Yahoo News 'Super Mario Sunshine' Is Weird Nintendo at Its Best
It is always funny to me when people act like they can predict what Nintendo’s going to release next. The company loves to do its own thing—even if that means alienating the people who cherish (and buy) its games. Super Mario Bros., the first game in the franchise’s main series, was a massive, blow-out success in 1985. How did Nintendo follow it up? By putting Mario characters into Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, a surreal Japanese side-scroller where you throw root vegetables at frogs. The sequel to the all-time best-seller The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time turned out to be a miserable nightmare about an adolescent maniac who’s trying to end the world by harnessing the power of a demonic mask; you play as a fish with an electric guitar. A year after Pokémon made its triumphant ascension into the home console era with Sword and Shield, Nintendo made Pokémon Smile, which teaches kids how to brush their teeth. We’re barely scratching the surface here, folks.
Unlike Ocarina of Time, Mario 64 never received a direct sequel. For about six years, the game stood on its own, with all its accolades and glory. Then, Super Mario Sunshine came along. Just when it seemed Nintendo had found a winning formula for a 3D Mario series, it went and threw the plumber into a dirty water park, where everything is covered in brown, toxic sludge, and you’re not allowed to leave until you clean it all up with a super-soaker. That’s really what the game is about. It starts with Mario going to jail!
Super Mario Sunshine was released on the Switch today as part of Nintendo’s 35th anniversary celebration of Mario’s debut in 1985. Packaged with it’s better-known counterparts, Mario 64 and Mario Galaxy, this marks the first time in Nintendo history that Sunshine has been made available on anything other than its original 2002 home, the GameCube. That was intentional on Nintendo’s part, I think. In the 18 years since the game’s debut, Sunshine has been met with equal parts derision and controversy. Many call it the worst of the series, others defend it endlessly. I thought Nintendo should have left the weird, wet game where it belongs: in 2002.
Super Mario Sunshine came out the year I turned 11, the same year I went to St. Petersburg, Florida, with my parents for spring break. And though that trip was supposed to be a vacation, to me, it felt like a punishment. It rained for most of our trip. The hotel we stayed in was so unsanitary and gross that my mom called Trip Advisor’s customer service and demanded a refund. I’ll never forget the feeling of a clump of hair drifting across my face as I rose from the water of the disgusting inground pool. God, I hate Florida.
I didn’t own a GameCube, but I’d sprinted to my friend’s house to try Sunshine when it came out earlier that year. And, like my experience in the murky waters of our hotel pool, there was a visceral disillusionment about the game. Taking place on a tropical island that has been utterly ruined by pollution and an anarchic graffiti monster (who looks like a translucent clone of Mario), Sunshine has almost none of the joys of Mario 64. Unlike its predecessor, you don’t hop from world to world all that much. Most of the game takes place inside the Isle of Delfino, where Mario has been ordered by the local government to clean out all the toxic guck, should he ever want to return to his vacation with Princess Peach. The game, harnessing the new graphics capacity of the GameCube, is covered in a dewey haze, making the experience of playing feel like driving through a mudslide with a windshield that won’t defrost. It’s hard as hell—much more so than Mario 64, a game that was designed to teach people how to enjoy 3D platforming—and it expects a lot out of its players. Like living in a hotel room with your parents for four whole days, it was too much for me.
Only now, 18 years later, am I learning to delight in the slime-covered world of Super Mario Sunshine. As an adult, I can now recognize and admire the risk-taking involved in this game. Nintendo could have delivered Mario 64 Part 2 (in fact, they almost did). They could have given us another castle, another set of paintings, another set of boss battles with Bowser. But that would’ve been too predictable. Sunshine’s core mechanic—the F.L.U.D.D. water gun attached to Mario’s back—was a hugely ambitious mechanic on which the whole game relied, for better or for worse. The gun, which can do things like hose down enemies or rocket you into the air, was a complete and total game-changer for Nintendo. Today we can see a direct line between the F.L.U.D.D. and later successes, like The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Splatoon, and even the most recent and most adored Mario title, Super Mario Odyssey.
Whether or not Sunshine will be deemed a successful experiment once it’s revisited today in its high-definition, widescreen format on the Switch, is beside the point, if you ask me. It goes back to the unpredictability of Nintendo, a quality that you just have to love about the company.
For cases like Sunshine, people use the term “Weird Nintendo.” It’s hard to explain, exactly, why we say this. Weird Nintendo can refer to the image of Mario, sitting in jail, a blank smile on his face, seemingly unconcerned with the situation. It can describe, lovingly, the fact that, after creating perhaps the greatest video game of all time with Mario 64, the company decided to abandon all expectations and turn Mario into a waste removal simulator. We can say it to commend Nintendo’s sudden interest in environmentalism; we can use it to explain why, until this past week, the company acted like Sunshine just didn't exist. It’s the part of being a Nintendo fan that you just have to accept.
For better or for worse, it’s going to get weird.
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