A Hat in Time? GET OUTTA HERE! We don't love you any more. Super Mario Odyssey is the one true god of 3D exploration based platformers. Yes, you can become just about anything. You can be a fish. You can be a tree. You can be a goombas (sic). Never mind that though, because Mario controls like fine silk, if silk was a liquid you could control with your mind, via your arms attached to controllers. There's so many ways to keep your momentum going. You can use so many unintended (or maybe they were intended) solutions to getting to various places, and it feels great doing it!
Play this as soon as you can. Switches are a lot easier to find now, so hop to it!
It is sooo good though! So good! And yes, like Banjo Kazooie they forgo the "single star at a time" system. You can stay in a world as long as you like, keeping the flow of the level going. Also, like Banjo Tooie, extra lives are now gone. Recent Mario games had already more or less negated the need to worry about lives by just tossing them out constantly (as well as allowing you to save the number of lives you have when you stop, which started with the Mario Advance remasters), so this is basically Nintendo officially acknowledging how pointless they have been for a while now anyway. It's a shame that familiar green mushroom and the accompanying chime aren't around, but onward to bigger and better things!
Minor quibbles:
No Hub World. The Odyssey ship you fly around in could have been a neat hub world, much like the Galaxy in Mario Galaxy, but it's basically a small room filled with mementos of your journey (and yes, that includes the occasional snow globe). That said, I don't miss having one that much. The individual worlds are rich and varied enough to provide all the fun I need. Maybe a hub world like Peach's Castle was never really needed for games like this. It could have been a fun bonus, but the game is amazing even without it.
Motion controls! This game forces them in where they aren't wanted or even remotely useful. Yes, they are "optional", but set up in such a way that the waggle is a more effective version of the moves you can do with a button. For example, you can frog jump with B, or SUPER frog jump with a waggle. Just a waggle, I should add. That's it. Since there's 3 unused "duplicate" buttons on the switch controller, there's no reason they couldn't map those to the "waggly" superior versions of various moves, except that Nintendo wants to justify motion controls in all their mainline games. I say I'm fine that they HAVE motion controls, but only use them in games where it makes sense or adds something to it.
Oh one last thing, the inconsistent art style. For the most part, the game has a cartoony look to it that fits what you expect in a Mario game. If you haven't played it, this is still the same world Mario games all take place in. There's no "Mario took a warp pipe to our world" component at all, he's just travelling his own world. That's why it's so odd that New Donk City goes for realistically proportioned characters. It's also odd to see realistic bones and dinosaurs in one of the earlier levels. There was a slight issue with this disparity in Breath of the Wild, where the cartoony characters kind of clashed with the more realistic backgrounds, but it's really on display in the city. Pauline aside, everyone there looks like a GTA character, and it's weeeird! I'm not the first to mention this, and I won't be the last, but their best bet was to go with townspeople that looked more like cartoon characters like Mario and Pauline. They can still look like they stepped right out of the 1930's on their way to the Daily Star to work with Clark Kent or whatever, just make them look cartoony! This is something that a rather significant asset patch could resolve, but I doubt Nintendo will. As it stands, it's just an Odyssey oddity.
From what I hear the game is really, really good... unless you want a challenge that is, in which case it's kind of a disappointment and I guess your favorite 3d Mario game is still Sunshine. :p But yeah, it sounds pretty great.
No, that was OB1. Mine's still Mario 64. The challenge isn't exactly high up there, admittedly, but there's still lots of challenges here and there, places you'll lose a few lives dealing with. Dying now brings you back to checkpoint flags, and you lose a trivial number of coins, which are just used to buy fun little cosmetic items. I'd say the challenge is about on par with Mario 64.
Sorry, I meant a general 'you', not you in specific. Right, OB1 did like Sunshine a lot... wish he'd come back, he's missed. Oh well. (That's the modern internet, most forums are fading...)
The rest of that sounds good, though. It's as hard as Mario 64, really? From what I heard I thought it'd be easier, as I remember Mario 64 being reasonably challenging, but sure, it's not one of the hardest Mario games from what I remember, though some of the Stars are hard and I never got anywhere near all of them. I'd need to pay Mario 64 again to be sure, though, it's been a long time...
The first time I played Mario 64 it was VERY hard, but I believe that's owed to it being the very first 3D platformer I ever played. It was all brand new then, and I was basically learning how to play video games all over again. By the time Mario 64 DS came along, it was a cakewalk for me.
So since I got it a few days ago I've been playing this game, and I'm now several kingdoms in. I just went through the water kingdom, and now am at the forest one, of the two you can do in either order; I chose water first. It's a very good game that is a lot of fun to play. Exploring levels, doing all the various things in each of them, and finding the many moons you get as a result is great fun. There's a lot of variety in mission types too, which is very nice. Oh, and the graphics are fantastic. Very much like the Wii U Mario games, this game has a great visual style which it sticks to, and it works. It's a very polished game and I like it a lot.
For negatives though, I guess I want to mention a few things. First, when you have to jump on enemies it can be kind of a pain sometimes because there's no way to target them. You've just got to jump and hope you land on them, which can be difficult in 3d. Galaxy fixed that problem by being mostly melee-combat focused, but this game requires both melee combat with your hat and jumps, without any new ideas to make the jumping-on-small-things-in-3d issue any easier. I've been hit by those stupid tiny yellow Goombas quite a few times now, and getting health back is a bit harder in this game than it has been in most 3d Mario games before it. Now, this difficulty is countered with the low death penalty, so when I do die I don't get set back far at all. It's just a little annoying sometimes. You have a homing attack for your hat, but that doesn't always kill enemies depending on which kind they are. Or maybe I'm missing something, there are a bunch more moves than the ones I'm using...
Beyond that though, I have two things. While it is, as I say above, a bit challenging at times so far, for the most part it is true that the difficulty level mostly isn't too high. I have died sometimes, but between the minimal punishment for dying and the mostly-forgiving design, making progress is quick. As you get more used to the moves avoiding damage probably becomes more natural, too. So yes, this game isn't hard. It's no Mario Sunshine. That's okay though, not every game needs to be hard... for that we always have Mario Maker.
On that note though, the other "issue" I have is that this game isn't as innovative as 3D Land/World and Mario Maker are. Odyssey is something I, like a lot of people, had wanted -- finally, a third open-level exploration-based 3d Mario game -- but because it is that, with a few changes such as not going for a specific objective each time you're in a level but instead collecting stuff as you go, it doesn't feel as new and original as last-gen's new Mario games do. I'm not saying 3D World is better than this game, I haven't played enough to say, but while I like this game a lot I'm not having quite the same 'this game is amazing!' reaction I had when I finally played that one. Maybe expectations have a factor here too, though, considering that Odyssey is getting much higher praise than 3D World gets. Anyway, they're both fantastic. I don't know which is better. It's no Mario Maker either of course, Odyssey is a very different kind of game but this is a very different kind of game from that so that is fine. I hope the Switch eventually does get a Mario Maker game though, that thing is one of Nintendo's best ideas in a long time and I really love it... sometimes the levels you play are awful and sometimes they are good (but of then they are way too hard), but regardless Mario Maker's always interesting.
As for Odyssey, though, it's a fun adventure through some weird kingdoms. If that's "all" it is that's just fine, it's something we haven't seen in a long time and it's clearly done really, really well.
I will say yet again, though, that Nintendo's obsession with "rescue the princess" and "you can only play as Mario (in games that aren't 3D World)" isn't okay. It never WAS okay, but after the progress they seemed to be showing with that game it's very disappointing that they have entirely backslid back to bad old Mario-only, rescue-Peach junk. Sure, they try to mix things up with this whole "wedding" theme, but it's just a new coat of paint on the same terrible old story. Fortunately the gameplay makes up for it.
Oh yeah, and to finish on a positive note, Nintendo 3d platformer water levels are usually pretty fun, and the one I was just in is no exception! I liked that level a lot, swimming around was great and the missions and sidequests to find moons were good stuff too.