I originally wrote this with the intention of dumping it in the Super Mario Odyssey OT, but it grew so huge that I thought it might be worth spinning off into its own thread, in the hopes of eliciting a focused and specific conversation that isn't overly mired in spoiler tags or in the way of those still pushing through the game.
Spoilers everywhere, obviously, but I've marked them anyway to protect the accidental stumblers and break things up for readability, as there are multiple sub-essays buried below. Unmarked spoilers, also, for the endgames of previous 3D Marios, if you haven't played them yet; I bring them up often as a point of comparison. Feel free to leave everything unmarked in the replies.
When I finished the content up to the credits roll I said I was reluctant to comment on platforming challenges and difficulty tuning until I had actually seen the extent of what Odyssey had to offer, but as of Wednesday I think I'm past everything with a serious mechanical/execution barrier, unless some of the postgame moons in the main worlds turn out to be unexpectedly rough. I am far from finished, but I get the impression the hard parts are over.
Specifically, this is what I've accomplished:
So after a weeklong binge on Odyssey I think I'm comfortable slowing down the pace and coasting through it a little at a time from here, as I've seen what I was impatient to see. (I say that now, of course, but in this game one hour has a way of becoming five.)
I don't like getting mired in ranking things, but while the postgame experience is remarkable for its breadth, I think it's reflective of Odyssey as a whole in that there is a ton of variety and lots of fun surprises, but the specific stages probably won't stand out as much long-term next to the incredible advanced content in Galaxy 2 and 3D World. Odyssey compensates for this by having a much fatter and engaging pre-credits experience (whereas 3D World was totally end-loaded to the point where the postgame is the game), but it feels like a different kind of game entirely due to the general lack of time pressure, or in the case of Galaxy 2, do-or-die forward pressure. (You'll notice that even in Galaxy 1, which only began to crack the nut of how a Tokyo-era 3D Mario postgame would work, applies the same pressure in the few standout challenges that it did offer—the ones everyone remembers like Luigi's Purple Coins, Battlestation's Purple Coins, or the Lava Spire Daredevil Run in Melty Molten Galaxy.)
I don't mind that Odyssey is such a low-stress experience across the board even in the postgame—it's unique that the solution to most of its platforming is to stop and think, and that it constantly provides you with the opportunity to do so—but it's doubtful that its challenges will linger in the mind seven years from now like so many stages from Galaxy 2. I haven't had the chance to revisit Galaxy 2 since 2010 and I still think about Cosmic Clones in the Chompworks, Silver Stars on the Cyclone, and of course The Perfect Run—and so much more besides.
So provisionally, let's call this the third-best postgame behind 3D World and Galaxy 2, though I'd certainly put it above Galaxy 1 and 3D Land in that respect due to the nature of the repetition in those games. I do think the unlock conditions are far too generous—I can't imagine beelining through the main game and not having 250 moons, and I can see why the unlock at that point might feel like a difficulty spike to some players because if you've only obtained 250, frankly, you haven't seen much. And I was already sitting on 500 the day I finished the main game. Galaxy 2 was far too excessive with its requirement for 9999 Star Bits, and 3D World was kind of pushing it with the flagpoles on every character (especially if you didn't have the benefit of playing everything in co-op like I did), and given just how huge Odyssey is I certainly appreciated that the requirement wasn't a hard 100% on everything else. But 500 is way too lax, especially when an alternate method exists for pumping up your moon count to reach high thresholds before you've cleared all of the content. I didn't need to work towards it at all.
Lengthy, more specific thoughts on the postgame and its various challenges (with screenshots galore):
I knew the Mushroom Kingdom was coming due to the portrait in the Luncheon Kingdom, but it was still fun to see what it offered. Boss rematches were straightforward, but the single addition or twist that each of them introduced was usually enough to keep things interesting. The first one I completed was the Luncheon bird, and I actually didn't notice anything different about the fight, but Knucklotec (Tostarena underground boss) required some serious rethinking and acute situational awareness with all the mummies hustling around.
Yoshi is amazing in this game—probably my favourite 3D rendition of the character to date, which makes Odyssey the best 3D Yoshi game on top of already being the best 3D Kirby. I keep trying to jump on his back out of habit instead of capturing him. You lose the ground pound due to the binding of ZL/ZR to releasing your capture target, but the wall cling easily makes up for it as a movement option substantially distinct from what Mario himself can do.
I'm also fond of the way Toadette serves as an achievement system. Good tuning, too: by the time I got to her, any of the remotely grind-like metrics (number of jumps and coins, etc.) had already been ticked off and the rest were all meta-rewards for moons I hadn't completed yet, which was perfect. Past Mario games in 2D and 3D have included stat-tracking, but I like that Odyssey doesn't distract you by signifying that an achievement system with material rewards (more moons) even exists until you're in the postgame. This is exactly an achievement system done right—guidance for postgame activity that you'll want to do anyway, but not something that affects your actions or decision-making during the course of discovering the main experience.
Secret 2D Treasure / 2D Boost from Bullet Bill is my favourite thing out of the Mushroom Kingdom and probably the best 8-bit stage in the entire game (though I don't think I've seen all of them yet, as I haven't done most of the postgame moons in the main worlds): it's a legitimately excellent 2D platforming stage with lots of action to track, the background-shifting mechanic from Yoshi's Woolly World, and its own superb take on the element of "Super Mario 2D Galaxy" seen throughout the game. (Center of the Galaxy / Edge of the Galaxy in the Moon Kingdom is a more sustained take on the concept, but was also pretty simple.)
The Broodal boss rush took me three or four attempts, I think. I like boss rushes set up like this, where you can take a finite number of hits with no health replenishment (pressing you to avoid damage as much as you can in the early stages and budget your health), which puts you under pressure to execute consistently without being outright frustrating like a Galaxy-style OHKO Daredevil Run. I was a little surprised that we never saw a team-up combo fight (like you do in 3D World), as the Broodals were so explicitly set up as Odyssey's spin on Boom Boom and Pom Pom, but I guess their mechanics all command so much space in the arena that they would interfere with each other more than anything.
Now for the challenge roads, which together siphoned about 1000 coins out of my pocket:
Breakdown Road – This was by far the most troublesome stage for me in the whole game up to this world. The main objective was trivial, but I spotted and went for the advanced objective right away, and as I had barely used the roll the whole game, it wasn't until here that I realized I never really did understand the interaction between the roll and the long jump. (The long jump slamming you into walls if you come in just a smidgen low is a special frustration with 3D Mario—the sound, the animation, everything about it is calculated to make you feel bad, and it's been this way throughout the 3D series.) So I had all kinds of trouble with the consecutive long jumps because (a) you can't set the camera high to gauge distance, since you're obstructed by the upper level, and (b) since I had a habit of holding down ZL for consecutive long jumps, I'd roll out of every landing and it would take me a little too far, throwing off my timing. It took me a long time to realize that the trick to this was letting up on ZL and running, not rolling, out of every long jump so I could trigger the next one precisely and rhythmically. Once I got that down, I cleared this in no time.
Invisible Road – Frustrating at first (due to how easy it is to inch just too close to the puddles) and overly dependent on memory, but most of my early failures in this stage came down to a huge brain fart where I kicked the rocks everywhere and simply forgot you can pick them up and throw them. This led to far too much unnecessary overthinking of how I could possibly get a rock over to the hidden chest in three kicks, as it was placed just a little too far for that and the opening was narrow. Whoops. The fight with the giant Piranha Plants at the end is great: since I was short on rocks, it was the first thing in the entire game to really push me to use the ground-pound-into-high-jump, which was the best method for engaging them and something I never needed to use elsewhere (as backflips and triple jumps got me enough height everywhere else in the game, and I was never required to gain height quickly while avoiding damage as I was required to do here).
Vanishing Road – This is an ideal challenge stage, the kind I went from hating to loving. At first I was stumped, as again, I had barely used the roll throughout the game, and while this was set up as a rolling challenge I also needed to figure out, on the fly, how getting in and out of the roll interacts with the other pieces in your toolkit. (I'd figured out the roll/long-jump interaction thanks to Breakdown Road, but the long jump doesn't get you through the second segment here.) So over the course of completing this, I had to develop a total mastery of the timing/spacing involved in the roll-into-dash-into-dive combo.
In sum, these stages delivered a focused approach to testing the player on the mastery of the Odyssey-specific move set; there just weren't many of them. And since they were capless challenges, all that was missing was an advanced cap-jump test. I spent a lot of time practicing the cap jump elsewhere in the game just to reach interesting places with alternate methods, but it stands out as a mechanic that the postgame never presses you to master (unless, again, it's covered by a postgame moon elsewhere that I haven't seen yet).
Yoshi's stages were all very forgiving, especially given how fruits act like purple coins and stay collected even if you fail, but they were clearly here just to give the player more opportunities to run around as Yoshi, who is so superbly designed but deserved as much breathing room as possible given how he was held back as a postgame treat. I spent ages dwelling in Yoshi Under Siege / Fruit Feast Under Siege just to assemble a Spider-man photo shoot, with our dinosaur friend swinging and clinging through the city.
So, Darker Side / Culmina Crater / Long Journey's End.
The strangest thing about this stage is that it's so laid-back as to feel much easier than it really is. It didn't take me anywhere as long as Champion's Road (still the all-time pinnacle of 3D Mario challenge stages) but consumed more hours from me than Galaxy 2's Perfect Run (and probably a similar number of attempts), never mind 3DL's 8-Crown or Captain Toad's Mummy-Me Maze Forever. Which came as a genuine surprise, as in the course of playing it, it was easily the most relaxed of the whole set.
I chalk this up to two things. First, as with Odyssey as a whole, the lack of forward pressure—there are only really two segments that are do-or-die (the foggy moving platform and the Pokio bird pendulum) while everything else is very forgiving, letting you take the time you need to read the situation, formulate a plan, and back up to course-correct or stall if necessary. Look back at any of the other "final exam" stages and you'll find that even in the easier segments, they push you, and you only get one shot at things. The thing about these marathon challenge stages is that they are all consistency checks: the individual segments are never really that hard relative to anything else the respective games throw at you, but stringing them one after another blocks you off from properly practicing any of the later segments, and there is always some tension over whether you'll be able to do anything reliably. Even if you had a method completely worked out, the flip-panel segment in The Perfect Run or the beat blocks, Kamek fight, and swimming segments of Champion's Road (or really just most of Champion's Road right from the first few jumps) introduced just enough tension and uncertainty as you knew that at any moment, things could go very wrong. A single mistake would be cause for panic.
Long Journey's End seems bigger and longer than the other final stages before it, but I wonder if its segment count is really that much higher (I haven't checked) or if this is just a function of how relaxed it is and how often it lets me stop. So you would expect it to be a harder consistency check, just from providing more tasks to be consistent about, but it lets the player off easy: in most cases, it only takes two or three attempts to figure out an exact timing or method for an obstacle, and from there you can execute accurately every time and never have trouble with that section again. (The Uproot segment looked tough at first, but then I realized that you could just patiently lure the enemies off the platforms and eliminate all the pressure.) I don't even see the point of the interlude where you run over the Wooded Kingdom leaves: there are all these beam emitters lying around but no reason at all to ever set them off, so this part is just a straight run that seems a little unfinished.
The one segment that really does feel like a classic in the vein of the earlier games, where you can get through it with a consistent method but there is still just enough room for error that you suddenly find yourself frantically playing reactively, is the foggy platform. It's best to ignore the beams and run around the platform in a square clearing side at a time, but there is so much going on that mistakes do happen, and the stage as a whole had no bigger cause for panic than when I accidentally set off the beams and found myself having to beat the segment the hard way. Even so, once you have a method, it's not a big deal. The biggest roadblock for me overall was the bird pendulum: as with the boost pad segment near the end of Champion's Road, you only get one shot at it and no real opportunity to practice the mechanic. (The pendulum's effect on your momentum and flick direction is deceptive, you see, as depending on which direction it's swinging, it looks like it perturbs the curvature of your flick, and you don't get an opportunity to really test this out. In the end it turned out I was overthinking it, and as long as you start with a good position on the first pendulum—which you can adjust by dropping back down and retrying if necessary—a simple, straight upward flick is the way to go. But then, I've only ever cleared this part once, as I one-shot everything that came after it. I don't know if I could get through it consistently.)
The second factor, and the most obvious one, is the incredibly generous health replenishment. Hearts are everywhere. If you reach the Sphinx you don't even need to worry about budgeting the amount of damage you are willing to take. Again, Odyssey is a different kind of game and it's in keeping with its design values for it to encourage exploration, even here, but it's not like the hearts are out of the way. They're just slightly off the path by enough that no speed runner will go for them, which means there is a limit to how many deliberate hits a speed runner is allowed to take, but for the purposes of all other players, the hearts are right there for the taking.
I'll probably sound crazy for saying this, but as a capstone unlockable, I found myself wishing that the final, final challenge in Odyssey was a Culmina Crater Daredevil Run. There is just enough in this stage to make it interesting, as it is full of segments where surviving is easy but reliably avoiding all damage is hard. I was occasionally even taking hits on easy parts like the aerial glide and the fork flick. And given that the difficulty here (at least on the first set of attempts when you are still figuring everything out) is roughly comparable to the standard 3-health Grandmaster Galaxy, I think it would have been a good, rewarding fit.
Now, I may have sounded highly critical here, so I want to emphasize that this stage is still among my favourites in the 3D series and something that was really necessary to make Odyssey feel like a complete experience. It's unlike the final stages in Galaxy 2 and 3DL/3DW in the same respects in which Odyssey on the whole is unlike those games. That's fine: it's actually kind of nice to have a stage that takes hours and hours of work, but in the moment, is somehow never frustrating. And it helps that there is a loop of positive reinforcement here where just getting through the first two or three segments is enough to turn a net profit, reminding me of the excellent design in DKCTF's K-levels where running some of its toughest stages and failing repeatedly would actually fatten your bank of lives and encourage you to try again and again. It also bears mentioning that the framing of the challenge, from the ensemble cast cheering you on at the base camp to the banter from Cappy in the final ascent, is unprecedented and glorious—a real finish to the game. I want to come back to this when I'm at 880 or 999 because I want another successful run on this stage to have the final word on Odyssey as a whole.
(All screenshots mine. Lots more here if you don't mind spoilers, as you probably don't if you've made it this far. Thanks for reading.)
Spoilers everywhere, obviously, but I've marked them anyway to protect the accidental stumblers and break things up for readability, as there are multiple sub-essays buried below. Unmarked spoilers, also, for the endgames of previous 3D Marios, if you haven't played them yet; I bring them up often as a point of comparison. Feel free to leave everything unmarked in the replies.
When I finished the content up to the credits roll I said I was reluctant to comment on platforming challenges and difficulty tuning until I had actually seen the extent of what Odyssey had to offer, but as of Wednesday I think I'm past everything with a serious mechanical/execution barrier, unless some of the postgame moons in the main worlds turn out to be unexpectedly rough. I am far from finished, but I get the impression the hard parts are over.
Specifically, this is what I've accomplished:
- 576 moons (so: lots more to do)
- 104 on jump rope, 112 on volleyball (got them both out of the way before I finished the main game)
- All boss rematches in the Mushroom Kingdom
- All moons apart from hint art in the Dark Side
- Darker Side
I suppose there are still several Master Cup footraces ahead of me, but none of the ones I've already seen have been a problem, so I'm not concerned about the difficulty tuning. And as far as money goes, Darker Side is a very lucrative coin farm if you're comfortable running it accurately, even if you fail, and I had enough fun with it that if I'm short of cash once I hit 880, I'll just go back and run it again in as many costumes as I can to cap off the experience properly. The main thing I'm worried about at this stage, from an execution standpoint, is hard-mode Picture Match. Everything else is just hunting.
- 104 on jump rope, 112 on volleyball (got them both out of the way before I finished the main game)
- All boss rematches in the Mushroom Kingdom
- All moons apart from hint art in the Dark Side
- Darker Side
I suppose there are still several Master Cup footraces ahead of me, but none of the ones I've already seen have been a problem, so I'm not concerned about the difficulty tuning. And as far as money goes, Darker Side is a very lucrative coin farm if you're comfortable running it accurately, even if you fail, and I had enough fun with it that if I'm short of cash once I hit 880, I'll just go back and run it again in as many costumes as I can to cap off the experience properly. The main thing I'm worried about at this stage, from an execution standpoint, is hard-mode Picture Match. Everything else is just hunting.
So after a weeklong binge on Odyssey I think I'm comfortable slowing down the pace and coasting through it a little at a time from here, as I've seen what I was impatient to see. (I say that now, of course, but in this game one hour has a way of becoming five.)
I don't like getting mired in ranking things, but while the postgame experience is remarkable for its breadth, I think it's reflective of Odyssey as a whole in that there is a ton of variety and lots of fun surprises, but the specific stages probably won't stand out as much long-term next to the incredible advanced content in Galaxy 2 and 3D World. Odyssey compensates for this by having a much fatter and engaging pre-credits experience (whereas 3D World was totally end-loaded to the point where the postgame is the game), but it feels like a different kind of game entirely due to the general lack of time pressure, or in the case of Galaxy 2, do-or-die forward pressure. (You'll notice that even in Galaxy 1, which only began to crack the nut of how a Tokyo-era 3D Mario postgame would work, applies the same pressure in the few standout challenges that it did offer—the ones everyone remembers like Luigi's Purple Coins, Battlestation's Purple Coins, or the Lava Spire Daredevil Run in Melty Molten Galaxy.)
I don't mind that Odyssey is such a low-stress experience across the board even in the postgame—it's unique that the solution to most of its platforming is to stop and think, and that it constantly provides you with the opportunity to do so—but it's doubtful that its challenges will linger in the mind seven years from now like so many stages from Galaxy 2. I haven't had the chance to revisit Galaxy 2 since 2010 and I still think about Cosmic Clones in the Chompworks, Silver Stars on the Cyclone, and of course The Perfect Run—and so much more besides.
So provisionally, let's call this the third-best postgame behind 3D World and Galaxy 2, though I'd certainly put it above Galaxy 1 and 3D Land in that respect due to the nature of the repetition in those games. I do think the unlock conditions are far too generous—I can't imagine beelining through the main game and not having 250 moons, and I can see why the unlock at that point might feel like a difficulty spike to some players because if you've only obtained 250, frankly, you haven't seen much. And I was already sitting on 500 the day I finished the main game. Galaxy 2 was far too excessive with its requirement for 9999 Star Bits, and 3D World was kind of pushing it with the flagpoles on every character (especially if you didn't have the benefit of playing everything in co-op like I did), and given just how huge Odyssey is I certainly appreciated that the requirement wasn't a hard 100% on everything else. But 500 is way too lax, especially when an alternate method exists for pumping up your moon count to reach high thresholds before you've cleared all of the content. I didn't need to work towards it at all.
Lengthy, more specific thoughts on the postgame and its various challenges (with screenshots galore):
I knew the Mushroom Kingdom was coming due to the portrait in the Luncheon Kingdom, but it was still fun to see what it offered. Boss rematches were straightforward, but the single addition or twist that each of them introduced was usually enough to keep things interesting. The first one I completed was the Luncheon bird, and I actually didn't notice anything different about the fight, but Knucklotec (Tostarena underground boss) required some serious rethinking and acute situational awareness with all the mummies hustling around.
Yoshi is amazing in this game—probably my favourite 3D rendition of the character to date, which makes Odyssey the best 3D Yoshi game on top of already being the best 3D Kirby. I keep trying to jump on his back out of habit instead of capturing him. You lose the ground pound due to the binding of ZL/ZR to releasing your capture target, but the wall cling easily makes up for it as a movement option substantially distinct from what Mario himself can do.
I'm also fond of the way Toadette serves as an achievement system. Good tuning, too: by the time I got to her, any of the remotely grind-like metrics (number of jumps and coins, etc.) had already been ticked off and the rest were all meta-rewards for moons I hadn't completed yet, which was perfect. Past Mario games in 2D and 3D have included stat-tracking, but I like that Odyssey doesn't distract you by signifying that an achievement system with material rewards (more moons) even exists until you're in the postgame. This is exactly an achievement system done right—guidance for postgame activity that you'll want to do anyway, but not something that affects your actions or decision-making during the course of discovering the main experience.
Secret 2D Treasure / 2D Boost from Bullet Bill is my favourite thing out of the Mushroom Kingdom and probably the best 8-bit stage in the entire game (though I don't think I've seen all of them yet, as I haven't done most of the postgame moons in the main worlds): it's a legitimately excellent 2D platforming stage with lots of action to track, the background-shifting mechanic from Yoshi's Woolly World, and its own superb take on the element of "Super Mario 2D Galaxy" seen throughout the game. (Center of the Galaxy / Edge of the Galaxy in the Moon Kingdom is a more sustained take on the concept, but was also pretty simple.)
The Broodal boss rush took me three or four attempts, I think. I like boss rushes set up like this, where you can take a finite number of hits with no health replenishment (pressing you to avoid damage as much as you can in the early stages and budget your health), which puts you under pressure to execute consistently without being outright frustrating like a Galaxy-style OHKO Daredevil Run. I was a little surprised that we never saw a team-up combo fight (like you do in 3D World), as the Broodals were so explicitly set up as Odyssey's spin on Boom Boom and Pom Pom, but I guess their mechanics all command so much space in the arena that they would interfere with each other more than anything.
Now for the challenge roads, which together siphoned about 1000 coins out of my pocket:
Breakdown Road – This was by far the most troublesome stage for me in the whole game up to this world. The main objective was trivial, but I spotted and went for the advanced objective right away, and as I had barely used the roll the whole game, it wasn't until here that I realized I never really did understand the interaction between the roll and the long jump. (The long jump slamming you into walls if you come in just a smidgen low is a special frustration with 3D Mario—the sound, the animation, everything about it is calculated to make you feel bad, and it's been this way throughout the 3D series.) So I had all kinds of trouble with the consecutive long jumps because (a) you can't set the camera high to gauge distance, since you're obstructed by the upper level, and (b) since I had a habit of holding down ZL for consecutive long jumps, I'd roll out of every landing and it would take me a little too far, throwing off my timing. It took me a long time to realize that the trick to this was letting up on ZL and running, not rolling, out of every long jump so I could trigger the next one precisely and rhythmically. Once I got that down, I cleared this in no time.
Invisible Road – Frustrating at first (due to how easy it is to inch just too close to the puddles) and overly dependent on memory, but most of my early failures in this stage came down to a huge brain fart where I kicked the rocks everywhere and simply forgot you can pick them up and throw them. This led to far too much unnecessary overthinking of how I could possibly get a rock over to the hidden chest in three kicks, as it was placed just a little too far for that and the opening was narrow. Whoops. The fight with the giant Piranha Plants at the end is great: since I was short on rocks, it was the first thing in the entire game to really push me to use the ground-pound-into-high-jump, which was the best method for engaging them and something I never needed to use elsewhere (as backflips and triple jumps got me enough height everywhere else in the game, and I was never required to gain height quickly while avoiding damage as I was required to do here).
Vanishing Road – This is an ideal challenge stage, the kind I went from hating to loving. At first I was stumped, as again, I had barely used the roll throughout the game, and while this was set up as a rolling challenge I also needed to figure out, on the fly, how getting in and out of the roll interacts with the other pieces in your toolkit. (I'd figured out the roll/long-jump interaction thanks to Breakdown Road, but the long jump doesn't get you through the second segment here.) So over the course of completing this, I had to develop a total mastery of the timing/spacing involved in the roll-into-dash-into-dive combo.
In sum, these stages delivered a focused approach to testing the player on the mastery of the Odyssey-specific move set; there just weren't many of them. And since they were capless challenges, all that was missing was an advanced cap-jump test. I spent a lot of time practicing the cap jump elsewhere in the game just to reach interesting places with alternate methods, but it stands out as a mechanic that the postgame never presses you to master (unless, again, it's covered by a postgame moon elsewhere that I haven't seen yet).
Yoshi's stages were all very forgiving, especially given how fruits act like purple coins and stay collected even if you fail, but they were clearly here just to give the player more opportunities to run around as Yoshi, who is so superbly designed but deserved as much breathing room as possible given how he was held back as a postgame treat. I spent ages dwelling in Yoshi Under Siege / Fruit Feast Under Siege just to assemble a Spider-man photo shoot, with our dinosaur friend swinging and clinging through the city.
So, Darker Side / Culmina Crater / Long Journey's End.
The strangest thing about this stage is that it's so laid-back as to feel much easier than it really is. It didn't take me anywhere as long as Champion's Road (still the all-time pinnacle of 3D Mario challenge stages) but consumed more hours from me than Galaxy 2's Perfect Run (and probably a similar number of attempts), never mind 3DL's 8-Crown or Captain Toad's Mummy-Me Maze Forever. Which came as a genuine surprise, as in the course of playing it, it was easily the most relaxed of the whole set.
I chalk this up to two things. First, as with Odyssey as a whole, the lack of forward pressure—there are only really two segments that are do-or-die (the foggy moving platform and the Pokio bird pendulum) while everything else is very forgiving, letting you take the time you need to read the situation, formulate a plan, and back up to course-correct or stall if necessary. Look back at any of the other "final exam" stages and you'll find that even in the easier segments, they push you, and you only get one shot at things. The thing about these marathon challenge stages is that they are all consistency checks: the individual segments are never really that hard relative to anything else the respective games throw at you, but stringing them one after another blocks you off from properly practicing any of the later segments, and there is always some tension over whether you'll be able to do anything reliably. Even if you had a method completely worked out, the flip-panel segment in The Perfect Run or the beat blocks, Kamek fight, and swimming segments of Champion's Road (or really just most of Champion's Road right from the first few jumps) introduced just enough tension and uncertainty as you knew that at any moment, things could go very wrong. A single mistake would be cause for panic.
Long Journey's End seems bigger and longer than the other final stages before it, but I wonder if its segment count is really that much higher (I haven't checked) or if this is just a function of how relaxed it is and how often it lets me stop. So you would expect it to be a harder consistency check, just from providing more tasks to be consistent about, but it lets the player off easy: in most cases, it only takes two or three attempts to figure out an exact timing or method for an obstacle, and from there you can execute accurately every time and never have trouble with that section again. (The Uproot segment looked tough at first, but then I realized that you could just patiently lure the enemies off the platforms and eliminate all the pressure.) I don't even see the point of the interlude where you run over the Wooded Kingdom leaves: there are all these beam emitters lying around but no reason at all to ever set them off, so this part is just a straight run that seems a little unfinished.
The one segment that really does feel like a classic in the vein of the earlier games, where you can get through it with a consistent method but there is still just enough room for error that you suddenly find yourself frantically playing reactively, is the foggy platform. It's best to ignore the beams and run around the platform in a square clearing side at a time, but there is so much going on that mistakes do happen, and the stage as a whole had no bigger cause for panic than when I accidentally set off the beams and found myself having to beat the segment the hard way. Even so, once you have a method, it's not a big deal. The biggest roadblock for me overall was the bird pendulum: as with the boost pad segment near the end of Champion's Road, you only get one shot at it and no real opportunity to practice the mechanic. (The pendulum's effect on your momentum and flick direction is deceptive, you see, as depending on which direction it's swinging, it looks like it perturbs the curvature of your flick, and you don't get an opportunity to really test this out. In the end it turned out I was overthinking it, and as long as you start with a good position on the first pendulum—which you can adjust by dropping back down and retrying if necessary—a simple, straight upward flick is the way to go. But then, I've only ever cleared this part once, as I one-shot everything that came after it. I don't know if I could get through it consistently.)
The second factor, and the most obvious one, is the incredibly generous health replenishment. Hearts are everywhere. If you reach the Sphinx you don't even need to worry about budgeting the amount of damage you are willing to take. Again, Odyssey is a different kind of game and it's in keeping with its design values for it to encourage exploration, even here, but it's not like the hearts are out of the way. They're just slightly off the path by enough that no speed runner will go for them, which means there is a limit to how many deliberate hits a speed runner is allowed to take, but for the purposes of all other players, the hearts are right there for the taking.
I'll probably sound crazy for saying this, but as a capstone unlockable, I found myself wishing that the final, final challenge in Odyssey was a Culmina Crater Daredevil Run. There is just enough in this stage to make it interesting, as it is full of segments where surviving is easy but reliably avoiding all damage is hard. I was occasionally even taking hits on easy parts like the aerial glide and the fork flick. And given that the difficulty here (at least on the first set of attempts when you are still figuring everything out) is roughly comparable to the standard 3-health Grandmaster Galaxy, I think it would have been a good, rewarding fit.
Now, I may have sounded highly critical here, so I want to emphasize that this stage is still among my favourites in the 3D series and something that was really necessary to make Odyssey feel like a complete experience. It's unlike the final stages in Galaxy 2 and 3DL/3DW in the same respects in which Odyssey on the whole is unlike those games. That's fine: it's actually kind of nice to have a stage that takes hours and hours of work, but in the moment, is somehow never frustrating. And it helps that there is a loop of positive reinforcement here where just getting through the first two or three segments is enough to turn a net profit, reminding me of the excellent design in DKCTF's K-levels where running some of its toughest stages and failing repeatedly would actually fatten your bank of lives and encourage you to try again and again. It also bears mentioning that the framing of the challenge, from the ensemble cast cheering you on at the base camp to the banter from Cappy in the final ascent, is unprecedented and glorious—a real finish to the game. I want to come back to this when I'm at 880 or 999 because I want another successful run on this stage to have the final word on Odyssey as a whole.
(All screenshots mine. Lots more here if you don't mind spoilers, as you probably don't if you've made it this far. Thanks for reading.)
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