There are ruins in various spots and secret passages within the ruins. I didn’t watch any Odyssey trailers or gameplay so when I captured the T-rex I exclaimed, “Holy shit, I’m a dinosaur!” Before that you get to be a chain chomp! The boss even makes use of this as to damage her you capture her chain chomp and slingshot it into her.Ĭascade World is still fairly linear so this is when the sandbox opens up. And for capturing you get the aforementioned T-rex. Beautiful landscapes with fields, waterfalls, and cliffs. Technically the second world but the first one is a tutorial. Odyssey has hundreds of Moons and some are very easy to get, just in a somewhat out of the way spot or even just in a shop.Ĭascade Kingdom /vtTw4FOk8U Both games had 120 Stars though Galaxy had more in its postgame. Stars in 64 and Galaxy usually required a whole level’s worth of work, with some exceptions. Power Moons are also more granular than Stars were. And if you want to explore a certain area you had to walk all the way to that spot. That’s something that annoyed me about 64: if two Stars were close together you’d still have to leave and re-enter the world to get both of them.

This makes it easy to zip around each world. Further, there are checkpoints found all throughout each world. One great improvement is finding a Moon doesn’t kick you back to the beginning. There aren’t specific levels to choose in every world, you just run around the world looking for Moons.

Odyssey uses an open world level design closer to Mario 64 than to Galaxy. Power Moons replace Power Stars in Odyssey. This replaces power-ups in this game because capturing already gives you a bunch of abilities: certain creatures will give you the fireball throwing and flight you’re used to seeing in Mario games. You can capture a wide variety of beings, including a giant T-rex, goombas, podoboos (the fireballs that leap out of lava), human beings, and many others. Hit a creature and you’ll “capture” it though really capture should be “possess.” The creature will get a Mario-stache and you’ll get to control it. The main claim to fame for Odyssey is that Mario’s hat is now a hat-creature named Cappy. Reminds me of the old comic on Nintendo Power which had the same premise. I also like the flavor text of Odyssey: Bowser kidnaps Peach as usual but this time it’s to force her to marry him. But I heard a ton of buzz about Odyssey and the last game I had misgivings on that had a ton of buzz (Breath of the Wild) turned out very well so let’s see how this one did. Being one of the few to dislike Super Mario 64, I’ve long thought that 3D Marios just weren’t my thing, with the exception of Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel. I had some misgivings about this game going in. Super Mario Odyssey was released in 2017 so I’m back in the relatively-new swing of things.

Super mario maker sprites podoboo