Completion Time: 25h:18m:00s
Rating: 5/10

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My First Mario

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Super Mario Sunshine was, in fact, my first Mario game. I’ve mentioned numerous times before, but I grew up with a Sega Genesis and eventually the first PlayStation. It wasn’t until the GameCube that I was introduced to Mario games, and before then my only real exposure to the character himself were from tapes I would rent of the Super Mario Bros. Super Show (though I rented tapes of The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog much more frequently, what can I say?). I encountered Sunshine once as a demo in a supermarket that I barely got a chance to play due to having to rush along to the frozen foods section. Some years later, and well after I had the GameCube and a collection of titles for it, I encountered a cheap copy that I was able to purchase from a man at a Nintendo themed booth in a flea market, using a small allowance I had accumulated from doing small tasks around a studio where my younger sisters were taking dance lessons at the time. Went home, popped it in, and what little I played of it enthralled me, though the difficulty kept me from finishing it as a kid. So, I’ve set out to rectify that.

You're telling me these two plumbers have a video game? Is Cyndi Lauper in it too?

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A Troubled Vacation

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I’m aware of how derisive Super Mario Sunshine tends to be, with hardcores fighting over its quality for a while now. I feel as if there’s been a slight reappraisal on both sides with the recent rerelease as a part of the 3D Mario All-Stars pack, (or whatever the hell that was called), with longtime fans admitting that it isn’t as great as they remembered and huge detractors admitting that they may have been too harsh on the game for what it is. For me, however, I loved it because I was a little kid that liked even the worst of the worst video games that I owned, and again I had no experience of what a Mario game should be prior to this, so I loved what I got to get through. I don’t know if I ever made it past the earliest bits of the game, with manta riding and watermelon rolling being the biggest sore spots for me, but that didn’t keep me from just running around and grooving to the music.

Sure I'll help you roll this giant fruit, I didn't wanna rest on my vacation or anything

And for the purpose of this revisit, the music is probably the best thing this game has going for it. I have a lot more insight as to Mario as a franchise now and have completed or at least played through many the games, and I know what makes Mario work. So, I can finally see how frustrating some of this can be. That isn’t to say that I don’t like the game, I still find it to be fun in parts, but the mechanics and gameplay feel antithetical to what I want specifically from a Mario title. There are segments where Shadow Mario (the antagonist of the game) steals away your water jetpack (the F.L.U.D.D) and forces you into a geometric void, where you have to platform your way around without the use of the game’s core mechanic. And honestly, these were my favorite parts of the gameplay overall. There was an actual challenge here and, aside from the terribly imprecise Chucksters, none of it felt broken or unbalanced. I was reminded of Super Mario Galaxy at times, which was both good and bad in this context. Good because I was enjoying myself, bad because most of the time I was just thinking about how much I liked Super Mario Galaxy instead.

Moments before disaster, since these guys don't bother to AIM

Sunshine takes you across a wide variety of vistas as you explore Isle Delfino, including a beach, an oil rig, a hotel (my favorite area), and even an amusement park (my least favorite area), and all the while it’s throwing interesting mechanics and platforming segments at you that probably were better in concept than practice. Take the aforementioned manta riding, for example. This is something that I also remembered having problems with in Super Mario Galaxy, for recent memory, but at least that had motion controls to explain away its lousiness. Here, I felt like no matter what I did I couldn’t control the rays for the life of me, often having to circle back repeatedly to collect a blue or red coin that I missed. Not fun, especially when you’re focused on completing the game and have resigned yourself to grabbing every blue coin available. Or the infamous sand bird, a bird made of sand blocks that climbs into the sky, forcing you to jump to clouds to collect red coins while avoiding falling from his precarious sides. Plenty frequently I fell off and legitimately couldn’t understand what I had done wrong. Or worse yet, the pachinko machine. There’s a shine sprite (this game’s stars) to get here by running around and collecting red coins inside of the behemoth, but this level is entirely broken. Glitching through platforms and attempting to navigate your water stream from inside a glass case when you can’t tell Mario’s depth from the wall is a near impossibility. This took me way longer than it needed to, and I stood in victory when I had finally succeeded. I guess it has that going for it, though I never want to experience it again.

The slide of shame

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Completing the Game

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Now it’s time to complete the game, but what does that mean? The biggest and most important piece of this would be the Shine Sprites, of course. You only need 50 of these to beat the game, but in true Mario fashion, 120 is the final number of a complete collection of Shine Sprites. How do you get all these Shine Sprites? Most of these can be gathered from the main 7 areas, by doing primary missions, some secondary missions, and gathering 100 coins in each area as well. There are additional small areas you can access through the main world (like the Pachinko machine…) which will also give you these sprites. But that isn’t all, you’ll still find yourself missing some of these collectables. That’s where the secondary item comes in: the dreaded blue coins. These are an obnoxious additional collectible that can be found in each of the areas that litter Isle Delfino, and for every 10 you find, you can exchange them for another Shine Sprite. In total, there are 240 of these things, and they can be well hidden, to a sinister degree. It’s worth just collecting every coin before even exchanging them for easy, on the fly tracking, but this was another downer to come out of this one, and all it really did was slow down my completion journey to a crawl. Get these coins early and often so you don’t have to run around as much in the late game. Once all of this is done and the day is saved, the collecting of the various Shine Sprites will incrementally get you a pair of sunglasses, a Hawaiian shirt, and a different ending credit screen.

Could've used those shades when literally staring into the sun above Delfino Plaza earlier...

Super Mario Sunshine is just as troubled as I’d been hearing in recent years, and it certainly hurt to go back to something I adored as a child only to find out it isn’t all that great. But even still, the thing is: it’s a mainline Mario game from Nintendo. A 3D one at that. The worst it can really be is middling in my eyes, because it has a fun art style, nice designs, great music, and it functions as a game. I may not care much for the gameplay itself, and completing was 100% a hassle at the end of the day, but I don’t hate it. Just removed those rose-colored glasses for the time being.

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 6/652