Super Mario Sunshine Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 8/26/2022)

[Image from igdb.com]

Super Mario Sunshine

Developer: Nintendo

Publisher: Nintendo

Genre(s): 3D Platformer

Platforms: GCN

Release Date: July 19, 2002

If the premise of a summer vacation-themed mainline Mario game sounds bizarre to you, you’re not alone. For some reason, the launch of the Gamecube marked a slight experimental age for Nintendo as they catapulted their mascots in unorthodox directions after keeping things relatively straightforward on the N64. Their bold decisions drew a sizable bit of ire from fans still enraptured after the significant splash Nintendo made in the first 3D era. They wanted more of what was offered on the N64 but with better graphics, and they threw up in their mouths when Nintendo refused to accede to their expectations. Nintendo’s flagship series usually only represent a console generation with one title. The company delivered its uncompromising creations to its fanbase with the same blunt directness of a disgruntled cafeteria worker serving food. The disappointed reactions to The Wind Waker are the more notable example, but fans weren’t pleased with Super Mario Sunshine. If Nintendo were willing to piss off Zelda fans with the warmer cel-shaded aesthetic of the Wind Waker, then their Italian gold-winning stallion was not immune from being put through the test chamber either. Fans eventually came to adore The Wind Waker after the initial upset dissipated in time, but Super Mario Sunshine has always been somewhat of an acquired taste. Besides being bewildered by its odd premise, most people see Super Mario Sunshine as a sophomore slump, a rough spot between Super Mario 64 and every subsequent 3D Mario game released afterward. I might be blinded by nostalgia, but I’m of the opinion that Super Mario Sunshine is not an awkward road bump in 3D Mario’s evolution but an integral game in improving the 3D Mario formula.

It's possible that what initially upset people most about Super Mario Sunshine is setting the game away from Mario’s regular stomping grounds. Super Mario is a franchise marked by familiarity, and deviating so far from the Mushroom Kingdom will naturally make some fans weary. Nintendo created a new tropical playground for Mario to galavant about in Super Mario World but then backpedaled by claiming that Yoshi’s Island was an island territory owned by the Mushroom Kingdom set off the mainland shore. Mario’s fans eagerly look forward to seeing how gaming’s legendary crown land improves with the graphical progress of every subsequent entry, especially since it looked so coarse and lumpy in Super Mario 64. Nintendo, however, felt it better to give Mario’s vast, hilly homeland a well-deserved break to explore new territory. Sunny Isle Delfino is not only a vacation destination for Mario and company but a vacation for the player after exhausting the typical Mushroom Kingdom setting. While this island is not the same Koopa-infested, quasi-psychedelic commonwealth with a plethora of geographical terrains, the vacation resort theme still captures the light-hearted vibrancy that makes Mario so alluring. People often venture out to these places on their vacations because the sun-drenched shores exude a sense of breezy frivolity, something just as applicable to the accessible Super Mario franchise. Super Mario has always felt like a ray of sunshine, and now the franchise offers a setting that overtly revels in nothing but jaunty warmth.

Of course, the game wouldn’t be enticing if it merely simulated Mario on his vacation. This isn’t Nintendo’s take on the abysmal, mind-numbing Universal Studios Theme Park Adventure with Mario at the helm. As carefree as Mario’s venture to Isle Delfino was intended, he is swiftly reminded that rest and relaxation are never on his itinerary. Mario is swiftly accosted by the Isle Delfino police force as soon as he sets foot on the island. Mario has been falsely accused of vandalizing the island by littering it with a sticky, iridescent goop that may or not be noxious to the island’s denizens or have a detrimental influence on the environment. Nevertheless, Mario wrongfully gets the book thrown at him and is sentenced to clean up his supposed mess with a high-powered AI water pack called F.L.U.D.D. Until Mario meets his community service quota, he will not be able to leave the island. The real perpetrator of the crime is “Shadow Mario”, an uncanny doppelganger colored in a translucent deep blue. Mario attempts to track him down to prove his innocence, but the phantom clone decides to pull an obligatory power Mario series power move and kidnap Princess Peach. As silly and forced as the initial source of conflict is, anything is preferable to the most tired of Mario plots that Super Mario Sunshine quickly devolves into. Not even the sheer will to modify Mario’s typical attributes in this entry could keep Nintendo from burrowing back into their coziest of comfort zones.


The opening cutscene also could argue that too much ambition might be Super Mario Sunshine’s downfall. Hearing every character's speaking dialogue in the opening cutscene is sure to grab everyone’s attention and raise some eyebrows. Voice acting is not new to the Super Mario series. Princess Peach had a few spoken lines of dialogue in Super Mario 64, and who could forget Charles Martinet’s expressive grunts, hoots, and slightly racist warbles as Mario? In Super Mario Sunshine, the extent of voice work is amplified to the point where every character in the opening cutscene utters a competent line of dialogue in a cinematic fashion. The level of voice work is probably more shocking in retrospect. More voice work was a logical step to 3D Mario’s evolution because Super Mario Sunshine presents a clear reason why it never progressed past this point. Text dialogue in mainline Mario games is simple to a fault. In a series that insists on exhausting the same plot in each entry, a few lines of straightforward text is all the game needs to at least set the scene. Super Mario Sunshine’s problem is that delivering this curt dialogue vocally sounds hilariously amateurish, as if the script was written by a fourth grader and delivered by a voice cast that sounds like children doing impressions of adults. The voice work is exclusive to cutscenes and would often be criticized for inconsistency, but I’m thankful that the rest of the game regresses back to text accompanied by some vocal sounds for the characters. The voice acting here is a testament to the fact that some video game series shouldn’t have spoken dialogue for the sake of progress for the medium.

Super Mario Sunshine also doesn’t seem very stimulating considering its premise. What was Nintendo smoking when they thought their next mainline Mario title should involve him doing high-stakes janitorial work? If I didn’t know any better, I’d probably be revulsed at first glance, but do not be misled by starting impressions. Super Mario Sunshine is cut from the same cloth of the 3D collectathon platformer ilk that Super Mario 64 established. Isle Delfino is separated into seven unique levels, with the hub of Delfino Plaza serving as a reposeful middle ground between them. Each level has eight objectives that will reward the player with the core collectible that must be heavily accumulated to progress through the game. To fit the tropical theme, the series star icon has been shifted into a sun-shaped “shine sprite,” which carries the same value. 3D platformer fans can rejoice that Super Mario Sunshine is another branch in the line of Super Mario 64’s offspring and that the sludge Mario must wash away only serves as an inconvenient obstacle to Mario completing his objectives. While Super Mario Sunshine might sound exactly like Super Mario 64 on a mechanical basis despite its quirks, the game deviates slightly in its direction. Instead of stumbling upon the main collectibles by exploring the stages, the titled shine sprites in Super Mario Sunshine are acquired in numerical order. Shine Sprite #1 of the level acts as the first “episode,” and every subsequent episode continues a loose narrative of how the area becomes cleaner due to Mario’s influence. Opening the level even gives the player a vague overview of what their objective is and where it is located. Bianco Hills is being terrorized by a giant, flamboyant, untethered, speedo-wearing Piranha Plant named Petey Piranha, who Mario fights twice to expunge him from the quaint village. The haunted hotel that overlooks Sirena Beach is open to Mario indefinitely after erecting it in the level’s first episode, and cleansing Noki Bay’s toxic waters is an ongoing arc in its respective level. One might argue that this linear approach to the levels is restrictive and streamlined, but the progression works with the game’s narrative. Each area gradually worsens as the player collects the shine sprites, meaning Mario has completed his sentence-driven service. Completing a more proportioned task also better compliments the boot-out system, something jarring from Super Mario 64 that Super Mario Sunshine continues to employ.

I always marvel in disbelief that the Gamecube was only one console generation after the N64. 3D graphics evolved past the growing pains of endearing amateurishness to a standard of believability in a measly five years. The transition between the fifth and sixth console generations is the largest leap of graphical progress that gaming has and will ever see. Many fifth-generation franchises that continued into the sixth generation were noticeably more refined in their sequels, but none of them highlighted a contrast so starkly as Super Mario 64 and Sunshine. Super Mario 64 was primitive even compared to all of its 64-bit contemporaries, the oldest and ugliest out of the rest of the ugly ducklings. The revelatory transformation of this foul-looking fowl wasn’t a surprise, but how radically it happened and in the short amount of time it did. Rudimentary edges that made the foundational polygons visible in Super Mario 64 have been sanded off to silky, buttery smoothness. Everything in the background, from the tall bell towers in Delfino Plaza, the countryside homes of Bianco Hills, to the scalable palm trees of Pianta Village, is discernible even from the furthest points away. Objects in the foreground like various fruits or those manholes with shine sprites painted on them no longer require squinting and or the use of one’s imagination to effectively determine what they could be either. Crashing water from the beaches flows and ripples to simulate its movement in real life, and enemies seem more vigorous and imposing. Mario and his friends went from looking like a child who drew and modeled them to resembling a professional artist's rendition. Super Mario Sunshine is the first Mario game that resembles a fully realized rendition of what fans visualized Mario and his world for several years. It only took the second 3D generation to make it a reality. Isle Delfino is a gorgeous resort that uses the higher graphical fidelity to effectively convey not only that colorful, light-hearted atmosphere of being on vacation but what the Mario series exudes in general. The series has been this effervescent since Super Mario World 2 on the SNES.

It’s no secret that I was unsatisfied with how rigid and unresponsive Mario’s controls were in Super Mario 64. The game could look like a microwaved claymation Christmas special all it wants, but I draw the line at Mario controlling like a paralyzed 1960s android. Mario’s acrobatics in Super Mario 64 was ambitiously varied but using felt far too stilted with the primeval 3D controls. Only one generation later, Mario executes the same moveset with the grace of a ballerina. Mario can still soar to extraordinary heights upon three consecutively timed jumps, but with a better sense of trajectory to avoid missteps with overwhelming velocity. His super backflip can no longer be done by crouching, but leaping backward after building momentum feels second nature now. With an additional spin move in mid-air, the player can do by playing with the control stick. Wall jumping no longer requires pinpoint precision, and the game is more lenient with penalizing the player by bumping Mario’s dome on platforms. Punching and kicking are no longer a part of Mario’s offensive means, but the more natural jumping controls diminish the necessity to use them. Mario’s ground-pounding move makes its gilded return as Mario’s ass makes more violent shockwaves on the shores of Isle Delfino than it ever did in his homeland. A new trick Mario learned for his vacation was the slide move, something used similarly to the roll move in 3D Zelda games that the player will most likely use constantly to increase their momentum. Mario looks like a mental patient constantly leaping on his crotch, but doing so feels liberating. The shackles that Super Mario 64 put on Mario’s standard mobility were a shame considering Mario was the one who revolutionized video game controls. Super Mario Sunshine evolves the chubby plumber’s moveset established by Super Mario 64 so drastically that he’s never felt more comfortable and capable, not even in any of his 2D outings. The player will feel inclined to bounce around with Mario and feel as gleeful as he does.

Not only is F.L.U.D.D. Mario’s tool for power washing, the jet-powered backpack also complements Mario’s improved portability. The standard nozzle on the pack will shoot water upward with the player able to change its direction and trajectory to aim, but not its angle. When Mario needs to squirt something quickly with a little less accuracy, the player can lightly tap the button to eject water in lighter spurts, which is what the player will be doing to deal with most enemies and goop directly in front of them on the ground. The base nozzle is mainly used for cleaning and offensive purposes even though it can turn the field into a slip and slide, but F.L.U.D.D. is equipped with three other alternate nozzles to further highlight the capabilities of the device. The hover nozzle is available once Mario receives the water pack and is, in my opinion, the most useful of the secondary nozzles. Once Mario is airborne, the nozzle will propel Mario over in the air for a brief period by shooting two spouts of water at the ground, either to maintain height or cross over a gap. Not only does this nozzle grant Mario greater traversal distance, but it will also aid in course correcting the player if they make a mistake with platforming. The other two alternate nozzles eventually unlock by finding their respective boxes in the field. The rocket nozzle will build up water and shoot Mario upward to staggering heights upon climax. The turbo nozzle acts as a speed booster whose wicked propulsion will accelerate Mario across the water like a makeshift jetski or create a powerful enough force to break through blocked-off doorways. Unlike the hover nozzle, I only find the other two nozzles useful occasionally. After using the other two nozzles for the one situation, it would’ve been nice to have every nozzle ready in Mario’s arsenal after using them for the first time. Some may argue that juggling through four different nozzles via the X button would be a pain, but the inconvenience of finding a crate with the hover nozzle after using the others proves to be far more vexing. Besides that one grievance, F.L.U.D.D. and his wide utility are a welcome addition to the Mario franchise, for it greatly expands on the fun factor of Mario’s already aerodynamic range of movement. Plus, he limits his vocal input on the field to a minimum, unlike some of Link’s partners.

Super Mario Sunshine also gets a familiar visitor to the island that I think most fans will appreciate. Yoshi’s minimal presence in Super Mario 64 as a completionist easter egg is one of the most vocal complaints that even diehard fans of the game share, so Super Mario Sunshine rectified this by giving everyone’s favorite green sidekick in Mario (fuck Luigi, I guess) more screentime. After catching Shadow Mario with a Yoshi egg in the hub, the egg will hatch the spry, puffy-cheeked dinosaur. As per usual, Yoshi’s stomach is rumbling, and he must devour everything in sight like a hungry black hole. Besides grappling with enemies with his whip-like tongue, the Yoshi’s found in Super Mario Sunshine must subsist off of an appetite for fruits found on the island, lest he dies of scurvy or something. Pressing the button usually reserved for F.L.U.D.D. while riding on the Yoshi will make it spit a jetstream of juice as long and violent as blasting water with F.L.U.D.D. Yoshi’s juice comes in three different colors depending on the last fruit he consumed, but it all does the same thing. Like the F.L.U.D.D. nozzles, Yoshi is only useful in certain circumstances. Missions that include the adorable, multicolored beast usually involve vomiting juice on fish to transform them into platforms or dissolving a pulpy growth obscuring a passageway. Yoshi sure isn’t intended to accentuate Mario’s range of movement because his flutter kick feels uncomfortably restrained. It also doesn’t help that in a game surrounded by water, Yoshi will disintegrate when he comes in contact with it like he’s the Wicked Witch of the West. Most fans see the inclusion of Yoshi as a mark of an exceptional Mario title, but his presence in Super Mario Sunshine is more of a hassle than a perk. The sunny, tropical setting of Isle Delfino should fit Yoshi like a glove, but Yoshi’s awkwardness and haphazard utility makes him seem like a fish out of water here.

But what is Super Mario Sunshine if not an instance of a stranger in a strange land? As unfamiliar as Isle Delfino is to Mario and every franchise fan, the island’s more concise and concrete design makes this vacation destination more comfortable. Super Mario 64’s hub was set in the Mushroom Kingdom, but can we say that any of the various paintings acting as the levels were teleporting Mario to locations situated just around the corner? Most of Super Mario 64’s levels were playgrounds that had familiar attributes but were suspended in ethereal oblivion that obscured any surroundings. Isle Delfino, on the other hand, is mapped out accordingly, and I’m not referring to the crudely drawn map in the pause menu. Mario warps to each area via a passageway in the wonderfully detailed Delfino Plaza hub, but the player can at least marginally discern where the level is located about everywhere else on the island. The Ferris wheel in Pinna Park is seen clear as day from Bianco Hills, and the Serena Beach hotel is so close to Pinna Park that it seems feasible to swim over to it. Isle Delfino is much more of a realized world than any iteration of the Mushroom Kingdom. Isle Delfino would make for a fine open world if only it didn’t conflict with the episodic progression of each level. I was always impressed at how the developers constructed a smattering of different levels under a specific theme without making the game boring and formulaic. Repeating a beach level with both Gelato Beach and Serena Beach may point to exhausting the constraints of the theme, but both settings exude a different aura and offer completely different missions (and it helps that the focal point of Serena Beach is the hotel in the center for most of the missions). Missions, where Mario uncovers a secret passageway where he must do some linear platforming to get to a shine sprite at the end, may arguably ruin the consistency. Still, I choose to see them as portals to more surreal, incomprehensible dimensions like Homer in that one Treehouse of Horror episode. Isle Delfino is the first time Mario engrosses the player with the setting, a cohesive world that greatly achieves its intended atmosphere.

Ironically for a game whose setting presents itself as gleefully tranquil, Super Mario Sunshine is the most difficult 3D Mario game. Despite all of the refinement the developers made to Mario’s movement with the added crutch of F.L.U.D.D., it does not make for a smoother Mario experience. I commented that the Mushroom Kingdom in Super Mario 64 felt like it was greased up like a slip-and-slide, causing Mario to trip and tumble to his death numerous times. Now, I’m convinced that Mario needs to invest in more adhesive-friendly shoes. Mario is still clumsy, but it only matters in certain instances, like the secret area challenges or the sparsely-spaced giant mushrooms underneath Pianta Village. Water surrounds the resort and acts as a safety net whenever Mario missteps and careens to the bottom. This is why more platforming-centric levels like Ricco Harbor and Noki Bay involve ascending tall cliffs for a steep penalty. However, starting again from the drink is only a mere inconvenience. Instead of being subject to a constant barrage of slapstick deaths, Super Mario Sunshine is more calculating with its punishments. Some episodes across every level involve some of the hardest tasks Mario has ever had to accomplish. The bloopers Mario surfs on in the red coin mission of Ricco Harbor are perilously fast, and one tiny collision will kill Mario on impact even after he’s collected every red coin. In Gelato Beach, Mario must roll a mammoth-sized watermelon down a hill and across a beach full of ravenous Cataquacks who will pop the overgrown fruit like a balloon and make Mario retrieve the watermelon from its origin point. A secret-themed level in Pianta Village involves navigating the chasms in between the blocks of ground via being chucked by the burly dopey Pianta natives. Unless the player possesses pinpoint accuracy and a Ph.D. in physics, the dopey islanders will heave Mario to oblivion. Hidden shine sprites around Isle Delfino, like the poorly designed Pachinko machine and ruthless lilypad section, will disintegrate players' spirits as quickly as the leaf does in the toxic stream. Super Mario 64 was inherently unfair due to being unrefined, but the more deliberate difficulty seen in these episodes exposes the developers as cruel sadists.

Do you want to know what makes these levels especially sadistic? Most of them are required to finish the game. Super Mario Sunshine forsakes the cumulative total of main collectibles needed for progress. It forces the player to experience every area's episode up until the seventh episode involving chasing down Shadow Mario and spraying him like a shower in the county jail. One of the greatest reliefs of Super Mario 64, or most other 3D platformers, is that the player has a choice of which areas to explore while ignoring the less savory ones as long as their amount of that collectible meets a quota by the end. Super Mario Sunshine’s streamlined methods show conspicuous holes that raise many issues. What incentive do I have to play the secret levels or collect the blue coins if only certain sprites count towards unlocking the game’s final level? Why should I waste my time with the eighth episode of an area when completing the seventh episode was all I needed? Shouldn’t each of the same collectibles be of equal value? Until a certain point in the game, more of the game does unlock after certain milestones. Multiples of five shine sprites will unlock a new level until the player reaches ten sprites when a cannon becomes available to blast Mario to Pinna Park. The first episode reveals that Shadow Mario is Bowser’s son Bowser JR, the obvious favorite of the Koopa King’s children, considering he shares his father’s name, is being manipulated by Bowser to capture Peach under the guise that Peach is his mother. This interaction turns into a heated Jerry Springer moment where Peach merely ponders this revelation instead of denying it, and Mario gets so angry that he power sprays with F.L.U.D.D. her like the whore she is (only kidding about that last part). After this seminal scene, the game’s progression flatlines, and the player must find the remaining areas through curiosity, breaking the game’s overall pacing. Forced progression with this type of game contradicts the initiative of the collectathon platformer and is the main inferior aspect to Super Mario Sunshine compared to Super Mario 64.

It’s difficult to state whether or not Super Mario Sunshine improves on boss battles either. Raising the bar from Super Mario 64’s stale, repetitive bouts is not a hard task. Still, I’m not confident in calling most of Super Mario Sunshine’s duels “boss battles” by traditional definitions. Petey Piranha and King Boo provide the standard 3D platformer fight of waiting for a weak point to exploit three times, but the others are oddly executed. The electrifying Phantamanta that eclipses the hotel in Serena Beach divides into smaller, sprightly versions when sprayed, and the fight ends when every speck of the wispy ray scattered around the beach is hosed down. Gooper Blooper’s tentacles can be brutally severed by Mario, but only pulling on his mouth in the center to the point of snapping will defeat him, which proves to be an easier loophole in fighting him. Bowser’s robotic visage at Pinna Park has to be shot down with rockets while riding a rollercoaster, and the eel that causes Noki Bay to become sickly doesn’t attempt to eat Mario while he cleans his rotten teeth. The final fight against Bowser doesn’t involve physical contact like pulling his tail, but toppling over the giant, suspended bathtub he’s soaking himself in with rocket-boosted ass crashes at the four corners of its foundation. I appreciate the ingenuity of these encounters, but they are so unconventional that they lack the impact that a typical boss battle tends to have.

Summer vacation sucks, or that’s my clever tagline for Super Mario Sunshine. Surprisingly, a game involving Mario cleaning up sticky sullage on an unfamiliar island after being framed for a crime he didn’t commit doesn’t suck. As odd as Super Mario Sunshine appears, it still emanates the pervasive charm of the Super Mario series. Isle Delfino is as lively and captivating as the classic Mario setting we’re all familiar with and is the closest a Mario setting has come to coherent world-building, a vital step in progress for level design in a Mario game. Mario, as a character, literally makes leaps in progress by feeling as fluid as the water that jets out of his mechanical backpack buddy. He finally looks like we’ve all imagined him as a realistic human being. As much as Super Mario Sunshine attempts to separate itself from Super Mario 64, I can’t help but compare the two based on how radically the former builds on the latter’s foundation. 3D Mario’s footing that Super Mario 64 invented is reinvigorated to a point of not only competency but to a degree of excellency. Super Mario Sunshine’s creative ambition may have proved too big for its britches at certain points, but besides a few egregiously broken challenges, Super Mario Sunshine's differences preserve its intrigue. It’s funny to me that the irregular Super Mario Sunshine is a far more exemplary 3D Mario title than the game that translated all of Mario’s familiar hallmarks into 3D, but that’s the beauty of a sequel.