The Main Reason Super Mario Sunshine Doesn't Work

I bought the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection when it was released on the Switch in 2020, and for the first time, I was able to play Super Mario Sunshine, originally released in 2002. I remember the high praise at the time from a lot of publications, but just as many people on the internet were calling it a massive disappointment and that seems to be the reputation that stuck. I gave it the old college try because, hey, video game fans are annoyingly prone to overstating their rage. Maybe this game isn’t as bad as a lot of people say it is. Maybe this is merely a good game that a lot of people were let down by because it doesn’t quite achieve greatness. Maybe something else. Who knows.

So I played it and… yeah, the naysayers were right the first time. I disliked Sunshine way more than I thought I might, but not for the reasons I was expecting.

It wasn’t the gameplay.

Granted I played a remastered version of the game. But even if I didn’t, platformers from the early 3D consoles are hard to judge based on gameplay these days. If you were there to enjoy them, your mileage will vary in how easily you can slide back into the mindset and quirks of these generations and not expect the level of precision you get in platformers now. If you weren’t there, a lot of these games are borderline unplayable. I belong in the former category, but barely. So where I stand, the gameplay is… fine. It wasn’t as terrible as I was led to believe, but it was still pretty rough. I found myself getting angry, but I’ve played worse on the Gamecube from a gameplay standpoint. I could live with it.

It wasn’t the hub world design.

One of my favorite aspects of a Mario platformer is the variety of levels. A lot of time, it’s some arrangement of plains world, jungle world, fire world, ice world, and so on. But at the very least, going through all these differing environments makes you feel like you’ve been on a journey. All of which is to say that I wasn’t a fan of the game sticking me on a singular island vacation town. I do, however, respect the idea and the experiment. Even if the arrangement of how you access the other areas is messy, there’s an intentionality to it that I can respect. It was a changing of the formula, and in the increasingly risk-averse gaming environment we live in now, I can give it up for that.

It wasn’t the infamously bad levels or the ones where they take the F.L.U.D.D. away from you.

The gimmick I’m going for here is offering slight defenses of the issues people point to when they want to criticize this game. But when it comes to these notorious levels — the pachinko machine, the lily pads, the giant watermelon escort mission, the rollercoaster turret level and so on and so forth, and the ones where they take away the F.L.U.D.D, all of which are bad — I’m not going to do that. All of these levels are failures in concept and execution, and I just can’t find it in myself to try to be kind to them. And even getting to the lily pads is a giant fucking pain in the ass.

It wasn’t the camera.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t want to excuse this either. But then I remind myself that the problems with Sunshine’s camera aren’t necessarily unique to Sunshine or a lot of games from that era. There was a PS2 demo disc with a Tomb Raider game on it. I don’t remember which one it was, but the camera on it was so shitty that it made me aware of bad cameras in video games in the first place. The point being that while Sunshine’s camera is frequently susceptible to getting stuck behind walls and creating needless depth perception issues, when it comes to that generation of consoles, you didn’t have to look very hard to find something worse. Not a justification. Just an observation.

It wasn’t the voice acting.

Sunshine was one of the first Mario games to feature voice-acted dialogue. It did not go well. Not only did the voice director have all the actors go full ham, but in a series that made a point of only having minimal voice acting, it just feels wrong. That said, in hindsight I recognize that Nintendo was going to try it with a Mario game at one point or another. They had to. After all, how else would you know it doesn’t work?

It wasn’t a number of other issues I could bring up, and it wan’t even the totality of everything I’ve already said. It’s the philosophy behind most of these decisions. 

Part of why good Mario platformers work is their simplicity. They teach you Concept A, and once you’ve mastered that, they teach you Concept B. Then the games weaves Concept A and Concept B together to create new ideas or rearrange what you’ve already done in new orders while all the while making room for Concepts C, D, E, and so on. Soon enough, you’ll have mastered everything you need to know to keep going when it gets hard.

This method communicates a certain trust and respect. Yes, things are going to get tough and you might get mad. But you never feel discouraged. Think about where you were when you started the game, and look at where you are now, and look how much fun you had getting better. You can do this. Hell, if the game’s done its job, you’ve already done a simpler version of it before. It was just in a form you didn’t recognize. You’ve been on an arc this whole time, and this is the culmination.

Sunshine doesn’t create this relationship. Instead, it values giving you a challenge more than it values getting you ready for those challenges in the first place. There is no arc. It doesn’t care about the journey, just the destination. As a result, rather than feeling encouraged, it’s a game that feels like, “Welcome to Super Mario Sunshine. Here’s F.L.U.D.D. Here’s a pachinko machine. Here’s some lily pads. Here’s some easy levels. Here’s some hard ones. I don’t know.”

To be clear, the issue isn’t random difficulty spikes. Even at its worst, Sunshine is a perfectly beatable game, and there are worse games that are way easier. The problem is why this game is hard when it’s hard and the reason Sunshine has these spikes in the first place. They’re not the culmination of anything. They’re just there and then at some point, it’s over.

At its hardest, however, is when it becomes the most apparent. By the letter of the law, this game feels like the sequel to Mario 64. But by the spirit of the law, its predecessor is The Lost Levels. A game that exists just to fuck with you.

Presumably, this is why many people like Sunshine, and if you’re the kind of person who values being messed with, or you find enjoyment in watching people like me who hate this game suffer (which… fair), I get it. But for me, in the other Mario games, I get the illusion that I’m overcoming Bowser. Sunshine feels like I’m overcoming the game itself. I felt valued playing the older Mario games and the ones that came after. Sunshine simply doesn’t give a shit.