Super Mario Galaxy 2

Rating: E

Score: 9.0/10

The success of the original Super Mario Galaxy can't be overstated. It was one of the biggest Nintendo Wii releases of the time. The Guinness Book Of World Records even proclaimed it the 29th biggest game release ever, and in the four decades (or more, if you want to go way back) of gaming the world has been through, that's quite significant. Even though Super Mario Galaxy had a much more light-hearted gameplay and design, it played smoothly and both the video and audio were great (the audio even being enough to release a whole soundtrack). Super Mario Galaxy 2, then, has quite the reputation going into it, without even playing the game! This game is only available for the Nintendo Wii.

The story, for the first time ever, is not about rescuing a princess. In the land of the Mushroom Kingdom, Bowser has unleashed a powerful monster that has conquered the castle Princess Peach once called home. After destroying that, Bowser took over the land of the Mushroom Kingdom, and made all the Toads (the race of Princess Peach's servants and locals) into monsters to fight and demolish his arch-nemesis Mario. Mario, seeing the kingdom's chaos, turns to dark magic to perfect the art of summoning creatures of his own to- Nah, just kidding. Of course the Princess is captured and Mario needs to rescue her again. This time, Bowser flees to a distant galaxy and Mario must follow in a ship shaped like his own head. And yes, I'm totally serious. I couldn't make that last bit up if I tried. I never understood Bowser's intentions either. Is he trying to kill Mario, because he's a giant lizard leading an army of turtles, mushrooms, and mages. Surely he could sneak up on Mario one afternoon and get the job done. Otherwise, it seems rather counter-productive to kidnap the Princess, put the spotlight on you and have bait to guarantee Mario will follow...But I digress.

So, of course, the ship isn't powerful enough to each Bowser yet, and you must collect "Power Stars" to power-up the ship. How to you collect Power Stars? Just flying around galaxies and take them for yourself. The basic gameplay remains the same: you still fly across planets to reach each star, and then move to another challenge on the same planet or one another planet. This time, you have help-your pet dinosaur named Yoshi. Yoshi can use his long tongue to eat enemies and he can jump higher than Mario can. He's not nearly as useful for the suicide-jumps as he was in Super Mario World (where, if you missed a jump by a bit while on a Yoshi, you can jump off the Yoshi for some serious extra air time).

All the kiddish charm of the first game returns, and along with it are the tough challenges that tend to pop up when you least expect it. Not even tough so much as tricky, requiring that balance of physical reflex and timing and mental planning and precision. If you can't quite get it, after a while, the game will jump in and offer help, which is good for people newer to platforming.

The controls are still as smooth as ever, but this time the game lacks the surprise of having a game so odd to control yet so fluent to control. As Mario runs across a planet, the camera is free to follow how it wants. Most of the time it works well, but sometimes it needs some manual adjusting to perfect.

Mario also has some new power-ups to play around with. None as particularly memorable as the originals, but all are still good (if most extremely odd). Yoshi can even get power-ups, which parallels some of the power-ups (or more so abilities) Yoshi could play around with in Super Mario World. Yes, Nintendo is known to pay respect to older titles whenever they can.

Although it lacks the surprise factor the original game was able to capitalize on, it still holds true to everything the series had going for it, which is sometimes a very hard thing to do. It's still a proud branch of Super Mario 64, which is still today considered the finest of all 3-D games and 3-D platformers. Despite its lack of originality, it seems Super Mario Galaxy still has a lot of fuel left in it.