Super Mario Odyssey

Nintendo does not iterate quietly. When the company decides a genre needs reinventing, it tends to reinvent it from the studs up — and Super Mario Odyssey, developed in-house by Nintendo’s EPD team for the Switch, is the clearest evidence in a decade that the old guard still sets the pace.

The setup is pure Mario boilerplate. Bowser has kidnapped Princess Peach, this time with the added indignity of a forced wedding, and Mario gives chase aboard a top-hat-shaped airship called the Odyssey. That’s the wrapper. What’s inside is the most structurally ambitious Mario game since Super Mario 64 cracked the 3D problem open.

The pitch is a return to the open, “sandbox” design philosophy of 64 and Sunshine — self-contained Kingdoms you’re dropped into and told, essentially, to go play. But the hook, the thing that reorganizes the entire game around itself, is Cappy: a sentient hat who lets Mario possess enemies and objects on contact. Nintendo positioned Odyssey as a flagship Switch title, a system-seller for a console still proving it belonged, and it delivered — near-universal acclaim and a permanent spot on the “greatest platformers ever made” shortlist.

What separates Odyssey from a nostalgia exercise is intent. This isn’t Nintendo cashing in on a beloved name. It’s a studio at the height of its powers asking what a Mario game can be when you hand it a mechanic capable of turning the player into a Bullet Bill, a T-Rex, or a chunk of electrical current, then building Kingdom after Kingdom of puzzles around that question. The mascot platformer, a category most publishers abandoned years ago, gets treated here as an active research project. That confidence is the whole review.

• The Capture Mechanic: Throw Cappy at an enemy or object and Mario possesses it, inheriting its abilities. Dozens of capturable entities — Goombas, Bullet Bills, a frog, a T-Rex, an electrical wire — each rewrite the moment-to-moment rules. This is the game’s engine, not a gimmick bolted to the side.
• Sandbox Kingdoms: Discrete, densely authored worlds — the prehistoric Cascade Kingdom, the skyscraper-choked New Donk City — that reward exploration in every direction instead of funneling you down a corridor.
• Power Moons: The collectible currency that fuels the Odyssey and gates progress. They are everywhere. That’s both the best and, eventually, the most exhausting thing about the game.

The Gameplay Loop

Mario has never controlled this well. That’s the foundation everything else stands on, and it deserves to be said plainly before we get to the clever stuff. The base moveset — the triple jump, the long jump, the dive, the ground pound, the wall kick — carries more nuance than any Mario before it, and Cappy layers a throw-and-vault on top that turns traversal into something closer to improvisation. Dives chain off cap-bounces off wall-kicks, opening routes that look, on paper, unreachable. The controls are built for near-zero onboarding friction: a child can move Mario, and an expert can make him dance.

Then Capture arrives and blows the loop wide open.

The genius of Capture isn’t the novelty of becoming a T-Rex — though the idea of stomping through Cascade Kingdom as one sells itself. It’s that each possession is a self-contained verb. Capturing a Bullet Bill turns a platforming problem into a flight problem. Capturing a Cheep Cheep turns it into a swimming problem. Capturing an electrical wire — the “Spark Pylon” — turns Mario into a current racing along a line. Every Kingdom introduces new capturable entities, which means Nintendo is effectively teaching a new mechanic every hour or two, then combining them in ways that never feel arbitrary. This is design discipline most studios can’t touch. The mechanic could easily have been a bag of one-off tricks. Instead it’s a coherent language.

The Kingdoms themselves are the other half of the equation. Each is a compact sandbox stuffed with Power Moons — the collectible that fuels the airship and unlocks the next destination. And here’s the smart part: Moons are the reward for curiosity, not grinding. See a suspicious ledge, capture the right creature, solve the micro-puzzle, get a Moon. The density is intoxicating early on — no corner of New Donk City goes unadorned with things worth investigating.

Where the Loop Strains

That density is also the game’s one real structural flaw, and it’s worth being honest about it. The main story requires a reasonable number of Moons. But Odyssey holds hundreds more, and once the credits roll, the collect-a-thon reveals its bloat. Some post-game Moons are inspired. Many are filler — a Moon for ground-pounding a random spot, a Moon for existing near a thing. The line between “rewarding exploration” and checklist padding gets blurry, and the game’s respect for a completionist’s time thins out the deeper into the post-game they go. It’s the difference between a game that trusts your curiosity and one that’s just counting on your compulsion.

The local co-op deserves a similar dose of realism. A second player can control Cappy independently, and it’s a lovely on-ramp for a parent playing with a kid. But it’s shallow — Player Two is a helper, not a partner, and no one is buying Odyssey for its multiplayer.

Odyssey is not chasing photorealism, and thank god. Its aesthetic is tonal range as a design principle — the game leaps from a painterly waterfall canyon to a hyper-stylized real-world metropolis where a cartoon Mario high-fives realistically-proportioned Manhattanites, and the tonal whiplash is the point. New Donk City remains one of the boldest art swings in the series precisely because it shouldn’t work.

Technically, the game is built to hold the line. It targets a locked frame rate, docked or handheld, and a 2D-styled game of this scope is light enough on hardware to keep the busiest set-pieces reading cleanly. The UI is almost invisible — a Moon counter, a coin count, and little else — which is exactly right for a game that wants your eyes on the world, not the HUD. This is a design of exceptional polish, and the restraint is as impressive as the spectacle.

On the Nintendo Switch, Odyssey is a showcase for what the hybrid concept actually buys you. Docked, it’s a couch spectacle. Undocked, it’s the best handheld platformer of its generation, losing almost nothing in the shrink.

The one wrinkle is motion controls. A handful of Capture abilities — spinning a cap throw, certain movement tricks — are mapped to Joy-Con gestures, and they’re clearly designed for a Joy-Con in each hand. In pure handheld mode, with the Joy-Cons attached, those same inputs are fussier by design; flicking the whole console to trigger a spin throw is workable but never elegant. It’s a minor tax, not a dealbreaker, and Nintendo left the essential moves on the buttons. But it’s the one place where the hardware’s flexibility bumps against the game’s ambitions.

Super Mario Odyssey is what happens when the studio that invented a genre refuses to coast on it. The Capture mechanic isn’t a feature — it’s a new grammar for 3D movement, and Nintendo teaches it with a patience and generosity that most games can’t approach. The controls reward both a child’s first jump and an expert’s chained dive-cap-bounce-wall-kick routes. The worlds are a joy. The only thing holding it back from perfection is its own generosity turned to excess: a mountain of collectibles that eventually asks more of your patience than your curiosity.

That’s a remarkably small complaint to level at a game this ambitious. Odyssey earns its reputation. It’s one of the best platformers ever made, and the clearest argument you’ll find that gaming’s oldest mascot still has more to say than most of the industry’s new ideas combined.