By Chris Kohler
Even if you’ve played every bit of Super Mario Galaxy, you’ll find its sequel packed full of surprises.
It’s rare for Nintendo to create a straightforward follow-up like this. In fact, the Sunday release of Super Mario Galaxy 2 is the first time in over 20 years that the company has launched two traditional Mario games on the same home console. Producer Shigeru Miyamoto said he greenlit the project because the team “hadn’t run out of ideas”.
And boy, was he not just whistling Dixie. Galaxy 2 is a veritable creativity bomb, a megaton explosion of new ideas. With the original 2007 game, the Mario team had its hands full polishing the game’s central play mechanics and coming up with levels that worked well with the radical design change — instead of exploring the standard 3-D action game worlds, Mario leapt and flew across a universe of tiny planetoids. The levels played and riffed on the concept of shifting gravity — arrays of spheroids would give way to topsy-turvy Escher-like constructions.
With the basic structure already in place, Super Mario Galaxy 2 gave this talented team a chance to let their imaginations run wild.
Every level in Galaxy 2 is different from the last. There are level concepts here that are only used once that could be made into full games on their own. One minute you’re eating glowing fruits that create an illuminated floor underneath you, and you’ve got to eat another one before it disappears. The next minute, you’re jumping across platforms that appear and disappear — to the beat of the level’s musical track. The second you finish one level, you’re off to another one that feels completely different and asks you to master something new.
Galaxy 2 does all this without introducing too many new power-ups, although Mario can do a few new things this time around.
The Spin Drill is the most prominent — with it, he can tear a hole through a planet and come up on the other side. As with all new ideas in Galaxy 2, it starts off with a light introductory level that teaches you how to use it. Soon after, you start using it in ways you wouldn’t expect — drilling every which way through a complex mountain of dirt to reach every side of it, for example. And by the end of the game you’re asked to prove your mastery of the tool by using it in complex ways. >>>
