For a brief period, either in the 1950s or 1960s, Charles Schulz experimented with drawing adults in the backgrounds of Peanuts comic strips. I wish I could track down the one strip I’ve seen like this to explain it better – if anyone’s seen my copy of Peanuts: A Golden Celebration, could they drop me a line? Anyway, Charlie Brown and Linus are on a golf course, I think, and there are these adults, never fully in frame because the kids are so small, and the adults are moving around, standing in the background, forming a sort of human topiary of arms and legs and torsos.
It is – to be frank – super weird. Firstly, the adult clothes age the strip in a way that Charlie Brown’s zig-zag shirt never has. Secondly, they completely throw out the scale. Are the kids tiny or are the adults giants? And they also clutter everything up. That shining Peanuts clarity – the expanse of sky Schulz managed to get into the tiny space of a newspaper comic panel every morning for half a century – is suddenly gone. It’s very, very odd.
Sadly, it’s not my job to write about Peanuts all day, but I think of that weird comic strip every time I play Super Mario Odyssey, the Mario game that… how to put this? The Mario game that I find the least comforting and familiar. Super Mario Odyssey is – to be frank – super weird, if you ask me. The designers have spoken about this a little – they’ve talked about wanting to make a game that feels like a journey to somewhere new, and I’ve read that a lot of the ideas in the games have a basis in the team’s own memories. But it’s taken me an age to pin down why the end result feels quite so strange and so different to what’s come before, even while containing so many of the same mechanics and the same thinking. I’m going to try to pin that down now, and Peanuts will maybe help.
First up: this game is wonderful. With the Switch, Mario returns to the expansive sandbox template of Mario 64 and Sunshine. The levels are really large and intricate, and there’s always a handful of objectives you could be going for at any moment. The range of levels is almost overwhelming and they’re all filled with secret areas, little jokes, one-shot animations and other asides.
It’s also wonderful because the Mario team have decided to really push things. This is probably the most technically challenging 3D Mario game to play Nintendo’s made in a while. It’s up there in terms of challenge with New Super Mario Bros U, an unfairly maligned Mario entry which cranked up the technical audacity for a handful of appreciative super-players. (Of which I am not, I should add, but I still loved what they were doing.)
Anyway, in Odyssey you have the standard Mario move-set but you also have Mario’s hat. You can throw it to capture different animals and critters, which gives the game some lovely moments when you’re suddenly controlling a Mario dinosaur, for example, and there’s probably an entire retrospective to be had in this aspect alone. But you can also throw it and leave it hovering in the air for a second, at which point you can jump on it, using it as a platform where there was none, and then move on from there to access particularly tricky spots.
Just ponder that for a second. A platform game where you can place your own temporary platforms – if you’re skilful enough and quick enough to then use them – and chain them together with other parts of the environment. (Argh, we’re back to New Super Mario Bros U again.) More than ever, you’re meant to simply imagine the invisible possibilities around you, the places you could reach, the tricks you could pull off.
This is almost too much. It’s brilliant, but in terms of skill it leaves me far behind it. That’s fine – I love a Mario game that really guns it, even if I end up coughing in the dust. But this is possibly one of the minor reasons why Odyssey sits so strangely in my hands. It’s the first Mario game in a while where I feel that a huge part of what the game offers is completely beyond me. Not a criticism of Odyssey – if anything, this is a criticism of me. And overall, it’s a choice I’m glad the designers made.
So where do things really get weird? It’s taken me a while to locate this feeling, but I think it’s down to the art, or rather the various settings the game takes you to. Mario Odyssey is definitely not set in the Mushroom Kingdom. More than that, it’s often not set in the recognisable world that all Mario games seem to inhabit, where things are soft and felty, even if they’re made of only a handful of polygons, and where everything around Mario – no easy way of putting this – seems made out of Mario-esque materials. You know, the stones that make up the Princess’ castle will be rounded and clean and smooth and noble. The trees will be a bobbly delight. Even something like the grotto in Sunshine has the absolute most huggable, lovable stalactites and stalagmites I have ever seen in a game.
Mario Odyssey is not like that. Just like Schulz once experimented with putting adults in the background of Peanuts strips, changing the texture of the whole thing in a way that was at once trivial and completely transformative, Odyssey puts Mario in worlds that aren’t built from Mario’s cloth. That’s the wrong way to put it, but it gets close to what I mean. It’s not a question of scale, but of jarring textures and tactility and art styles. Mario is still Mario, the squat little cartoon guy with the moustache, but the worlds are often not Mario worlds. They’re something else.
Granted, a few of them are Mario worlds. The Cap Kingdom where things kick off has sparse, childlike chunks of architecture set against a sea of rippling duvet. The Sand Kingdom is a wonderful toy chest of things to do, with bright Mexican influences. Bowser often turns up in a battleship plucked right out of Mario 3 and all the levels contain plenty of Goombas and other Mario-esque critters to ground-pound.
But beyond that? Take the Cascade Kingdom. It’s all a bit too…realistic? Sure, there are floating rocks and improbable waterfalls, but the textures suggest something like Tomb Raider, and Mario stands against them in a slightly migrainey, not-meant-to-be-there way. That T. rex Mario can control is not a Yoshi-style cartoon dinosaur in my memory of it. It’s a lunge at something more photo-realistic. (The kind of lunge, it now occurs to me, that Core Design once made with… Tomb Raider.)
Listen: everything you do here is classic Mario fun, but it looks different, and because it looks different, to me it lands a little different. It makes me think: what exactly am I meant to feel here? What am I meant to be making of it all?
Onwards. The Wooded Kingdom is another font of lovely Mario fun, but the textures – the trees and the gantries – suggest something I might see in a PC sim about the logging industry. Again, Mario clashes against this, as he does, for me, in Metro Kingdom, exploring an urban downtown heavily influenced by New York and filled with yellow cabs and – gah! – actual humans.
Again, all of this stuff is lovely to mess around with and filled with ingenious challenges, but it looks, again and again, like the kid has broken free from the soft play and run out into a building site. It’s the Peanuts thing once more – something childlike dropped into a world where they don’t quite fit.
Part of this is conceivably down to technology – Mario’s running on hardware that can deliver a much greater range of textures than the Wii or the GameCube could. He’s suddenly free from the lovely fuzziness of rim-lighting and let loose amongst convincing materials that we all live around – brick and stone and metal.
But this is still a choice, and it’s a choice from a team that clearly knows exactly what it’s doing and always has. After Yoshi’s adventures in fabric and needlecraft, and Paper Mario‘s pop-up aesthetic, all the way back to the cardboard mountains of Yoshi’s Island, it’s clear that Nintendo thinks very seriously about the faux-materials it makes its games from. So it’s ultimately intriguing to see Mario Odyssey aiming for graphics that, well, look like graphics. I want to know why they wanted to the game to look like this.
For a while I was stuck at this point. For a while, I found Mario Odyssey so deeply, comprehensively odd, purely on an aesthetic level, that a persistent, deeply stupid part of me sometimes wondered if the game existed in part to invite speculation – speculation regarding how it came to look so strange in the first place. (If it even does. Occasionally I will ask a colleague about Mario Odyssey and how weird it looks and quite often they’ll tell me that, really, it still looks like a Mario game.)
In my wildest moments I’d cook up conspiracy theories. Maybe New Donk City, that late mini-level that looks like Dark Souls and even the food level whose name I can never remember, are all parodies at heart, or at least references. Maybe they’re Mario dropped into the kinds of worlds you get in open-world games, Souls games and a certain kind of low-poly indie respectively, and they’re there to say: Mario could be in these games, but he would still be Mario, he would still be different, he would still be his own thing.
From this skewed perspective, Mario Odyssey seems like the most self-aware of Mario games, which is such an odd thing to say. Odyssey seems like the Mario game that is most aware of what other games are doing, and the Mario game that reinforces the most strongly that it’s going to keep on doing its own thing anyway. Here’s Mario in these other settings, but his style is still his own and he’s still running and jumping and having a lovely Mario time.
But are there other ideas to explore here? Gear shift, but I’m currently reading The Philosophy of Home, by Emanuele Coccia, a book which is exactly what its title suggests it is. In an early chapter Coccia explains this ancient Greek idea that he translates as “appropriation”. He’s talking about “the ability to transform ourselves into something connatural with what is around us, and, vice versa, to transform something outside ourselves into a thing from which we are inseparable.” In a way I think he’s talking about the ways that we fit in and that we allow ourselves to fit in, here, there, everywhere.
I read that and I thought: Mario Odyssey. That plumber always fits into other Mario games, but he never fits in, or rarely fits in, when Odyssey is concerned – according to me, anyway. I play through the whole game and the worlds seem built to a different aesthetic, and maybe that’s actually the governing idea to this particular adventure. Although the worlds in this game are still secretly built to Mario’s scale – they’re measured out in his jumps, his height, his speed at a run – they go to pains to suggest they are not. Mario never achieves appropriation. He never totally fits in. In this game he is the eternal stranger, the eternal visitor.
This is probably why Odyssey is such an apt name, and it’s probably why the game ultimately feels like such a weird and triumphant celebration of Mario in general. He goes to all these different places where he shouldn’t make sense, and yet he can still get by through running and jumping and being a cheerful little plumber. He works through New Donk City and he beats that Dark Souls world. He swaps bodies with a toss of the hat, but he never really bends who he is. Homer would be proud?
And so maybe the game’s deeper message, not plucked from the Odyssey, but from someone who definitely read it, is this: simply the thing I am shall make me live. To put it another way, It’s-a me, Mario.
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