Finest resort facilities – Super Mario Sunshine

The success of the PlayStation in the UK made console gaming central to video games here in a way which it had never been previously. It may even have helped drag Nintendo up with it. The Nintendo 64 was never able to rival the PlayStation, but coupled with the evolving versions of the Game Boy (and of Pokémon), it finally established Nintendo as at least one of the central players in the UK, and the console played host to some major successes. 

The N64’s successes basically fell into three categories: Nintendo’s big names, Star Wars, and games by Rare. The limited follow-up on two of those was among many things preventing the Gamecube from being even as big a success as the N64. Rogue Squadron II was a launch title but Peak Star Wars was past, at least for now. Rare only made one game for the Gamecube (Starfox Adventures) before being bought out by Microsoft. That left Nintendo, and the three UK #1 games on their purple playbox were all sequels to their own major series. The surest bet of all was the follow up to Super Mario 64.

Super Mario Sunshine has a peculiar status for a mainline Mario game. It is a Mario game about something. Mario games before and after have themes (dreams, the stage, outer space, money, cats, and so on) but they’re all very loosely applied to selections of levels defined more by their differences than their similarities. Super Mario Sunshine is a game about a tropical holiday island which needs cleaning up; its hub is set on that island and so are all of its individual worlds. Mario has a new water-spraying ability not just as the occasional power-up but as a constant almost all the time right through the game. At the same time, it isn’t just about that, and that’s where some of the unevenness that also makes it stand out comes in.

Partly, Nintendo seem to have come to a similar conclusion to Square with Final Fantasy X: with all of the new graphical power and lighting capabilities of their new console, what better way to use them than some water and dazzling sunshine? The results are frequently stunning, and have a more obvious wow factor in visuals alone than almost anything on the PS2 so far. The water looks wonderful without straying into distracting showing off, and all of the other reflective surfaces they put in work almost as well.

There’s also something very charming about Isle Delfino and how it draws more directly and recognisably on real life than previous Mario games. I love that the various fruits that you can find, and play annoying mini-games with, include durians. I had personally encountered those before playing the game, but just barely. It’s a neat reminder that assumed cultural universals can be anything but. 

Making your way around the world comes with more freedom than ever, though the freedom is a double-edged water pack. It’s not the standard nozzle on the FLUDD machine, or either of the bonus ones that turn up later on, which is particularly transformative. It’s the hover nozzle that keeps you in the air, pushed up by jets of water. Combine it with backflips and wall jumps, and Mario can climb upwards with a new speed and dexterity. On the other hand, it only lasts a limited time, as well as its water supply needing replenishing, and that’s a lot more things to keep track of at any given moment. Super Mario Sunshine offers freer movement, but it’s much harder than in previous games to reach the joy that comes from being able to master that movement and know instantly exactly where you can and can’t get to.

The matching issue in the game’s level design is that having created bigger, more complex settings than ever before, they’re frequently shut off with harder limits than most of Mario 64. You can sometimes collect shines out of order, but there are fewer moments of exploring paying off by finding one out of nowhere, and the gating makes some of the game’s more egregiously difficult levels a bigger stumbling block than they need to be (looking at you, The Manta Storm). 

There’s also the fact that some of the most memorable levels are completely disconnected from the setting, accessed through entrances which take you to another world ready to face revolving blocks and a capella versions of the music from Super Mario Bros., with Mario’s water pack yoinked away in a cursory cutscene. This doesn’t make any less narrative sense than anything else in the ignorable plot, but it’s another slice away from some of the game’s more intriguing aspects and another time it feels at odds with itself.

The 2D Mario games moved from individual levels to the eight world maps of Super Mario Bros. 3 to the single integrated map of Super Mario World, but that was still just an overlay on a bunch of entirely separate levels. Super Mario 64 made no pretence of linking together the painting worlds you could jump into from its hub. But in Super Mario Sunshine, you get a map of the island and there is actually a sense of coherent geography. You can see the locations of other levels in the background as you play.

The levels may all, once again, be accessed by jumping into paint-based magical doorways, but they are a world. And I’ve said from the beginning how much a sense of place in games means to me. Just moving around the world of Isle Delfino, spraying and hovering and flipping, makes for most of the game’s most sparkling moments. As such, it’s the way that Nintendo fail to fully commit to the concept that proves the biggest disappointment, even ahead of any glitches or ridiculous difficulty spikes. For a series used to bold moves forwards, Sunshine feels like an unusual half-way house. A Sunshine which pushed island exploration further to the fore might still not have worked, but at least it would feel uncompromised.

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Top of the charts for week ending 5 October 2002:

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