Reviews// Super Mario Galaxy

The balance between Nunchuk and Wii Remote use is weighted perfectly: you never get the feeling that you’re waving the Remote just for the sake of it, and analogue control of Mario is tight as ever. Even those old digital buttons get a look in, with A used to jump (three times for a born-in-64 triple jump) and Z and C used in conjunction with A to perform long jumps and so-called butt stomps.

So Mario has his full repertoire of moves from two generations ago, and he has all sorts of new Remote-specific abilities. In short, he’s the most capable plumber Nintendo has ever sent out.

For the record, it took me about ten minutes to fully adapt to the Nunchuk-plus-Remote control setup in Mario Galaxy. So if you only play an in-shop demo for nine minutes and walk away mystified, it’s because you probably needed another 60 seconds. Sorry, the point is, Super Mario Galaxy is joyously easy to play.

But, happily for long-time Nintendo fans who were beginning to suspect that Nintendo had given up entirely on producing real games with real gameplay challenges, Galaxy is not easy to complete. The trick Nintendo Tokyo has pulled here is quite an ingenious one: Galaxy gives you all the moves you’ll ever need and makes sure that it’s perfectly easy to use every last one of them, but then it takes the liberty of pushing Mario to his outer limits through a long string of stages that appear to have been designed by madmen. There’s something of The Prisoner about it: you’re trapped in a pretty messed-up place where nothing is ever quite what it seems, and you find yourself in ever more bizarre situations. In comparison, looking back, the level design in Super Mario 64 is tame.

The geographical shape of the game is also completely different from Super Mario 64. If Mario 64 was Liechtenstein, Mario Galaxy is the Greek Islands. Okay, that’s perhaps not a great analogy, but the point remains: Galaxy has countless little islands of playable territory, although some of them are big enough to completely lose their outer space backdrop, replacing it with blue skies. All tied together by a (throwaway) story of the Cosmos and Mario’s new found ability to fly through space. Even the central hub area, from which galaxies and star systems are accessed, is floating in space.

But instead of using this conceit to cobble together a big group of levels set in space, with clichéd astronaut themes and nods to Star Wars, Nintendo Tokyo uses the complete lack of continuity to form an absurdly incongruous collection of planets and galaxies, in many cases dispensing with – and, in the most inspired cases, playing around with – gravity and physics, sending Mario to pretty much every inhabitable space of the designers’ imagination.

Gradually increasing collected star totals are required before you can open new stages, by clicking on ‘?’ boxes which explode to reveal new galaxies. I won’t mention specific examples, but I will say the degree of variation between early stages is such that the moment immediately before clicking A to reveal a new galaxy is one of Mario Galaxy’s most curiously happy moments. Galaxy is chock full of Easter Eggs, but even just discovering new levels feels like a huge reward because of the richness of each previous area. It’s a winning cycle where you’ll want to keep playing until (and beyond) any important engagement or need for sleep.