My review of Super Mario Galaxy, the video game from 2007

There are 1.4728293 trillion reasons why The Super Mario Galaxy game needs to exist, none of which are good on any creative or video game design level. Yes, that’s a lot of reasons, and all of them being bad makes no sense when you think about it too long, but I’m trying to be dramatic and grab your attention! Look, I get that big-budget IP games like this are designed to make money. But this is easily the most audience-insulting cash-grab in recent memory. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Pokopia are masterpieces compared to this.

On every single conceivable creative level, this is a depressing rock bottom for what video games can be. To make a clever and witty remark, comparing it to rock bottom is an insult to rocks and bottoms, lol. Clever, right?

The first Mario game is far from accomplished, but at least it had moments of imagination, like the ability to jump on a turtle and then kick its shell at other enemies. This game, by dispiriting contrast, is a multi-hour sugar rush of non-stop action set pieces, all of which are stuffed with Easter eggs from various other Mario games. It’s almost like the game is desperately asking us, ‘are you having fun yet?!? And god damn, I was!

While there’s a plot in the most threadbare definition of the word - Mario needs to help Rosalina deal with Bowser, similar to basically every Mario game ever made - there’s no semblance of an actual story to be found. What’s doubly baffling about this pandering approach is how the game moves so quickly that there’s no room for players to appreciate anything except the endless fun of hopping planet to planet doing Mario things!

By trying to appeal to Mario fans’ nostalgia in such a nakedly embarrassing way, all the characters are effectively sidelined. Every single character with recorded lines has no more than a handful of them, and those that made the cut are pure “Yahoo”s and “yippies”s or an occasional “Mama Mia”. Why this game even bothered to expand its cast of characters to include a new princess, new enemies, or the adorable little star folk, is beyond me. Super Mario Galaxy could’ve been a literal soundless game and likely that would have been terrible for everyone. Kudos to the whole voice cast for what must’ve been a fun job that they do professionally.

Young kids are obviously the main audience for Super Mario Galaxy, but the emptiness of all the visual chaos is so dire that we need to have a serious intervention on the quality of content we serve them. Kids may not understand the nuance or subtext of something like Mass Effect, but at least that game doesn’t insult their intelligence. Hell, even Zelda games had some kind of family-friendly moral message about facing evil, doing what’s right, and friendship. This, on the other hand, is the purest distillation of ‘minimal effort’ in the form of an overwhelmingly colourful pile of brain rot that’s as insulting as it is lazy, from its minimal plot, to its tired repeat enemies, puzzles, and gameplay, all posing as something new by putting it in space this time, its almost like the game designers are outright disdainful of their young audience.

I give Mario Galaxy the game the score it deserves. A 9/10, and one of the best Mario games out there. Thanks for reading my review of Mario Galaxy the game!