Mario teams up with a sentient hat called Capy which allows him to inhabit and control enemies and objects, and they pursue the unhappy couple around a globe that looks like Earth. Bowser has kidnapped Peach again and is organising their wedding (more, it seems, to make Mario jealous than out of a burning desire for the Princess, but that's a can of worms we'll leave unopened for now). They can be traded for souvenirs and outfits specific to that kingdom.
Aside from the moons, every kingdom contains 50-100 purple coins to collect, some well hidden. There's an untidiness to Super Mario Odyssey, an unruly side, which comes as a surprise after the immaculate presentation of every other Mario game since Sunshine. This is symptomatic of the game as a whole. The camera has quirks, it requires a lot of input from the player, and sometimes - rarely, but sometimes - it just can't cope with Mario's exuberant movement and the extreme geometry of the levels, and it lets you down. Odyssey - in this as in so many things - just shrugs and embraces the chaos. The Tokyo EAD games worked around it, first by making the levels spherical, ensuring you always had a decent view, and then by pulling them out into strips and looking down on them from lofty, quasi-isometric angles. Creating a reliable camera for viewing a game which requires acrobatic movement in complex, perilous 3D spaces has always been difficult.
To give a specific example, there's the camera. :: The 20 best Nintendo Switch games you can play right now These used to be the qualities that Super Mario stood for, before Nintendo turned its mascot's games into a heritage industry. Several things, in fact: anarchy, freedom, surprise, the shock of the new. They were beautifully polished and accessible games, stuffed with brilliant ideas, yet something had been lost. Later, inspired by the huge success of the nostalgic New Super Mario Bros series, Super Mario 3D Land and 3D World sought to pen the freewheeling spirit of 3D Mario within the linear, storybook structure of the classic 2D games. Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel shot Mario into outer space and atomised its levels into sequences of tiny, wraparound planetoids. After Sunshine's uneven attempt to follow the unfollowable 64, he took Mario in two very different directions.
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For Koizumi, Odyssey must feel like coming full circle. It's directed by Kenta Motokura, a young turk by Nintendo's standards, and produced by Yoshiaki Koizumi, who directed Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy and was the leading light at the offshoot Tokyo EAD studio which has stewarded 3D Mario games for the past decade or so. If anything, Odyssey serves to underline just how radical a design Super Mario 64 was - and still is. After so long away, it feels refreshing and startlingly modern in its freedom, just like Breath of the Wild - and yet this approach was nailed by Shigeru Miyamoto, in his first attempt at designing games in 3D, over 20 years ago. Odyssey expands this structure without fundamentally altering it. This Mario is defined by open, 'sandbox' levels stuffed with secrets and multiple goals that do not necessarily need to be attempted in order, but that sometimes change the context of the level when you complete them. So there's both freshness and nostalgia to be found in Odyssey, which resurfaces a dormant mutation of Mario, only previously seen in full effect in 2002's Super Mario Sunshine and 1996's epochal Super Mario 64. Zelda and Mario represent order and chaos, ego and id - and you can't reinvent something which is constantly reinventing itself.
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Mario, on the other hand, is a series of relentless forward momentum and anarchic non-sequitur, where traditions only exist to be subverted. To rip that up and start again was daring indeed.
Zelda is about tradition, about patterns, about repetition, and its appeal is bound up in the graceful, orderly symmetry of its design. It's because the comparison relies on a false equivalence between the two series.
That's not because it isn't a wonderful, continually surprising, never-not-novel game - it very much is. This is not a hope that Super Mario Odyssey can fulfil.