In a year when Nintendo has launched a new concept in game consoles alongside editions of its most treasured series, Zelda and Mario, it's been tempting to draw a line between the two games and dare to hope that Super Mario Odyssey could be as bracing a reinvention as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The narrative of Switch's launch year asserts itself: it is a time of rebirth at Nintendo, when conventions are swept aside and we can experience the magic as if for the first time.
This is not a hope that Super Mario Odyssey can fulfil. That's not because it isn't a wonderful, continually surprising, never-not-novel game - it very much is. It's because the comparison relies on a false equivalence between the two series. Zelda is about tradition, about patterns, about repetition, and its appeal is bound up in the graceful, orderly symmetry of its design. To rip that up and start again was daring indeed. Mario, on the other hand, is a series of relentless forward momentum and anarchic non-sequitur, where traditions only exist to be subverted. Zelda and Mario represent order and chaos, ego and id - and you can't reinvent something which is constantly reinventing itself.
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. 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. Odyssey expands this structure without fundamentally altering it. 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. If anything, Odyssey serves to underline just how radical a design Super Mario 64 was - and still is.
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