Super Mario Galaxy

***Super Mario Galaxy*** is a 3D *Super Mario* title that, naturally amongst its Wii game brethren, replaces many techniques from Mario's once-beloved moveset with copious waggle. The game introduces a gravity mechanic that prevents the player characters from falling off of most platforms.

When the game is "completed", players are tasked with finishing it all over again, this time with butter applied to the player character's shoes. The reward for doing so is the Wii equivalent of a JPEG email attachment.

Despite reviewing well, series veterans constantly pan the game for being overly linear.

## Plot

We open on a letter from Princess Peach, and, therefore, can immediately divine that she will get kidnapped before Mario can so much as knock at her door. In the meantime, she appears to be holding a nude alien infant that she intends to force onto Mario as a "gift".

Bowser barges in to ruin the hallowed festivities, allowing the three players who were somehow unfamiliar with this plot to figure out that he's the bad guy! He uses a massive UFO, which comes out of nowhere and has never been mentioned since, to recycle his scheme from *Paper Mario*.

As always, Bowser fails to account for Mario following hot on his tail, dooming his plan from the start. Bowser then summons his stepfather in for damage control. A shot from his weapon conveniently blasts Mario into the backyard of a divine figure, who's also conveniently pissed off at Bowser's shenanigans.

When Mario comes to, he finds that he has been sleeping up in the sky, and soon meets Jesus. Sadly, Mario is not actually dead, and is therefore doomed to observe the agonizing creative decline of his franchise over the following decade.

More to the point, the light fades from around Jesus, revealing His true identity to be Elsa from Disney's *Frozen*. His house is dark from a power outage, and it's up to Mario to collect an irrational number of plot coupons so that she can encase her home in a giant egg and launch it directly into Bowser's house next door.

At the end of the game, it turns out that our heroes' efforts were all for naught, as Bowser's plan happens to develop the slight side effect of Spoiler alert: destroying the entire universe with a supermassive black hole, which kills everyone and replaces all existence with the sound of a baby crying.

Realizing that everything is royally doomed, and that she never saved a backup copy of the reality she governs, Elsa instead Spoiler alert: recreates the universe as a sloppy guess at how things were before the events of the game, but gets all possible key details blatantly wrong.

## Music

Unlike prior entries in the series, *Super Mario Galaxy*'s soundtrack primarily consists of recordings of a crowd of people scraping lubricated sticks against strings of catgut.

## References

1. ↑ Its sequel, *Super Mario Galaxy 2*, cranked up the linearity and handholding features, amassing many perfect scores in the process.
2. ↑ This leaves the Nintendo 64 kids rolling their eyes in yet another exciting new way.
3. ↑ A metaphor that is soon to become literal.
4. ↑ If MatPat claims otherwise, we don't want to hear it.
5. ↑ Albeit not before satiating her self-aggrandizing giantess fetish.
6. ↑ This prose brought to you by Band Gang.