It's interesting - because I'm very much against the opinion of Odyssey being a Sunshine successor.
After being deeply immersed the past few days, It feels like the natural conclusion to everything the Mario team have been working on since 64 - not to mention what Nintendo have been developing over the years.
64 Introduced large levels with Multiple Objectives
Sunshine then made large levels change depending on objective, linking them together
Then Galaxy took the open world design of 64 and applied it to smaller play spaces that were linked together in a linear fashion, and made Objectives and the Levels a single entity.
3D Land and World felt like an attempt to take what they had learnt from those games and apply them to the framework of 2D Mario - Levels always have an end point you're funneled towards which aligns with the main objective, but you always have objectives off the main path too (Star Medals, Green Stars)
Odyssey just feels like an expansion on that into an open-world framework - Levels are still designed to push you towards the headline objective (usually rewarded with a treble-moon) but the green star numbers have been expanded into their own tasks. There's a definite hierarchy to what objectives are more important, and I think the game sings for it.
Considering all the side excursions (Hat Doors, the Clouds, Pipes and Chimneys) that lead directly into more linear, platform focused challenge, I don't feel like they'd need to return to the framework of 3D World, at least as a successor to Odyssey. Not saying I wouldn't love another game like 3D World, but considering there's a lot of it in Odyssey I don't feel it's necessary.
