Super Mario Galaxy 2

No other place to begin here than by saying, unabashedly, that Super Mario Galaxy was (and still is) one of my favorite video games of all time. It's hard to quantify these types of things, but I've played, according to my own backloggery page, 485 video games in my lifetime. Forty-seven of them warranted a 5-star rating from me - about one in ten. But Super Mario Galaxy could very well be in my all time top five. Which makes it, to the rest of my five-star ratings, what my five-star ratings are to every other game I've played.

Eh, like I said, quantifying it doesn't really begin to do it justice. I played Super Mario Galaxy from December of 2007 through January of 2008. Winter break, from my sophomore year, a time of my life where I was dealing with some combination of existential dread, some engineering workload-based depression, and the pangs and realities of adulthood weighing down on me. Super Mario Galaxy just plain blew my socks off, this beautiful, then-innovative platforming game, bombastic music, a joy to play - a challenge, especially late, but the best and most rewarding challenge where brief moments of frustration were completely counterbalanced by the accomplishment of, say, finally landing that elusive star after an hour of failure and anger.

It'd be melodramatic and inaccurate to say something like "Super Mario Galaxy saved me," or something similarly stupid, but it was absolutely the lone bright spot in a four-to-six-month period that was one of the darkest of my young life. So when I got Super Mario Galaxy 2 for Christmas a couple years later, my instinct wasn't to jump right into it, but to hold off. To save it for another rainy, cloudy time where I needed a pick-me-up.

Of course, that's not really how life works. That's not how sadness and despair work, either. I went through some more, uh, "times" between 2010 and today - many much darker and rougher and, well, realer than the sophomore slump seasonal depression, and at no point during any of them did I think, "gee, you know what might cheer me up? A Wii game!" No - just because the first one, with hindsight, represented a bright point in a rough year did not mean its sequel would be some kind of cure-all for any ensuing rough patches.

What motivated me to finally start playing this, a month ago, wasn't any sort of sadness at all. Nor was it a nostalgia kick. Instead, it was a growing awareness of the game's possibly diminishing shelf life. I mean, this thing's just been sitting on my shelf for six years and change - I wouldn't want to stop playing video games altogether before finally getting around to it. Life's too short, you know?

So - okay, life stories aside - how was it!? It was excellent! I'm happy to say that I genuinely, greatly, totally enjoyed playing Super Mario Galaxy 2. The atmosphere and the music completely hold up - there's nothing in any other platformer quite like whizzing through space, collecting twinkly shiny objects just by pointing a Wii remote at them, all while Mario yelps his occasional "wa-hoos" and "ha-wahs."

As I said, I've been playing the game for a few weeks now, whenever I've found (well, made) the time to do so. Mostly this has consisted of two-hour sessions late at night after Marissa's gone to bed. I approached this game with a completionist's attitude (sort of - more on the green stars a bit later) which meant rather than whizzing around from level to level and world to world like I had adult-onset ADHD, I went over every level with a fine-toothed comb from the outset, minimizing any sense of wandering or backtracking. This meant the game got steadily and progressively harder, which left me whizzing through levels collecting extra lives early on but dying all over the place late in the game. It's hard to remember any specific highlight levels - they were all wonderful, really, impeccably designed and wonderfully imaginative - but a few levels definitely stand out in my memory as exceptionally challenging in a frustrating way - and almost all of them involved Yoshi.

Look - I love Yoshi. And as a rule I love his inclusion in Super Mario games - he lets you run faster, jump higher and farther, and he's even a built in damage buffer of sorts. But so many aspects of his gameplay mechanics in this game were a nightmare. For one, using his signature "stick out tongue, grab bad guy" move involved pointing the Wii remote at the screen and pressing B on enemies. Worse, there were often flowers in bubbles suspended in mid-air that Yoshi could fling to and from, always by sticking his tongue out and grabbing them. Do you know how frustrating this was? Do you remember how shitty the Wii remotes are at actually pointing to the screen n a steady, fluid manner? Worst of all, some levels made use of a Yoshi power-up in the form of a spicy pepper that made him run around at insane speeds, almost impossible to control. My God, this one level from fairly early on in the game will forever haunt me...

Otherwise, I can't really complain. I have a couple of gripes about the way the camera work made it very difficult to control or understand the movements of Mario - another PTSD-type level killed me some two dozen times in part because the view kept changing from above Mario to beside Mario to below Mario, all while riding on one of those platform-snake things and avoiding ghosts in a haunted house level. Oof. Oof. No thank you! But occasional shoddy camerawork is a small price to pay for a game where you spend so much time just flying through the air, flinging yourself from planet to planet, marveling at the goofy physics of it all. I loved this game! I really did.

Oh, right, the green stars! So. You only need to collect something like 70 regular stars, and you don't need to beat every level by any stretch, in order to face off with Bowser and ostensibly beat the game. Doing so opens up a seventh, special world - "World-S" in that weird Japanese video game parlance - and beating every level in this world (trickster comets included) and all other worlds nets you 120 stars. This is similar to how the first game worked. But in the first game, once you got every star, you could collect 120 more stars while playing as Luigi. I never did this! I thought it was unnecessary padding, just a spin on replaying the game - and this was, again, one of my all time favorite games! I thought Galaxy 2 would have a similar second "half," but it turns out it's pretty different. Once you get the 120 regular stars, you unlock these things called green stars, which, contrary to their name, are not merely stars to collect as Luigi. Instead, they're just hanging out in all the worlds and levels you've already beaten in hidden or hard to reach places. Collecting 120 of these - two or three in every level - gets you to 240 stars, which opens up a final world, in which there are two more regular stars to collect, giving you a grand total of 242 for "completion."

I'm sorry - I'm not doing this! I've already seen and played through every level, every challenge in the game. What remains strikes me as a glorified collectable hunt - something I'd use a walkthrough for in order to expedite the process, which would suck most of the fun out of it anyway. I love you, Galaxy 2, I really do - but I'm not going to finish you off on your own terms. We're done. We had a blast! I'll remember you fondly, but as far as I'm concerned, I played you fully and completely from start to finish. And how many games can I say that about these days?