| Music: | Gusty Garden Galaxy theme |
This game is both beautiful and flawless. It's easily the best non-RPG I've played (and not directly comparable to RPGs). gamerankings.com has it as the second best game of all time, right ahead of Metroid Prime, and I have to say it's well-earned (hmm, I really need to play Ocarina of Time one of these days...). If you don't have a Wii yet, buy it for this game.
To put it simply, the game is pure fun, with practically no downtime. Many adventure games (e.g. Okami) were fun but had boring stretches and some dull dialog; Mario Galaxy is 25 hours of pure gameplay. Previous 3D Mario games were lots of fun but also involved a lot of tedious and frustrating parts; Mario Galaxy entirely avoids these. Granted, the story is entirely forgettable -- making it perhaps the exact opposite of Xenogears -- but that's not the point; the game is meant to be fun. And while previous Mario games have had decent music, Mario Galaxy goes above and beyond, which only amplified my enjoyment.
I liked the game so much that I actually got all 120 stars (traditionally, you only need 60-80 stars to go to the final level, but there are 120 total). Normally I avoid playing a game longer than necessary and quit as soon as I've seen the ending -- I think I stopped at 81 shines in Mario Sunshine, and I rarely do side-quests in RPGs -- but that was not the case here.
It's hard to describe what makes the game fun in general; basically the level design was extremely good. Here are a couple of specific points, though:
The gravity mechanics were surprisingly well-done. Basically, you spend a lot of the game on planets that are about the size of a small house, but with Earth-like gravity. As you run around them, the gravity smoothly changes directions. It's a bit disorienting at first, but I got used to it quickly and it became a lot of fun. After playing this game, I honestly find it strange and shocking to think that almost every other game ever made has only constant downward gravity. How could so many other games ignore this amazingly fun mechanic? Probably because it's too hard to get right, but SMG pulled it off beautifully.
Another random point: Camera angles. In most third-person 3D games, I spend a lot of time being annoyed with the camera. Lots of games (FFXII, Okami) basically leave it entirely up to the player to move the camera as they see fit, and frankly controlling the camera is not that fun. On the other hand, Mario Galaxy -- like previous 3D Mario games, but more so in SMG -- deals with the camera for you, getting it right 99% of the time, and letting you move it manually the few times where you really need to. This must have taken a ton of work, and could easily have been really annoying if they hadn't done a good job with it. But they did an amazing job, and it removes a lot of annoyance from the game, leaving more pure fun to enjoy.
In general, at no point did I feel like the developers had mis-designed anything. The only time I even got really frustrated with the game was when collecting the stars which only become available after you have seen the ending, but those were supposed to be challenging, and I think they were just about right in that regard. I never got stuck on one thing for any significant amount of time and I never had to consult the internet about anything.
In summary, I love Nintendo. It's amazing to me that they are able to release so many games of so consistently high quality. Yet, as my friend Lester observed, Mario Galaxy is the kind of game they manage to put out about once every five years.