Super Mario Sunshine is the Most Forward-Thinking 3D Mario
By: James O'Connor
Tags: Videogames, Nintendo, Gaming, Features, Nintendo Switch

Super Mario Sunshine is the Most Forward-Thinking 3D Mario

Nintendo pushed its most celebrated franchise in bold new directions

By the end of 2002, with my Year 9 school holidays on the horizon and my “Spice” orange GameCube controller in-hand, I’d come to a firm decision: Super Mario Sunshine was my favourite game. It wasn’t just better than Super Mario 64 (a game I only recently finished); it was the very best game I had ever played. I decreed this to myself, quietly (I was at the start of a long phase of not really wanting to discuss games with my friends for fear of looking nerdy), and was puzzled with every review that didn’t declare this to be the truth of the matter.

I was hoping that when I came back to Super Mario Sunshine in the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection on Switch, it would help me to understand how I’d reached this conclusion as a kid. For all its strengths, Super Mario Sunshine is — quite plainly — not the best game of all time. It’s probably not a top-5 Mario game. But I think I get it. For a kid who had only ever owned Nintendo systems, Super Mario Sunshine felt like something truly different: a step forward into the future, into something new.

There was a rumour, before the GameCube was revealed, that the next Mario would go in a more “mature” direction for his next outing. For whatever reason, every magazine I read interpreted this news in the same way — Mario would have a gun this time. It would be Shadow the Hedgehog, years before that game released. What we got wasn’t that, of course: Super Mario Sunshine’s “mature” direction amounts to a game about needing a relaxing vacation, and then struggling to find the balance between actually relaxing and getting as much out of the location you’re visiting as possible.

For a kid who had only ever owned Nintendo systems, Super Mario Sunshine felt like something truly different: a step forward into the future, into something new.

Coming back to it now, I can see the parts of Super Mario Sunshine that resonated with me, and the things about it that are very specific to my interests. It’s bright and colourful in a way I’d come to see, as a Nintendo fan, as inherently good; it had beautiful water, far beyond what was possible on the Nintendo 64; it had a lovely soundtrack. I still love that one level is set inside an amusement park. In 2001 I’d gone on a family trip to four amusement parks at the Gold Coast, Queensland, and I loved being able to recapture some of that feeling in the game. I don’t like the use of the word “escapism” around games — I believe that good media is much better at making us confront the difficulties of life than it is at helping us forget them — but Sunshine really does feel like a vacation, despite all of its fiddlier elements and frustrating sections.

Source: Nintendo.

All in all, it’s hard to get back into that exact headspace, and the game’s numerous, well-documented flaws are more apparent than they were back then. But I’ve found that I still think Sunshine is lovely, and with the benefit of hindsight, I think it tried to do something with Mario that no platformer since has really attempted — it tried to take the whole series in a completely new direction, one that wasn’t tied to the series’ past. It’s not just that Mario has FLUDD strapped to his back: it’s Mario is a legitimately new setting.

Super Mario Sunshine contains aesthetic elements of the series’ past: Yoshi, warp pipes, coins that can be collected for extra lives. But it’s distinctly separate from the Mushroom Kingdom in ways that make it very interesting to come back to. No other Mario game feels like it’s set across a singular large location: while each level is discrete, they maintain the same aesthetic sensibilities, and feel part of a larger whole. The levels in Sunshine feel different from anything that came before or since. This is a world without Goombas or Koopas, without Stars. Sunshine hints at a wider world than even the globe-trotting games that followed do: a world that’s not beholden to what has come before.

This is a sensation I had with Super Mario 64, too, but it’s more pronounced for his second 3D outing. As much as I miss the analogue shoulder buttons of the GameCube controller, I’m still fond of FLUDD, too. Mario’s water-spraying device feels like it was built with speedrunners in mind, with the way a careful jump-and-hover can lead to shortcuts, and jumping into a wet downward slope sends you sliding like a kid on a slip-‘n-slide. Beyond the ways it opens up Mario’s set of abilities, it also reminds me of an Australian summer as a child, where the school holidays seemed to stretch endlessly and after Christmas everyone you knew had a fancy new watergun they couldn’t wait to fire at you when you caught up in January (although you ended up spending a lot of time with those friends inside, playing games).

Source: Nintendo.

The game launched in Australia in October 2002, but it feels like January. How many other games feel like a specific month?

I’ve been thinking a lot as I play about how Mario changed after Sunshine. As many problems as it has, I think there’s an interesting alternate dimension out there where it became the blueprint for what Nintendo should be doing with Mario. In 2006, the excellent New Super Mario Bros. arrived on the DS, returning Mario to his 2D roots. It was a game that proved that, after years of moving forward into 3D spaces, people weren’t done with 2D Mario games (in an age before digital downloads, 2D games didn’t tend to do so well on consoles for the first two generations of 3D games).

Sunshine hints at a wider world than even the globe-trotting games that followed do: a world that’s not beholden to what has come before.

New Super Mario Bros. was an excellent game, but it also, on some level, redefined what it meant for Mario to be “new”: for Mario to move forward, he would have to constantly look back. The game’s knowing winks and nostalgic background designs set the tone for every Mario platformer to come.

And look, don’t get me wrong. Super Mario Galaxy, which is properly indebted to every Mario that came before it, is better than Sunshine. Miles better. It’s comfortably one of the best games ever made, and if by some very specific curse I was sent to a desert island with just 10 games to enjoy for the rest of my life, I’d have to seriously consider whether to take both Galaxy games or just one.

But going back to Sunshine, it’s hard not to think what would have happened if Nintendo had kept pushing the boat out further. Imagine a version of Super Mario Galaxy where instead of stomping on Goombas, you’re fighting an alien enemy. Imagine, then, that Super Mario Galaxy 2 went even weirder, more alien. Maybe Bowser wouldn’t be part of it, and Peach wouldn’t get captured (which is a plot structure we really must stop hand-waving away as totally fine and cool, by the way — there’s no other series critics would allow to get away with doing this over and over).

What would that universe’s version of Super Mario 3D World look like? Where would Super Mario Odyssey have gone? While Odyssey digs deep into some new corners of the Mario universe, it’s very tied to the series’ past. Every modern Mario platformer since Galaxy feels simultaneously like a new game and a celebration of everything that came before it. That’s part of why it’s so hard to say who and what Mario is now. I love the parts of Odyssey that lean into the series’ past (that Donkey Kong tribute is perfect), but I wonder what a version of Mario not tethered to that past might look like.

When I first played Super Mario Sunshine, my favourite parts where the sections where FLUDD is taken away from you, and you need to complete more traditional 3D platforming challenges. Coming back to the game now, these are easily my least favourite sections. Being stripped of FLUDD makes the jumping a bit cumbersome, since Mario is much too slippery and has been stripped of his long jump, and subsequent Mario 3D games have just done this sort of thing much better. More pressingly, these are the sections where Sunshine feels most at odds with its own identity, and too beholden to what has come before. I hope that one day, Nintendo will allow another 3D Mario game to forge its own unique path the way this game did.