Super Mario Sunshine

I wanted to finish this game last Thursday because that was "Mario Day." (Mar 10 - get it?) Alas, life got in the way, as it so often does in this frivolous logging pursuit, and now I'll have to settle for being four days tardy. So be it. Super Mario Sunshine is the Super Mario installment for the GameCube. It was preceded by Super Mario 64 and followed up by Super Mario Galaxy, both of which are very much considered to be better games than this franchise oddity. I'll partake in that same assessment, but not for the reasons most people did. It seems like the biggest problem most people had with this game was the premise. It takes place not in the Mushroom Kingdom, but on "Isle Delfino," a beach-themed tropical island. You don't collect stars throughout the game but "shine sprites" instead. And, of course, there's the game's biggest offense: FLUDD. FLUDD is an acronym for... something. Essentially, it's a robotic water tank that features primarily as a fire hose and a jet pack. And boy, did people hate FLUDD. FLUDD even sucks in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, where it is quite possibly the worst attack any character possesses. A good deal of Super Mario Sunshine is spent spraying graffiti off of walls and cleaning up "goop," a hazardous substance that a mysterious "Shadow Mario" figure has been wiping all over the island. It's easy to see why a lot of people wrote this game off right off the bat. But I didn't! I actually didn't mind the unique and different premise. Sometimes a franchise can get a little stale, and I commend Sunshine for going out on a limb this time around. But I still had plenty of issues with the game. For starters, the controls. Maybe I was used to Galaxy (which I doubt, since I haven't played that in over two years) but I was very unhappy with the way Sunshine controlled. I'd be standing at the edge of a ledge, trying to drop down slowly to the level right beneath me, only to have Mario careen off into an abyss because he leapt forward audaciously instead of just casually hopping down a level gently. Ugh. Sometimes I'd be jet-packing from one tightrope to another, only to realize that the tightrope I was trying to get to was in fact behind and above me, rather than right under me. Again, ugh. Also annoying were the over-the-shoulder third-person-shooter angles in which you could more accurately aim Mario's fire hose but be unable to move him around. This meant any time you wanted better aim at, say, a boss, you were all the more vulnerable to said boss's attacks. Why the trade off? This is Super Mario, and the only challenges in any boss fight should be figuring out the proper pattern of attack and then just not running off an edge or into an enemy. Suffice it to say, I simply didn't appreciate the execution of the control scheme. My second big issue with Sunshine was its division of shine sprites into those mandatory for game progression and those that have no use aside from existing just to be collected. What I mean is that instead of all shine sprites being equal in Sunshine, some are necessary to find and some just aren't. You need to acquire the first seven shines in each of the seven worlds in order to unlock the final level. In 64 and Galaxy you were allowed to find stars wherever you wanted and as long as you had a certain amount of stars you could access new worlds. And that wasn't the case in Sunshine. You can have fifty shines or eighty shines, but the only thing that dictates whether or not you can play against the final boss is whether or not you've collected the seventh shine in each of seven worlds. The deemphasis on "hidden" shines made me all the less likely to go exploring and trying to find them. It only made the game completely linear rather than open-ended. And at that, I shake my head. All things considered, Sunshine was a pretty good and very fun game. A number of challenging levels that seemed like the inspiration for Galaxy were especially entertaining, and the outright frustration-inducing moments were few and far between. The game just wasn't without its flaws. But few games are, and you could do a lot worse on the GameCube than Super Mario Sunshine.