#SUPER MARIO ODYSSEY TWO FULL#
#SUPER MARIO ODYSSEY TWO SERIES#

#SUPER MARIO ODYSSEY TWO SERIES#

All of this gameplay is fun, but stylistically, it’s a bunch of very, very odd pairings for a series that usually gets its aesthetics perfectly right.Īgain, neither of these are issues that have all that much impact on my enjoyment of the game. If every map was a wildly different style, maybe this would work better for me, but it seems like a large cluster of maps are “traditional” Mario maps while some blend the concepts (the forest’s decayed buildings with cartoony bad guys) and others are just way out there (New Donk, the dragon boss fight, polygon food land). And those New Donk City residents just seem so out of place in a Mario game, it’s hard to get over, and even weirder when these universes collide, like seeing a cab stuck in the sand and a trim man in a grey suit bemoaning his problem while surrounded by cartoony sombrero-wearing skeletons. Something about this just…doesn’t work for me.

Or for Mario to throw his hat at a Jurassic Park-style T-Rex after 30 years of his go-to dinosaur being Yoshi. But I maintain that it’s very weird to see Bowser standing on top of a dragon that literally is rendered like Alduin from Skyrim. They’re all a blast, especially New Donk City which is a ton of fun and the most engaging place to explore out of anywhere in the game. I’m not saying these areas are not fun to play. Putting all these together in one game feels…weird to me. But then sometimes the game goes way in the opposite direction, like with the food-based world where everything is practically just textureless polygons. And of course there’s New Donk City, a hilarious, but visually bizarre space where we realize that Mario is a “different” type of human, as the citizens there are tall and lean and “normal” in a way we’ve never seen across any part of this series. At one point, you fight a very not-cartoony dragon in a map that looks like it could be pulled from Dark Souls.

#SUPER MARIO ODYSSEY TWO FULL#

The forest level is full of decaying ruins that look like it’s straight out of a Destiny Crucible map. But then you get into some pretty weird spaces soon enough. The snow, beach and island levels for instance. Many of the worlds follow pretty similar design principles. While I get that this is supposed to be a trip around the world to a variety of exotic locales, the end result is a mish-match of style and textures and graphics that often feel like wearing plaid with polka-dots. This one might be controversial, but I just…don’t know about some of the design choices made in Super Mario Odyssey.

Super mario odyssey two