Super Mario Sunshine became the series’ blemish.
#Super mario sunshine 64 beta series#
Yes, Mario still has a peerless pedigree in video games, but at that point, the series was undefeated. Point being, the Super Mario series had (rightfully) earned a reputation unlike any other in video games (Zelda comes the closest, but back then Zelda games were much less common, though I still think Mario would ultimately win out when taking things into consideration in modern times). Not a whole lot of NES titles can boast that. 2 was still better than most other NES games, and it’s still fun today. 2, which is now often labeled the “black sheep” of the series, only really earned the moniker in hindsight, after its status as a reworked Doki Doki Panic became more common knowledge. And of course, Super Mario 64 revolutionized gaming from that point onward. The same goes for Yoshi’s Island, albeit to a humbler degree. 3 and Super Mario World were released in the early 90s and are still considered some of the best games ever made even today. was the biggest game of all time when it was released in 1985. Though Nintendo themselves only seemed to retroactively include those games in the canon in more recent years). Think about it this way: Up until Sunshine’s release in 2002, every “proper” entry in the Mario series was considered an all-time great in the medium (unless, again, you counted the Super Mario Land titles. Travel back to the early 2000s, and some of the backlash against Sunshine may have been excessive (the gaming community has a bad habit of only working in absolutes), but it wasn’t entirely unfounded. Super Mario Sunshine is a good game, but not good enough for a series that’s usually associated with greatness. But playing Sunshine today, it would be incredibly difficult to put forth a credible argument that it’s one of the better Mario games once the nostalgia glasses come off. Yes, I myself have nostalgia for Super Mario Sunshine, and I repeat that it isn’t a bad game. I have seen a number of YouTubers and people on social media try to defend Sunshine to the death, but again, it’s probably no coincidence that all of its defenders are of a certain age. Though it’s surely no coincidence that Sunshine’s newfound reverence should occur around the same time those who were young tykes during the game’s 2002 release are now old enough to reflect on Sunshine with rose-tinted nostalgia goggles. In more recent years, Super Mario Sunshine is talked about in a more positive light than in years past. And that’s a shame because it could have, and should have, been so much more. titles as part of the main series of Mario games).
But with the possible exception of Super Mario 3D Land on the Nintendo 3DS, Sunshine is undoubtedly the weakest 3D Mario game by a mile, and possibly the weakest “main entry” in the whole series (unless we’re counting the Super Mario Land and New Super Mario Bros. In fact, if this is the weakest 3D Mario offering, then Mario has done well for himself, because Sunshine is still a very fun game in a lot of ways. Look, first thing’s first, Super Mario Sunshine is not a bad game.
The more I thought about it, the more I think something closer to my recent write-up on Howl’s Moving Castle is more apropos. But as I’ve been playing it, I feel I have more to say about Sunshine than what my “Replaying” features usually entail. I was originally just going to write one of my “Replaying” articles in relation to Super Mario Sunshine, which I am currently replaying via Super Mario 3D All-Stars (which came out on my birthday, something I may have mentioned once or twice).
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