watermelon mission I managed to do them just fine! The problem with this game isn’t that its consistently hard, more.so that is consistently annoying. Even some of the missions that I’ve been praising can be a slog, they are just not fun and repetitive, and death meaning being booted back out and having to start from the very beginning is actually evil and an huge waste of time, considering how entering a levels takes a lot more than it did in 64. It’s made even more frustrating ‘cause you’ll be presented with a very cool and original level where you have to clean a huge eel’s teeth and is super fun and challenging, only to have to do one where you have to be thrown by Piantas with 0 aiming skills or having to traverse and overly long, boring and confusing maze; there’s no middle ground, the missions are either 10 out of 10 or a torture beyond human comprehension, and a lot would be remedied if the game just was more friendly in communicating what the hell you need to do; sometimes is clear as water, others, the way to progress is at the exact opposite plaxe from where the start of the level is (fuck you too Pianta Village!).

Progression is also kinda weird; the story is weirdly fast pace, with basically no spoken dialogue or cinematics after a certain boss fight and they disappear until the ending, and the way you obtain the nozzles and Yoshi is also really weird, the nozzles are fine I guess, but it’s weird that you only really unlock them for the main hub (and I believe they would work far better as permanent upgrades) , and that they are also pretty imbalanced, the rocket is WAYYYYY more useful than the other one that I only used like two times and don’t even remember the name. Yoshi is also kinda bizarre since you need to beat a specific mission for it you unlocked, but hey, it doesn’t really matter, after all, all 7 first chapters of every single level and mandatory, so it really that big of a deal!... Wait a second WHAT.

Look, I’m fine with tying the progression with the defeats of Shadow Mario instead with the Shines themselves, that idea at a base level isn’t bad, what IS bad is that because how it is made, shines serve absolutely no purpose unless you want to get 100% completion, which actively makes the already kinda frustrating coin and blue coin MULTIPLE shines even more pointless AND this teensy-little fact is NEVER told by the game EVER. WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS SUNSHINE, I WANT TO LOVE YOU SO BADLY.

Super Mario Sunshine it’s beyond flawed, and its missteps only become more and more apparent as the game goes on… but still, I have gained a huge fondness for it; at times it’s a fantastic experience, and I value it both for what it s and what it is not: it is a fantastic game with some of the best platforming in the series and incredible sense of style, and it is not just a sequel to Super Mario 64, it’s its own thing that would go on to define modern Mario and a lot of the design choices, like the pan out of the level and showing the objective and the more developed boss fights that , would go on to inspire future 3D Marios, and in that alone it has value, and plus, it’s still a damn good game. I think I’ll ponder over this one for a bit, but as of now I now clearly but even with flaws, it’s worth playing it and discover the surprises it has in store.

And now, officially, summer begins…