While Mario Odyssey had the unfortunate fate of living in Galaxy's shadow the entire time I played through it initially, my opinion of it has softened with time. I still maintain my criticisms of the game with regard to lack of platforming challenges, trivial and repetitive moons, and the wildly inconsistent quality between some of the kingdoms, but now that I've had some time to reflect and revisit the game since its launch over a year ago I've come to enjoy it for what it is. It's a more laid-back and experimental kind of 3D Mario game, and I respect the chances that Nintendo took with its design.
But there's one major change to the Mario template that Odyssey made that I hope sticks around for good, and that's treating coins as actual currency.
Doing away with lives and structuring both the in-game economy (shopping) and death penalty around coins was a stroke of genius in Odyssey, and I can't imagine ever going back to the old paradigm after this. While coins held more weight in earlier Mario games due to their relatively punishing difficulty at the time, they've long been little more than a means of drawing players' attentions to hidden areas or optimal jump paths. In most Mario games post-SMW lives are so easy to come by that a seasoned player would typically never run into a situation where lives or coins would make or break having to redo a chunk of the game. If coins only serve the purpose of adding up to extra lives, then they lose all meaning when limited lives are never a concern in the first place.
Mario Odyssey says, "fuck all that" and treats coins like actual currency that is worth going out of your way for. The implementation of kingdom-specific currency in the form of purple coins that buy kingdom-specific rewards was an equally fantastic bit of world-building and game design in a single stroke too. I've recently decided to revisit Odyssey to show my toddler Mario in a more 3D, close-up fashion than what he's been seeing with NSMBU Deluxe, and the core gameplay loop that I've found myself gravitating toward is trying to hunt down the remaining purple coins in each kingdom that I'd missed so I can buy all of the souvenirs/stickers in the game. While doing that I'm naturally coming across new moons (I'm somewhere around 695 right now) and regular coins that I'm saving up for all of the expensive DLC costumes that have been added to the game since launch. When was the last time hunting down coins of any kind in a Mario game was engaging? It's amazing what a difference it makes to have something worthwhile on which you can spend all of the coins that Mario picks up on his travels.
While I can't say that I'd necessarily want the next 3D Mario game to adhere to Odyssey's overall design direction, I know for sure that this one aspect was such an improvement that it should become standard going forward.
That's my two cents, anyway. Odyssey upends a bunch of tried-and-true Mario conventions in a variety of ways, so I look forward to hearing what the rest of you valued the most among all the contrbutions that it made to the series.
But there's one major change to the Mario template that Odyssey made that I hope sticks around for good, and that's treating coins as actual currency.
Doing away with lives and structuring both the in-game economy (shopping) and death penalty around coins was a stroke of genius in Odyssey, and I can't imagine ever going back to the old paradigm after this. While coins held more weight in earlier Mario games due to their relatively punishing difficulty at the time, they've long been little more than a means of drawing players' attentions to hidden areas or optimal jump paths. In most Mario games post-SMW lives are so easy to come by that a seasoned player would typically never run into a situation where lives or coins would make or break having to redo a chunk of the game. If coins only serve the purpose of adding up to extra lives, then they lose all meaning when limited lives are never a concern in the first place.
Mario Odyssey says, "fuck all that" and treats coins like actual currency that is worth going out of your way for. The implementation of kingdom-specific currency in the form of purple coins that buy kingdom-specific rewards was an equally fantastic bit of world-building and game design in a single stroke too. I've recently decided to revisit Odyssey to show my toddler Mario in a more 3D, close-up fashion than what he's been seeing with NSMBU Deluxe, and the core gameplay loop that I've found myself gravitating toward is trying to hunt down the remaining purple coins in each kingdom that I'd missed so I can buy all of the souvenirs/stickers in the game. While doing that I'm naturally coming across new moons (I'm somewhere around 695 right now) and regular coins that I'm saving up for all of the expensive DLC costumes that have been added to the game since launch. When was the last time hunting down coins of any kind in a Mario game was engaging? It's amazing what a difference it makes to have something worthwhile on which you can spend all of the coins that Mario picks up on his travels.
While I can't say that I'd necessarily want the next 3D Mario game to adhere to Odyssey's overall design direction, I know for sure that this one aspect was such an improvement that it should become standard going forward.
That's my two cents, anyway. Odyssey upends a bunch of tried-and-true Mario conventions in a variety of ways, so I look forward to hearing what the rest of you valued the most among all the contrbutions that it made to the series.
