PixlBit

If I might make one suggestion - if you're going back and exploring now, I'd suggest "beating" the game first. There's good reason to do your backtracking after that, so just something to keep in mind.

I can totally see Casey's points as well, which is exactly why I didn't want to mess with the content of his review. While I might feel differently, I don't think that he's coming out of left field. Regardless, I think we all agree that the game is great, just probably at different levels of greatness.

Glad you're enjoying it as much as I am and that you too were looking for the same kind of Mario experience. Given how warm the reception to it has been, I'm really hoping the next few Mario offerings are also exploration-based like the earliest 3D games.

Casey offered me a spot in this review to say my piece about this game, but I felt he did a great job explaining his position on the game, even if it runs counter to my own.

That being said, I wanted to add my two cents down here in the comments. The tl;dr version is simply that I am madly in love with this game. It's easily my game of the year, surpassing even Zelda, which in any other instance would never be the case. Given how fantastic the year 2017 has been for games, choosing a single game of the year is no small feat, but Super Mario Odyssey just ticks all the boxes for me in a big way.

Some background - Super Mario Sunshine is my favorite 3D Mario game (maybe was at this point... we'll see, need to let that sit for a bit before making such a proclamation). I've always enjoyed the more exploratory 3D Mario games, with some of the more recent ones (3D Land/World) being my least favorite in the entire span of the series. I'd always felt like Super Mario 64 basically established what we should expect from the 3D games and that was something very different from the 2D games. Starting with Galaxy things definitely pushed closer to the 2D formula and I've missed the roots of the 3D games since.

Odyssey is an exploration game first and foremost and a platformer second. There's definitely a variety of challenges that are very platforming oriented, but it's clear that the platforming mechanics are in service of the exploration. So as you might imagine, that's precisely what I've been wanting from this series for a very long time.

I know one of Casey's gripes was that the power moons were too plentiful or that some were too easy to get, thus reducing that rush of completing something and honestly, I just never felt that. I love that there are so many and that they harmonized the various widgets to collect down to moons and tokens.

It's an insanely fun game to play and the amount of effort Nintendo put into fan service is tremendous. There are so many callbacks to past Mario games and the outfits are largely callbacks in and of themselves. I'm smiling just thinking of all the clever stuff they packed into the game.

The hat mechanic with Cappy is brilliant and the gameplay opportunities they still haven't explored with what they created are numerous. I'm totally hoping for a Super Mario Odyssey 2 that's basically like Galaxy 2 was to Galaxy. Just really squeezes everything out of the formula and makes for a challenging, fun experience that's very gameplay-focused.

I highly recommend the game to everyone and I absolutely think it's worth buying a Switch for. It's the first exclusive (Zelda being on Wii U) that is a strongly compelling reason to get the hardware.

I agree - tell him to fuck off and do what makes you happy. Life is too fucking short to listen to assholes who want to dictate to you what you should be spending your time doing.

I think a lot of the Skyward Sword critique was around the motion controls, which I get. I just didn't happen to have the troubles other did, with the exception of the swimming and flying, which controlled quite poorly. Otherwise, I loved the game.

I'm with you on Zombie Apocolypse stories. I think they suck and I thought most of TLOU was boring. The gameplay was mediocre and the story was so plainly obvious I just wanted it to end. Needless to say, I won't be investigating the sequel and I still haven't played the DLC from the first game.

Game I love that everyone hates: Might be a stretch, but Super Mario Sunshine or Skyward Sword

Game I hate that everyone loves: The Last of Us

Did they delist Neo Geo Heroes? I have that on my PSP and I did a review of it when it came out. See here.

Anyway, good list, I have basically all of these games. Was so glad you mentioned Cho Aniki, because that series is weird as fuck. So much homoeroticism all centralized in one series. Still less weird than the loli girls in the Cave games.

Congrats on the baby! Good luck with the little one and I hope you get some decent sleep. The first few months are fun and scary and tiring all at the same time.

Yes, you can because holy shit it's so good.

This game is straight up amazing. Played it pretty much all day yesterday. I think it has a real chance of dethroning Super Mario Sunshine as my favorite 3D Mario game. It's such an inventive and fun game. It shines a light on how little I really cared for the 3D Land/World entries in the series.

I'm playing Costume Quest 2 with my kids. We played the first last year. Hoping we can actually get through it in a reasonable time frame.