2/5 ★ – Elesh's review of Super Mario Odyssey.

The core of whether Mario Odyssey works or not for you will be how you feel about Cappy. Because, in reality, Mario is barely a part of this 'Mario' game - it is Cappy's game. For me, the capture mechanic felt dissonant with the core of who Mario is supposed to be, and I just straight didn't enjoy it, or Cappy as a whole. And that coloured my experience with the game, because nearly every interaction in this game is Cappy doing something. Even a lot of the movement techniques revolve around Cappy. Hell, you don't even ride Yoshi anymore - you possess his body. Which just felt so incredibly wrong to me. My other big quibble came with with just how many collectables there are in this collect-a-thon game. I understand there need to be lots of things to find, but there were literally hundreds and hundreds of them. There were so many it stopped feeling special to find them after about a half hour. There were some really good puzzles hiding a few of the moons, but the majority of them were just... lying out in the open. You practically had to try to not get dozens of moons every time you played. It was just... too much. It took the fun out of the collecting. One thing I will give credit for is that, aside from a strange sense of weight to Mario's movements that felt a bit awkward to me, the game's controls were fluid and responsive. Which is very important in a platformer of this style. And it is these controls that are the reason why I am giving the game a 3. There's a lot of good here and I can definitely see why people love this game. For me though, the obsession with reminding me that the game's true protagonist was an annoying ghost hat, the strangely dissonant possession mechanic, and the constant marginalization of Mario's role in a Mario game killed what joy I could have otherwise found in it.