13th November 2023, 6:27 PM
(This post was last modified: 13th November 2023, 6:29 PM by A Black Falcon.)
I've been playing the game off and on here and there, so I'm still not at the end. I did finally finish world four yesterday, so I'm getting farther, and certainly will finish this game. It is good.
The best thing about this game is something I've mentioned already, how great some of the level concepts are. With new enemies, new things in the levels to interact with such as the green flowers that cause some kind of change near you in the stage, and more, a lot of stages in this game are inventive and quite fun to work through. Are they challenging, a bit, but the difficulty here is mostly moderate. Even so, though, it's fun enough that that's alright most of the time. There are some levels that I wish were harder, but by this point in the game more of them present enough challenge, and the new ideas you see in so many stages are great. I like returning ideas we haven't seen in a long time, too, such as the levels in the cave stages with those sticky zones that you can move through, like the sap in Mario Land 2. It's really cool to see those back. I'm quite liking the game for sure, it's one of the better games this year.
On the other hand, the worst thing about this game so far is something that some reviews rightly criticize: the boss fights! What happened here, how did they actually publish this game with the boss fights as absurdly awful, or ENTIRELY ABSENT, as they are?
Because yes, of the five worlds I've seen in the game so far -- worlds one through four and the hub world which has a bunch of levels in it too -- only two have had bosses. The other two don't have a boss at the end, after the last regular level in the level it just randomly ends and says "hey you win here's the reward item!" even though you didn't fight any kind of boss. At all. I know that 2d Mario games don't usually exactly have the best boss fights -- Mario is the best platforming series for its platforming, not for its great boss fights, that's for sure -- but at least all previous 2d Mario games HAD a boss at the end of each world. This one does not, and it's a meaningful flaw in the game.
As for the two worlds that did have bosses, both are Bowser Jr. I know that's not the last fight with BJR either, he will appear again later. This game has very few bosses and the few it has are, such as BJR and Bowser, re-used from previous games with minimal change. How do you fight Bowser Jr.? You jump on his head a couple of times. After each hit he spins around and sometimes throws stuff at you, exactly like previous games. They try to mix things up slightly with a 'corrupted' version of him on the last hit, but it doesn't change much. Sure, there sometimes is some kind of modification to the space, but the few boss fights I have seen in this game are every bit as bad and unoriginal as the regular levels are good. It's disappointing that this otherwise quite good game puts in so little effort in its boss encounters. And I thought previous 2d Mario bosses were weak, at least those existed!
As for the voice acting, it is disappointing that they removed Charles Martinet and replaced him with some random new person who isn't as good, but as much as I am unhappy with Nintendo for that, I've never been one to care much about voice acting in games, honestly. As long as it's done decently, or alternately is entertainingly awful, I'm fine with it. I've almost never cared about the names of videogame voice actors. Even so though, Mario's voice is one of the few that I think does matter, and yeah, this guy is a definite downgrade.
The best thing about this game is something I've mentioned already, how great some of the level concepts are. With new enemies, new things in the levels to interact with such as the green flowers that cause some kind of change near you in the stage, and more, a lot of stages in this game are inventive and quite fun to work through. Are they challenging, a bit, but the difficulty here is mostly moderate. Even so, though, it's fun enough that that's alright most of the time. There are some levels that I wish were harder, but by this point in the game more of them present enough challenge, and the new ideas you see in so many stages are great. I like returning ideas we haven't seen in a long time, too, such as the levels in the cave stages with those sticky zones that you can move through, like the sap in Mario Land 2. It's really cool to see those back. I'm quite liking the game for sure, it's one of the better games this year.
On the other hand, the worst thing about this game so far is something that some reviews rightly criticize: the boss fights! What happened here, how did they actually publish this game with the boss fights as absurdly awful, or ENTIRELY ABSENT, as they are?
Because yes, of the five worlds I've seen in the game so far -- worlds one through four and the hub world which has a bunch of levels in it too -- only two have had bosses. The other two don't have a boss at the end, after the last regular level in the level it just randomly ends and says "hey you win here's the reward item!" even though you didn't fight any kind of boss. At all. I know that 2d Mario games don't usually exactly have the best boss fights -- Mario is the best platforming series for its platforming, not for its great boss fights, that's for sure -- but at least all previous 2d Mario games HAD a boss at the end of each world. This one does not, and it's a meaningful flaw in the game.
As for the two worlds that did have bosses, both are Bowser Jr. I know that's not the last fight with BJR either, he will appear again later. This game has very few bosses and the few it has are, such as BJR and Bowser, re-used from previous games with minimal change. How do you fight Bowser Jr.? You jump on his head a couple of times. After each hit he spins around and sometimes throws stuff at you, exactly like previous games. They try to mix things up slightly with a 'corrupted' version of him on the last hit, but it doesn't change much. Sure, there sometimes is some kind of modification to the space, but the few boss fights I have seen in this game are every bit as bad and unoriginal as the regular levels are good. It's disappointing that this otherwise quite good game puts in so little effort in its boss encounters. And I thought previous 2d Mario bosses were weak, at least those existed!
As for the voice acting, it is disappointing that they removed Charles Martinet and replaced him with some random new person who isn't as good, but as much as I am unhappy with Nintendo for that, I've never been one to care much about voice acting in games, honestly. As long as it's done decently, or alternately is entertainingly awful, I'm fine with it. I've almost never cared about the names of videogame voice actors. Even so though, Mario's voice is one of the few that I think does matter, and yeah, this guy is a definite downgrade.
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