Video Game Corner: Mario's Life Conundrum

Ramblings about video games. 

What I am about to say is a criticism of only about 10% of Super Mario Galaxy 2. You will only encounter the problems I'm about to detail if you're a completionist and feel compelled to obtain every star in the game.

First, a quick detour to another game, inspired by the Mario games of the NES and SNES eras, Super Meat Boy. That game is all the difficulty and challenge of the early Mario titles distilled to their hardest and purest essence. Super Meat Boy also has an ingenious design. Every level is difficult, but takes only 30 seconds to complete, so, while the amount of skill required to beat a level is high, it only needs to be maintained for a short time. In addition, when you die, the level restarts immediately, literally the second after death.

Which brings me to my complaint with Super Mario Galaxy 2, a game that I recently went back to, after spending four years away from it. Ever since the Wii, Nintendo has adopted an interesting strategy for the Mario games. In order to make them playable to all ages, the early levels serve as tutorials for the basic mechanics that will be expanded upon throughout the rest of the game. The difficulty is slowly ramped up as the game progresses, and the very hardest levels (the ones comparable in challenge to the old Mario games) are kept for the last world or hidden away in a secret area.

During my initial playthrough of the game, I obtained most of the stars in the early levels and came back to it to finish up the odds and the ends. This meant I had to beat the harder, later levels, which meant a lot of dying. And herein, lies the nit I have to pick with the game. Every time I died, I had to button through multiple cutscenes and boxes of dialogue. Furthermore, because Mario has a finite amount of lives, every once in a while I would get a game over screen and have to suffer the game telling me to take a break. I know these extra touches are meant to add to the personality of the game, and for 90% of the time they do, but during that 10% where I'm playing the game for its mechanics, those additional layers become frustrating. I would much prefer an instantaneous restart like Super Meat Boy.