Super Mario Sunshine (GameCube)

While Mario is often the platform game trendsetter, establishing how a platforming character should control in both 2D and 3D space, you can usually count on the portly plumber to stick to a few tried and true concepts. Whenever Mario goes on an adventure, it tends to take him to all kinds of different environments, Mario traveling from grasslands and deserts to volcanic lands and underwater worlds. Diversity in level types allows for new enemies and hazards to easily slip into the adventure while injecting some fresh new aesthetics along the way. However, for Super Mario Sunshine, our intrepid hero chose to take a break from the his world-trotting adventures and went on vacation, and while circumstance would call on him to step up and save the princess once again, his vacation destination ends up being one of the best places Mario has ever explored despite all of its locations stemming from the single concept of a tropical island getaway.

Isle Delfino really is meant to be an island getaway and not a host to platform game obstacle courses, but when Mario and Princess Peach drop by the island for a much deserved break, Mario is immediately misidentified as the shadowy character who has been going around the island covering it with goopy graffiti. Having a FLUDD water pack strapped to his back, he’s told he must make things right by cleaning up the island, but to truly help this sun-drenched tropical paradise return to its former glory, he must also help collect the Shine Sprites that scattered due to the imposter’s mischief. Eventually Mario will run into this Shadow Mario, predictably have the Princess kidnapped by him, and have another task added to what was meant to be a relaxing vacation, but even though he’s back to jumping around areas and collecting shiny objects to save the day once more, Isle Delfino isn’t the kind of hub world you navigate before you head off to explore entirely disconnected locations.

Super Mario Sunshine’s unity in theming is immensely impressive when you consider how excellent all the different levels turned out. Delfino Plaza itself is already a thematically appropriate hubworld, this town bustling with the grass skirt wearing Pianta people. They mill about at the fruit market in a city so filled with palm trees that they actually sprout out of the Pianta populace’s heads, a small canal cuts into the city already surrounded by water, and fountains, statues, and a lighthouse all help make this place interesting to explore in between visiting the game’s main locations. When you do set off to explore a new area to collect Shine Sprites, you aren’t teleported to some far off land, but a different part of the island. You’ll find yourself in their port town Ricco Harbor where you leap around the ships and docking equipment. You visit the sunset soaked Sirena Beach with its lavish but unfortunately haunted hotel and casino. You even drop by the island’s theme park and visit the villages that the locals live in. You don’t get to explore the entire island on foot, but each level takes you to a different highlight of this fictional world that plays into island theming, and even when stages like Gelato Beach and Sirena Beach focus on the same place on an island, Sirena takes you mostly into the seaside hotel while Gelato focuses on the shoreline for its challenges.

Even the game’s music sticks to this tropical aesthetic superbly, each song perfectly matching the location’s concept and tone. Ricco Harbor’s bustling port has an energetic sound with bombastic brass to evoke ship horns, Gelato Beach’s steel drums give the sunny seaside level plenty of pep, and Delfino Plaza itself has a tune that captures that desire to head out into this new island with its constant bouncy energy and shift between instruments like the song itself was walking around town. While the voice acting added to the story cutscenes can be a little cheesy and there are some songs that are more mellow or carried over from previous titles, the sound profile of Super Mario Sunshine is a solid fit for this island adventure that helps this stand above most Mario titles when it comes to truly capturing a design concept and exploring it to its fullest.

The aesthetics and trappings of Super Mario Sunshine are impressive without a doubt and would make for a memorable adventure on their own, but this 3D platforming collectathon has an interesting addition to the running and jumping Mario usually uses to get around. The FLUDD backpack isn’t there just to spray water on any goop you find, this new tool augmenting Mario’s movement in many different ways. In fact, spraying things is most often used as an attack or a way to clear away some hazard, the spray nozzle’s only real alteration to how you platform being the ability to spray some water in front of you so that a belly slide will send you forward even faster. The hover nozzle is the big game-changer, this jetpack-like configuration meaning that, so long as you’ve collected some water for the pack from one of the abundant water sources around the island, Mario can fly with two powerful streams of water for a limited time whenever he likes. Mario does have a few unique jumping options like chaining three jumps together for more height or flicking the stick in the other direction to do a high-flying somersault, but the height these grant is made even better for platforming challenges when you can then hover for a brief time, the jetpack not giving you much height but serving as a good way to get more distance out of a jump. There are many places where you can chart your own path by using the jump options and the hover nozzle in tandem and it serves as a good form of course correction if you almost overshot your destination. There’s a rocket nozzle that launches you incredibly high when used and a turbo nozzle that lets you dash forward at high speed as well, but these simple use cases can’t complete to the universally helpful hover nozzle that opens up exploring 3D spaces in so many ways despite its limitations.

While the hover nozzle gives Super Mario Sunshine much of its platforming enjoyability though, there are a few instances where the game takes it away, and while the jumping and movement feel fine most of the time because you always have your back-up plan on your back, these small “secret levels” show that Super Mario Sunshine isn’t as tightly designed as it feels when you have your liquid parachute. In fact, many of these secret levels crank up the difficulty in addition to taking away your ability to compensate for Mario’s not quite laser precise movement physics, the plumber a little bit slippery, not having as much control over his jump in midair as you might like, and seeming to have an odd relationship with if he chooses to bump into a wall or grab onto the edge of it. Many of these secret levels are mandatory and thus you are made to run an obstacle course floating in space that breaks away from the game’s theming, exposes the small flaws in the movement, and yet still whips out demands for some of the greatest precision movement in the entire game. Rotating platforms that are easy to slip off of here and do or die moments crop up as well where it’s a complete wash if you don’t do the right action at the right time, but the game tries to patch over these by making an extra life available near the start of these so you can keep retrying until eventually things work out properly.

The secret levels are certainly the low side of Super Mario Sunshine objective design, and many levels give you unique or interesting goals that explore their levels in diverse ways. Red coins urge you to explore less emphasized areas of the level like Pinna Park placing them on the rides and Gelato Beach hiding them in the coral reef, something the blue coins take even further with their concept. While the game’s poor tracking of them isn’t the best, blue coins can be traded in for shines and are littered all around the game world, the player rewarded for curiosity and experimentation when spraying a suspicious object or doing a small platforming trick rewards them with one of these special collectibles.  Some areas have challenges that focus on platforming without taking away the FLUDD pack like climbing the complex equipment in Ricco Harbor while stages like Pianta Village features citizen focused objectives like when you must scramble through a town full of burning goo to cool off a woman’s burning metal pets. Every level unfortunately includes a rather basic Shadow Mario chase objective, but the true bosses of these worlds are a bit more interesting. Phantamanta is a giant pinkish ghostly ray that drifts along the ground of Sirena Beach, coating it in electric gunk and splitting apart as you try to manage spraying it and cleaning the electrified beach safely. Gooper Blooper makes multiple appearances with his large tentacles you can rip off to get to his mouth to yank at as well. A fight with Mecha Bowser takes you onto a roller coaster, Petey Piranha involves you forcing a giant plant to drink far too much water, and even less exciting battles like the giant rampaging Wiggler on the beach still have you running around trying to trip up the ornery caterpillar.

A good majority of Shine Sprite objectives in Super Mario Sunshine are amusing mixes of platforming, action, and FLUDD focused antics, but beating the game requires you to do 7 specific Shines in every level, with the Shines you find in Delfino Plaza and earn for blue coin collection only counting towards 100% completion. In fact, levels often have extra Shines beyond the 7 you need to do that are also entirely optional, but the fact the game has 50 total required Shine objectives means that some of the shakier ones are harder to ignore. Thankfully, a few of the worst concepts are entirely avoidable, so you don’t need to play the giant Pachinko machine with its odd controls, the watermelon festival where it barely feels like you have control of the giant fruits you’re meant to pass by herds of unkillable enemies, or complete the absurd string of actions involving riding the dinosaur Yoshi atop boats only to navigate a lily pad ride slowly and perfectly with instant death threatening any deviation from the expected performance. Instead, you get multiple secret levels on your journey with their FLUDD-free slightly imprecise gameplay, but while these can be pushed through with perseverance, a few others feel far more egregious. Chuckster Piantas will hurl you to your destination based on even incredibly small shifts in your positioning, making it quite easy to be centimeters off and get chucked into the endless void instead.

The final level involves learning the finicky controls of a canoe that doesn’t tell you that you need to go to the front to steer and the back to propel it with your nozzle. Missions that involve Yoshi can be hampered by his flutter jump sometimes being a second jump that takes you higher and sometimes barely giving you any lift. The camera can’t always get a good angle on you so sometimes you view Mario as a shadow on the other side of a wall as question marks replace important items and characters so navigating is unusual. Even outright glitches like Yoshi passing through a wall in the hotel and Mario falling through Pianta Village’s bridge if you do a water-enhanced belly slide can crop up, but when these are sometimes easy enough to push through and recover from, they’re tolerable. The poorly designed Shines are also thankfully maybe 10 out of the game’s 120 with only a few actually required, but there is often a little bit of unwieldiness involved even in otherwise fine mission concepts like riding the Sand Bird whose body moves in unusual ways. A greater amount of Shines are earned through entertaining uses of game mechanics and the environments, but playing the game unfortunately means running into some inevitably weaker moments that are just a bit too common to dismiss.

THE VERDICT: Super Mario Sunshine might be one of the best games to embody the phrase “flawed masterpiece”. Isle Delfino is a fantastic gaming world, the tropical vacation theming spreading to excellent music, a diverse but thematically coherent set of stages, and even a gameplay goal that integrates the water jetpack with the reasonable concept of cleaning up a polluted island. FLUDD augments Mario’s abilities in many interesting ways that enhance the missions he’s given and the way he explores the game’s large but inviting locations. However, this island adventure has surprise roadbumps as secret levels engage with weaker FLUDD-free platforming, half-baked objectives crop up, and rough edges interfere with your enjoyment of an otherwise enjoyable mission concept. There is much more good than bad, so while the flaws are too present to ignore, the incredible successes still rocket it up the rankings into a truly excellent adventure.

And so, I give Super Mario Sunshine for GameCube…

A GREAT rating. Super Mario Sunshine may feature the best location Mario has ever visited, with a wonderful sense of cohesion to almost every part of the adventure as the music, the level design, and even the barely present narrative all work together to make this really seem like a tropical vacation gone awry. Visiting different parts of the island, seeing how the locals live in places that still work as excellent platforming stages, and finding all the little secrets and cute touches left for you make exploring Isle Delfino a joy, the FLUDD water pack injecting plenty of enjoyable ways to get around these cleverly conceived locations. All of this thought was certainly put into how the island should come alive both as a video game playground and believable location in fiction, but it seems Super Mario Sunshine wasn’t able to polish its mechanics to a shine as well. Most of the time everything works together pretty well, meaning you’ll get Shine after Shine that engages with your abilities excellently, but then something poorly conceived like the Chuckster secret level crops up or a bland recycled idea like the Shadow Mario chases reappears. Super Mario Sunshine requires a few too many interactions with its weaker sides to truly achieve unquestioned excellence, and while it has the good sense to cram its worst concepts into the optional side content, it’s a shame it even included ideas like the absurd requirements to enter and complete the lily pad ride.

I feel like even people who love Super Mario Sunshine know they have to append the phrase “Super Mario Sunshine is amazing!” with a quick follow-up of “except for these things”. The unusual difficulty and sloppy design of a few too many moments leaves an undeniable blemish on an otherwise superb Mario adventure that almost deserved to be given the highest rating possible, but rather than only trying to do what it is good at, it slips in plenty of experimental and rickety concepts as well. Regardless of those stumbling points though, Super Mario Sunshine is mostly a marvelously conceived Mario adventure that draws out a superb level of creativity from its tropical setting, the objectives, levels, platforming, and challenges all swirling together into a game that still manages to dazzle and delight because so many of its core concepts are excellently realized.