3.5/5 ★ – DaysposableHero's review of Super Mario Odyssey.

This may be the first Mario game I’ve ever played to completion. Platformers aren’t usually my thing, as I’m a narrative over gameplay kind of guy, for the most part. But this game was a lot of fun. I really appreciated two things about it, specifically: its free-form nature and its low stakes. For the most part you can generally just hop about the environments poking at things and exploring until you find the requisite number of moons needed to fuel your hat ship. There are puzzles ranging from little local secrets to large-scale, map altering adventure segments. And how long you spend in a particular level is totally up to you. You can find just enough moons to gas up your hat and get back on Bowser’s trail. Or, you can scour the map, meticulously completing every task and finding every moon. The game was fun enough that I most often found more moons than required, though I’m not sure I fully completed any particular world. And as I mentioned above, the stakes are very low. Failing any particular challenge usually just means you get put back to your last stable spot on the map and you go for it again. It did a particularly good job of communicating and training concepts, then implementing those concepts in a higher-stakes situation like a boss battle. There was never anything required to progress that wasn’t already familiarized in the open world platform levels. The hat mechanics were also quite fun. Mario can use his hat (Cappy) to possess and play as all the classic Mario enemy types. You can play as a goomba, or a pokey bird, or one of those orange fish things, and often this is required to pass a particular challenge. The individual behaviors of the enemies being required to solve various puzzles was a cool creative touch. Ultimately, though, this is a Mario platformer. The same barely-there story (Bowser kidnapped the princess again, to the surprise of no one), same issues with 3D platforming (I swear that block looked closer than that). But, it’s a platformer that I actually wanted to finish, so that’s saying something.