Pretty much everything about Nintendo’s upcoming Super Mario Odyssey is delightful, with one major, glaring exception – what’s Mario doing interacting with regular normally-proportioned humans? There’s just something…wrong about it. I mean, yeah, Sonic the Hedgehog has been doing it for years, but that’s a series Mario absolutely shouldn’t be taking tips from.
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Well, in a recent interview with IGN, Mario’s father Shigeru Miyamoto revealed he had his own misgivings about New Donk City and it’s weird realistic humans.
“You can do whatever you want up to this line, but don’t go past this point. That’s what I don’t want to change. When it’s internal teams, they really understand it, although they try to push that line a little bit further.
[In Super Mario Odyssey] I was worried about how players would react to being in a world where Mario is this tall and normal people are a little bit taller. Or the fact that people don’t get mad at Mario when he’s jumping up and down all over the place, but with all that said, I think I realized that characters like Pauline already existed, and the idea of this game taking place in the city worked out really well. And so, we ran with it.”
Well, if Miyamoto is okay with it, I am too. I guess. Despite some of its many odd touches, Super Mario Odyssey still feels very distinctly Mario, which begs the question — what really defines the series? What’s its core appeal? Miyamoto summed it up nicely…
“Simply put, in Mario, you run, you jump, you fall, you bump into things. Things that people do all the time in everyday life. The developer who makes Mario games has to be creative, but I also think the players must be creative as well. They need to think and act themselves. What makes Mario really relatable for a lot of people is the fact that it requires creativity on the side of the player to be able to think and act and learn from those actions. That’s the key to what has made Mario so accepted and popular.”
Super Mario Odyssey freaks out Nintendo Switch owners on October 27.
[via IGN]
