Restart Button: Super Mario Sunshine

 Restart Button is another ongoing segment where I take about games that somehow fascinated me to play them for a second time in order to devise an improved comprehension of their underlying structure. In this particular critical analysis, I usually expect from my readers that they either have played the game before or at least retain a clear understanding about the content of the game.

It shouldn’t come out as a surprise that Super Mario Sunshine was appropriately packaged as one of the hottest released games seven years ago. The tropical panorama, the crystalline waters, the exotic sceneries, and the short-sleeved garments sported by Mario, Peach, and her entourage of incompetent Toads implied that summer was the idealist season for a platforming getaway. Unfortunately, what was supposed to be a relaxing vacation soon turned into a laborious community service. Its highest priority: to cleanse the paradisiacal Isle Delfino from the slippery sludge that was smeared on all of its touristy locales. Geared with a gizmo of hydropower and wisdom, Mario’s first, third-dimensional journey outside the typical Mushroom Kingdom was certainly the most ambitious.

Though, when it is betted between the original 64 and the recent Galaxy, Sunshine somehow alludes itself as the middle book of a trilogy; it depends very much on what came before and even more so on the promise of what is to come. It dangles uneasily on its own, and when you have an influential game such as Super Mario 64 as your predecessor, the expectations alone will not be merciful. It’s no wonder that Galaxy had to omit almost all the rules established by the original 64-bit adventure to stand on its own, and to repel itself from the notional standard criticisms. For Sunshine to be deemed as the lesser 3D Mario is possibly explicable, but to rashly designate it as the most horrid entry might insinuate austerity. Perhaps, Sunshine was far too bright for many gamers to appreciate its polished luster, and the risk of outfitting the mustachioed hero with a talkative water-pump. Either that or the census remains truthful, and the splotch harming Sunshine’s foundation was rather too tenacious to be washed away by a new gimmick. Yet, seeing that we will not be getting a new 3D Mario game this year and the fact Galaxy 2 is promising to adhere to the sequel’s mindset with the same cosmic scene, it seems Sunshine lends itself another playthrough now more than it ever did.

The Accidental Tourist

The most perceptive element of Sunshine lies in its homogenous, thematic design. The conventional expectation of a snow, lava, and sky stages is diminished in favor of traversing a gaudy resort, brimmed with charming, crayons-daubed landscapes and chubby Pianta natives that jiggle, hula, and muffle when spoken. Beaches and strewn of palm trees are omnipresent through most of Sunshine’s maps, and the complementary, calypso beat never exhausts in cadency, originating both fresh scores and varied remixes of classic Mario tunes. The smell, sound, and feel of a foreign retreat never escape the scene a moment, and here, situates Sunshine’s foremost criticism: its consistency. After all, Mario games are pretty known for their idiosyncratic composition and claustrophobic variety of level design. It’s quite hard to detach traditional gamers from the laws that the series has created for itself and its genre. Nintendo shoot itself on the foot in Sunshine but promptly stitched its wounds with Galaxy. While the celestial imagery suggests an all-new formula, the ingredients are still prevalent; the conservative structures of snow, flame, and aquatic levels –among many others– not only are available but also evident couple of times in the Wii chapter.

Nonetheless, it’s still quite absurd to accuse Sunshine of the overused “poor level-design” reproof for solely adapting a fixed aesthetic. As a matter of fact, it’s remarkable how a Mario game structured around a tropical resort showcases sundries of flourished levels, each one of them satiated with personality and charm. The follow up of the plumber’s brief incarceration thrust us to the bustling center of activity of Delfino Plaza, disguised as the game’s hub world and point of accessibility to every other area in the island. Though, unlike Peach’s Castle and Rosalina’s Observatory, the fruit-cluttered piazza doesn’t always maintain its simplified mechanism of interconnectivity. Factually, it is one of the game’s extensive stages with its own regulation of Shine Sprites (Sunshine’s prize-winning trophies), it’s just you have to come back to it several times to see it all way through. This decision devised Delfino Plaza its own variables of collectibles, unlockable secret missions, branched underground tunnels, and locomotive Piantas.

When it comes to Isle Delfino’s other amusing distractions, we tend to see a fluctuated discrepancy of level design, though mostly is geared to an ingenious architecture. The meek windmill wonderland of Bianco Hills welcomes novice players with a fair distribution of land, water, and tall structures that are set for trialing and exploratory activities. Rico Harbor, –Delfino’s panoramic port city– however, alters the H2O proportion to its preference, with bright cranes, uninhibited ships, a mysterious lighthouse, and a contest of squid wave-racing running on its vicinity. The sand-tastic of lively Gelato Beach thrives on watermelon bars, popping sandcastles, and a memorable, grueling trek aboard a flying sand bird. Off Delfino’s coast is Pinna Park, which devotes its tiny landmass to rollercoaster rides, rotary ships, and a furious boss fight with a robotic, fire-breathing Bowser. And finally, the last exemplar of the marvelous stage motif in Sunshine has to be the serene and the literally breathtaking Noki Bay; the mauve marina scales high up to a towering waterfall, sinks deep down to watery depths, and exuberates its colors with strutted seashells. Unfortunately, the two remaining attractions, Sirena Beach and Pianta Village, failed to illustrate the quintessence of elegant design, with the former treading on the novelty of a hunted beach hotel teemed with ghosts and secrets while the latter exhibits a dull, ancestral village that should have been one of the introductory levels instead of being the last course.

Though, the unfortunate circumstance of Sunshine is the superfluous quality of some of the chapters. Red coins, competitive racing, runaway pursuits, and time attacks are the flavors of the month in most of the isle’s settings. Clearly, Nintendo EDA has stretched the levels' replayability to almost breaking point. Sunshine remains comparatively inventive to other Mario games but you cannot escape the inkling that by the end of the vacation, the bosses you meet are battles you've already fought, and that some areas of Isle Delfino were going to be extended before a deadline has severed development schedules. For an island resort, Isle Delfino showcases a variety of attractions, but when it comes to irredundant activities, it barely scales to the level of a 4-star hotel.

Go with the FLUDD

The GameCube era marked Nintendo’s willingness to experiment with their key franchises by implementing new designs, directions and cosmetic changes that even some of them transpired to be fairly precarious. For starters, they launched their wondrous purple-box with Mario’s younger, pusillanimous brother in Luigi’s Mansion. The 64-bit realism of Legend of Zelda was completely overhauled in the Wind Waker, favoring the composition of cel-shaded aesthetics. Fox McCloud got out of his Arwing’s cockpit in Star Fox Adventures. Metroid Prime shifted the camera perspective behind Samus Aran’s helmet, entitled her in a first-person vantage point. With such unforeseen executions, it seems strapping Mario with a water-pack doesn’t sound so ludicrous now, among other things.

Nevertheless, FLUDD (a Flash Liquidizing Ultra Dousing Device) works impeccably! In a time when second-rate developers were loading up with increasingly preposterous 30-plus power-ups that hadn't been completely thought out or developed, Nintendo once again demonstrated how it's properly done: take one character, round him out with four different nozzles, and create dozens of moves around each similar mechanism to create countless variations of hovering, speeding, squirting, and rocketing. There’s something even more satisfying about charging up your rocket nozzle while you’re floating in the middle of Rico Harbor; just as the meter almost hits the top line, you jump up out of the water, the rockets blasts off, and you fly high into the sky. Likewise is accelerating the turbo nozzle when running on land: a constant spray of water propels you forward, sending you into perfect arcs when you jump, leaning you at jet-ski angles when you corner. It’s not a hyperbole to endorse the impression that Nintendo had embellished a brilliant usage of water-pressure expedient in Sunshine more than anyone has ever done before.

Yet, as we all know, a platformer’s moves are only as good as what the creators make you do with them, and all occasional artery-popping camera fury aside, Super Mario Sunshine tests you with expertly designed tasks. For example, one assignment sees Mario wearing a space helmet, descending into a submerged city, and using his water-pack to spray plaque from a giant eel’s teeth. Another mission positions him on giant reflective mirrors that tilt to reflect the light of the sun onto a giant, glass-encased egg, the obstacle here is that he has to get the enemies off the mirrors by pushing them to the edge with the squirt nozzle and then ground-pound from his side to send them flying. The mustached plumber can also scale higher grounds by filling in a water jar from one end, participate in balloon-popping mini-game in the amusement park, and rise submarines out of the sea by turning on the lever with his dousing hose.

It still goes without saying that Super Mario Sunshine is treading on a common ground. As far as franchised games operate, something entirely new is neither possible nor necessary at this point. All Sunshine needed to do is skillfully manipulate the elements set in place by its predecessor. In doing this, it got a little confused, and hearkened back to older games; though wholly satisfactory and technically brilliant, it would have fared better if the designers concentrated on one thing at a time. The special, FLUDD-free missions (read “Back to the Basics”), the inventive water-pack-centric gameplay, the menacing foe of Shadow Mario, the tripped-out bosses: all of these things call to mind a game of long ago, and give a distinct impression: it’s all pretty familiar, even for a Mario game that is quite sophisticated as it’s seen here.

Back to the Basics

Sometimes, you never truly appreciate what you have until it’s gone; this is quite a true story in Super Mario Sunshine. Theoretically, despite its practical efficacy, FLUDD almost eschews the basic principles of the genre due its technical mechanism. It sends a loud message that you are allowed to make mistakes without being entirely punished. An uncalculated leap over a large gap can easily be corrected by triggering the hover nozzle, an irritating projectile foe can be stunned it in its place with an effortless spray, falling from a higher ground is no longer a taxing risk, as a quick adjustment to the rocket nozzle will boost Mario back up to where he came from. Regardless of the limited capacity of its water-tank, FLUDD almost feels like an infinite power-up. Shigeru Miyamoto and his minions recognized that when they created Mario’s life-saving toy, and they made sure to take that commodity away during the game’s most critical moments.

Always greeted you with a mockingly brief intro, Shadow Mario will make sure to steal your water device as soon you start one of Sunshine’s “secret” objectives, striping you off to your regular overalls and your dexterous grasp of the rules of a basic platformer. With a blackened sheet background encasing the entire stage, distorted with 8-bit sprites and accompanied by a capella, finger-snapping, hand-clapping tune, all harking back to the original Super Mario Bros; these obstacle coursers are unpretentious shout-outs to Mario’s original roots.

Though, to say these stages are relaying on nostalgia is clearly a misapprehension. A tribute such as this clearly exudes that a shift to a new, immersive perspective doesn’t always blemish the challenge founded in the previous premise. Super Mario 64 only presented us the theory that 3D is better –or at least more engrossing–, but it didn’t attribute any of its presentation to its elder designs. Sunshine with its FLUDD-less stages, however, reminds us that not only it retained the same frustrations and satisfactions of its 2D counterparts but also proposed the possible creation of a compelling 3D game, incorporating the idea in plotting a course from point A to point B to win the challenge; that linear aspiration blossomed into a successful fruition, guised under the name of Super Mario Galaxy.

What a Twist!

It’s safe to believe that the narrative in Sunshine wouldn’t have the chance of winning an award in the “outstanding videogame literature” category. But for a Mario game to incorporate the lighthearted and silly plotline seen in Sunshine is admiringly a bold move. For one thing, Princess Peach doesn’t assume her role as the damsel in distress until midway of the game; just as soon you unlock the 4th course, Pinna Park, to be specific. It’s pretty unsettling, seeing her standing in the middle of the Delfino Plaza, nonchalantly twirling her umbrella and disclosing contempt of the current circumstances. Yet, this is just a tip of the iceberg. What followed after her abduction is quite a shocker: Bowser has a son! Well, aside from his seven youngsters who assisted his overassertive invasion in Super Mario World but completely left the scene afterward. It turns out that the adorable-looking but mischievous Bowser Jr. was the florescent imposter who claimed Mario’s identity, and tarnished his name all over the beautifully secluded resort.

It’s a given, then, that the final boss is no other than Browser himself. The greatest deed –despite the fan rage– is that the dreaded confrontation manages to maintain the silliness and the comedic sparse that predominate the premise since the opening hour. Indeed, instead of the usual sinister loom, the ascending calamitous score, and the indignant gush by the evil Koopa King, we are treated with a brief, sultry FMV: the Princess sitting on a big yellow rubber duck accompanied by Bowser and his son, enjoying a hot steamy bath, sharing a moment of father and son on a giant hot tub. The shortcoming? It’s a pretty easy fight, despite the unfair two on one strategy.

Brighter Than the Sunshine

Yet, no matter what can be said about Super Mario Sunshine, whether it’s an admiration for its production value or condemnation of its water-pumping gimmick, it’s going to be endlessly compared to its other siblings. Though, it’s quite clear that Sunshine combines the direction of both 64 and Galaxy. It is not as approachable and open-ended as the former, or exceptionally linear and focused as the latter. For example, incongruent from the Power Stars in 64, The Shine Sprites aren’t vague in description, and when you start a chapter, you are always treated with an optional intro that illustrates where you are supposed to go. The same can be said with Galaxy, as you are also not constrained in one designated path to reach the intended goal; thanks to FLUDD, you are at liberty to be creative on how to scale and traverse the terrain by jumbling the nozzles together and utilize them as effectively as you please. Here, Sunshine strikes a delicate balance in the degree of freedom that grants you with, while emphasizing both on exploration and ingenuity and being focally determined in its objectives all at once.

On the other hand, it’s still aggravating to witness Sunshine misinterprets its tools so inadequately. The Blue Coins challenge provided an excellent invitation to dissect the landscape and carry out different variations and applications with Mario’s water-pack, but the problem is situated with the lack of a checklist or at least a hint system that describes the locations of these fiendishly hidden coins, partially since most of them appear under specific circumstances. Hoarding all 240 of these elusive coinages (to win 24 Shine Sprites in return) without the benefit of a strategy guide can be an exercise in frustration. The pitiable inclusion of Yoshi also deserves admonishing due to the incoherent and intangible servicing of the trusty, multi-colored dinosaur. There is no reason why FLUDD couldn’t have incorporated the same facets boasted by the flesh-colored, stream-spitting, fruit-eating, double-jumping sidekick. It seems the creative team at Nintendo EAD added Yoshi at the last minute for just the hack of it.

Ultimately, whatever you think Super Mario Sunshine is trying to achieve, you might want to think the opposite. It’s not a shinning example on how a 3D platformer should aspire to be, nor a shameful game that deserves to be neglected in return. It has a bright heart that enables it to sit comfortably among other viable platformers, emitting a distinguishable light that yearns for a second holiday in its scenic resort. It’s up to you if you want to book a second ticket to the lovable Isle Delfino, but just make sure to take advanced precautions against any faulty mishaps, and cautiously plan the number of days you keen to dedicate the rest of your summer vacation. Chances you might extend your stay until further notice, or none at all.