Super Mario 3D All Stars - Review

Over the years Mario has gone on countless adventures, in both 2D and 3D and while the 2D games have had their moments in the spotlight, the 3D games tend to be left behind. Celebrating Mario’s 35th anniversary, Nintendo sought to rectify that with the release of the Super Mario 3D All Stars collection, the question is, is all that glitters gold, or does this not break the mould?

This is not a review of the three games on their own, but more the overall quality of the collection, including the games and how they perform, any Nintendo fan has likely played these games before anyway. Super Mario 64 is the story of Mario and his need for cake and thankfully, the cake was not a lie, but before he could have some, he needed to collect 120 stars and rescue Princess Toadstool or Peach as she was calling herself from Bowser, who had managed to capture her and drive away most of the castle staff. Super Mario Sunshine has Mario, Peach, Toadsworth and a few Toads heading to the tropical paradise of Isle Delfino for a bit of a break, but they soon discover that someone has been dressing up as Mario and defacing everything. Before Mario is allowed to leave the island, he must clean everything but then Peach is kidnapped and the adventure just begins in earnest, the highlight though is Galaxy. Super Mario Galaxy took the best of the other two games and managed to make something new, whilst still retaining that sense of familiarity that makes Mario games so good. The levels were more bite sized, like Mario 64, but there were more tools to be used, like Mario Sunshine and the balance on there was pretty good, but it added in motion controls, elevating things to new heights.

It is important to note that these are what can best be called enhanced ports, meaning there have been some touches to the games, that improve various things, but they are not remasters, nor are they the same old game. This is the best way to think of things and the best example I can provided is in Super Mario Sunshine, during the explanation phase, all the button images have been updated to reflect the new controller layout, but then on the screen at all times is the flash X above the nozzle indicator, telling you which button to press to swap them and that is still the Gamecube X button. While the improvements to the game are well done, the half-baked effort puts it a massive damper on it, more on that in a bit though, lets talk about the games. Super Mario 64 is the oldest of the three and even though it was in the early days of 3D games, it was so well designed back then, that it holds up today. Even better, with a proper control stick, not like the one from the Nintendo 64, controlling Mario is smoother than ever before, something that is very welcome. The flip side to that is when you play Super Mario Sunshine the control stick can be a little too eager to react, which can cause some problems, but overall the controls are mostly improved across the board.

I say mostly because Super Mario Sunshine was always left behind due to its unique nature of controls, specifically related to F.L.U.D.D, or the talking water backpack. On the Gamecube released, you would press the Right shoulder button down to active, if you only pressed a little, you could still free run and then if you pressed it the entire way down, you would stop and spray. The controls took some getting used to, but once you learnt them, they were unlikely anything you experienced before, or even since. The problem with Sunshine now is that the two functions are mapped to different buttons ZR is assigned to the move and spray, while R is stop and spray and while from a functional point of view, you can see how it makes sense, but in practice there is something off about it, but sadly the controls only get more confusing when you boot into Super Mario Galaxy.

Galaxy was a massive change for the Mario series, after Sunshine, we were treated to a number of games in a row that stuck to the 2D perspective and while they were mostly welcome, a 3D game was sorely requested and what we got was nothing like what was expected. Using the Wii remote to interact with the world on the go, it was simple and it worked, the Switch version of the game, does not work. If you are playing in handheld mode, the game tells you that you can simply tap on the screen to interact with the required parts, the blue stars, or the star bits that fall down at random, sounds ok. The problems in how frequently you need to do it, making it a little hard to do, especially when you are using one hand to hold the Switch, while you actively tap on the screen with the other.

When docked, or using a detached controller, motion control is enabled by default and you direct, somewhat, where the star cursor is on the screen, if the cursor moves out of sync, you can tap R to reset it and more the most part that works better than the touch, but it is not perfect. Using a Pro Controller, you have to move it around in giant motions, in order to get the cursor to the edge of the screen, something you need to do if you want to collect all those precious star bits and it just feels unnatural. The levels that require the use of motion as a means of movement, like the manta ray surfing, also feel a little odd, given that in order to make the tighter turns, you have to basically drop the controller to one side, which again feels unnatural.

Something else that feels a little odd is the visual upgrades, like I said at the start, these are enhanced ports, not remakes or remasters, and when you see elements that were left out of the upgrade, they tend to stand out. The easiest one to see the updates in is Mario 64, the main character of Mario has been cleaned up a lot, he is no longer blurry, the M on his iconic hat is clean and easy to spot. The flip side to this is that the shapes that make up Mario are now very noticeable and while not Final Fantasy 7 levels of blocky, it is more akin to that than anything else. Mario Sunshine has perhaps got the most noticeable boost in the visual space, as the game now supports a widescreen format and it honestly looks amazing.

The game had some amazing little visual touches in the past that made certain elements stand out, but now they pop even more and lets just stop and admire how well those sun effects are, because it is impressive. But while the effects and lighting look really good, a lot of the texture work has been ignored, meaning you will see some blurry textures, or ones that just seem out of place, if you don’t stop and look for them, it is easy to miss, but they are there. Super Mario Galaxy is perhaps the one that had the least amount of work done to it, mostly as it was already in widescreen, with some decent assets at launch, but there are some tweaks to it. Again most of the changes have been done against the lighting models and effects, but as the game was pretty gorgeous before, it is hard to make it look to much better.

The overall presentation on the menus though, that needs some work and badly, being blunt they are shit, in order to select the game you simply highlight the one you want and if you want the music, you select that soundtrack you want. My issue with them is that it everything is presented on a single line, selecting music doesn’t take you to a new menu, no just a massive list of songs from the album in question. Each time you load into that menu, a random track will play, with its name in the corner, which is a nice touch, but being able to skip to another random track would have been very welcome. The music in the games is the same as it was before and as they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but while being able to play the music outside the games is nice, standard music options are also nice.

There is no ability to favourite any tracks, if you like the 70th track in the Galaxy soundtrack, each time you go into it, you have to manually look for it and there is no random option, meaning once you start playing a song, it will just play them all, in the same order each time. The main reason I don’t like the presentation is purely because they have done the basics required and nothing else, it would have been cool to see a special menu filled with some designs and concepts from the games, but they didn’t.

Super Mario 3D All Stars is a good collection of great games and that is really all there is to it. The visual improvements are not consistent across the board, meaning while somethings look nice, others look bad, not because they are, just by comparison. They took great effort to update games like Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine, but then forgot things like a constant and flashing button prompt. The inclusion of the music elevates this from a mediocre collection, in terms of bonuses, to something more, but it doesn’t reach the same heights that their flagship celebration title should. Ignoring the issues, contained within are three solid games and while there are some control issues with Mario Galaxy, revisiting these games was fun and that balances most other issues I have.

The Score

8.0

Review code provided by Nintendo

The Pros

+Three solid games that are as fun to play today as they were when they first released

+The inclusion of all that music helps make this fun, even when you are not playing the games

The Cons

+The controls in Galaxy are a mess and while not broken they have problems

+The lack of extras makes this feel like less of a celebration and more of an obligation