Pros: way to many to put here
Cons: camera problems in a few areas.
The bottom line: Unidentified Flying Plumber
I got Super Mario Galaxy a couple of months played it solidly for a week and beat the game, I didn’t review it because I didn’t complete everything. Of course then the challenge level went up and with Christmas so did my schedule so I never got a chance to quite to everything and still haven’t because of the length of the game. This game is pretty much perfect in a way a Mario platformer should be.

Now this title has been called the true successor to Mario 64, now Mario Sunshine is by no means a bad game (a lot of gamers have been bad mouthing now that galaxy is out.) but it lacked one thing that all great Mario games have had since Mario 3. That was in the challenge factor, in a Mario game you only have to torture yourself if you want to. In Super Mario Bros 3 level 7 was harder then 8 but finding all the flutes meant you could bypass all the hard stuff, Super Mario World could be done by completing only 13 of the 96 worlds which was easy, however getting past Tubular on the other hand wasn’t easy. And Mario 64 you only needed 70 of the 120 meaning you could get them all done before even worrying about doing the top levels were the worlds were really hard. But you were rewarded if you didn’t skip the stages and explored in all of those worlds so Mario games have always had an easy to beat but a wide world with lots of challenges if you wanted to see everything. Sunshine though didn’t have that in it, it required you to do some of the most frustrating obstacle course stages and you couldn’t get around them because regardless of how many secret shines you found you were stuck in till you completed the Bowser Jr part of each stage. I was worried about the same type of frustration in Mario Galaxy, luckily it’s non existent. Ok enough on my rant on why Sunshine was a screw up on with the Galaxy review.

Story.
Mario is off to visit the Princess during her star festival, only to have Bowser show up and rip her castle right out of the sky and take it into outer space. Mario tries to stop him but he gets thrown off the ship when it reaches outer space. Luckily he is rescued by Princess Roselina who runs an outer space observatory. The good news is that Princess Roselina ship can take Mario anywhere in the cosmos he wants to go, the bad news is that Bowser stole all the stars from her observatory and now it’s powerless and guess who just been volunteer to track them all down.

Ok so it’s another rescue the princess story line what were you expecting from a Mario game, to us this may be a repetitive story line, to Mario its job security.

Graphics.
Yeah the Wii is no Xbox360 it doesn’t mean that the graphics it can pull off aren’t anything short of impressive. The opening stage where Mario journeys to the castle at night is a beautiful scene with the area from Mario 64 being redone. But that’s just the opening stage the rest of the game is beautiful to. Yes the planetoids stages are there but there are also huge stages with a theme. You have haunted house stages, beach stages, ice stages and all of them are done beautiful and so different from the last. My only gripe would have to be with the camera though and while it is mainly a fixed position, sometimes though the camera seems either to far away or won’t move enough to get the job done. It’s rare though but it does happen.

Sound.
We get some new music that doesn’t sound sci fi actually fits the space motif rather well. There is also the same Mario classic music, the toy time galaxy has the original Super Mario Bros theme remixed, there is the under ground theme in several levels. And to add a blast from the past SMB3 obstacle course levels music has made a come back for a lot of Galaxy’s obstacle course.

Gameplay.
Mario Galaxy is a huge game but it’s initial set up is a lot like Mario 64. Roselina’s space ship starts out with no power so your only option is the stages in the Terrace room, once you collect more stars from each stage more stages will open.

The worlds Mario will explore to are a bit different then what was encounter in Mario 64, while Mario 64 world were huge and open, Mario Galaxy’s world are big but the path ways you travel are predetermine for each star. Mario will be able to shoot himself out of special stars that will lead him to a new area for a stage and were they take him differs from stage to stage. Don’t think that this is an excuse for sitting on your Loral’s because it isn’t, each stage has at least one hidden star that can be found only by looking off the beaten path. Despite the predetermine courses in the level there isn’t once were I felt the game lost it’s sense of wonder and exploration because of this.

What the game opens up in it’s term of gameplay is it’s stage design, if you only seen videos it does look like planet to planet hopping is the only thing in the game. It isn’t there are ghosts house stages, a giant desert, and a stage filled with toy boxes. And lets not forget the boss stages there bigger and more dramatic then anything in Mario 64. You will know what I mean when you’re getting to the final boss battle with King Koopa and your running through a cylinder of lava dodging bullets. The game plays with gravity in ways that is never seen, each platform or planet often has it’s own gravity so you might think your jumping out into space but you fall on the other side of the platform or get pulled onto another platforms gravity. In stages like these Nintendo put in black holes to tell when jumping may lead you to something special or into suck down into awesome gravity of a black hole that will lead to certain doom. My favorite example of gravity would be again the toy time level were each color block at gravity working a different way jumping off the blocks on to another could lead to entirely different results then what was expected.

So how hard is this game, a lot of game reviewers have claimed this to be the easiest Mario game ever made. It depends on what you’re after. Saving the Princess is no big sweat has the game provides plenty of extra lives, with a toad walking around the main hub offering 5 lives if you talk to him. And you only need 50 star bits to get extra lives and unlike coins in previous games these can be collected from a distance just by pointing the wii remote at them. So getting the 60 stars needed to rescue the Princess can be done in most gamers sleep. Now getting everything and unlocking the extra Luigi mode which I haven’t gotten done yet is a whole heck of a lot harder, expect bald spots and hair ripping on this one. Why because of the cosmic comet stages. While Nintendo took a lot of coin collecting aspects out of this platformer expect them to be put back in when you challenge a purple comet has you have to find 100 coins in an area before time runs out. If that’s not hard enough try challenging some of the strongest stage bosses in this game with only 1 hit if this doesn’t send wii motes flying in anger nothing will. This is just how a Mario game should be rescuing the Princess easy, finding everything uber hard and Mario Galaxy more then enough meets the demand.

Final Recommendation.
One of the best games on the Wii and the best Mario game to come out in ages. Mario Galaxy is a true successor of Mario 64 and offers a whole lot of fun and creates a platformer that is more then just running around collecting coins and other crap.