Meanwhile, you can use your Wii-mote to control a star-shaped pointer on the screen (since you’ll always have it pointed at the television anyway) which can be used to pick up Star Bits, small colorful prisms which serve as food for the game’s inhabitants and ammunition for your pointer. Yes—I said ammunition; you can aim at the screen with the Wii-mote and pull the B-Trigger to fire Star Bits at enemies to stun them. These Star Bits are also a form of currency throughout the game, used to feed Hungry Lumas, which grant you access to new galaxies and secret stars. Don’t worry about having to collect them, though; it’s never tedious (always fun by contrast, in fact), and you will always have an abundance of them provided you’re taking your time with the game. In that sense, they’re almost more for spice than anything else—as you fly from place to place, they’re strewn beautifully across the skies, beckoning for you to point at them and collect them during your travels.
Somewhat similar to Mario 64, in Galaxy, Mario has a life meter that can be replenished by finding coins. However, now you’ve only got three hits to work with, making things considerably more challenging. In fact, Galaxy’s difficulty might be one of the most refreshing things about its design. Sure, it’s pretty tough, but it’s designed so that even casual gamers will not give up too easily. With enough persistence, nearly anyone can prevail, but the game is hard enough to challenge even seasoned players. This is something that is common to the best Mario games of the past. Meanwhile, the game’s phenomenal soundtrack (which I’ll discuss at length later), stunning variety, and generous helpings of extra lives keep players interested, even as they’re eye to eye with the most daunting tasks. This is one of very few games where I actually caught myself smiling when I died—a rare thing indeed. That alone should be a testament to the meticulous balancing that went into perfecting Galaxy’s gameplay, and from which its fun factor so richly benefits.
The only tiny issue that blemishes Galaxy’s gameplay is the very occasionally problematic camera. The designers elected to implement an automatic camera system that (usually) intelligently assumes the best view of the action to ensure that the experience is immersive and the control is smooth. However, as with all automatic camera systems, you will sometimes see it wrap around to an inconvenient angle or shift in the middle of a critical moment. These mishaps are thankfully (and surprisingly) infrequent, and for the most part, the camera work feels natural and appropriate. There are also some situations where camera control is left (optionally) to the player, and in this event it’s easy to press C to zip the camera behind Mario or rotate manually with the D-pad. The only complaint about manual control is that sometimes it’s hard not to wish that you could do it more often. But for casual players, the predominantly automatic approach greatly simplifies the gameplay, and even for us more serious gamers, the camerawork is done well enough where for every time we frown in discontent, we also smile with acceptance at how well it actually works in spite of these niggling issues.
Rejuvenating Innovation
But let’s go back to talking about creativity. Super Mario 64’s legacy was the elegant transition of classic platforming gameplay into three dimensions. Now that we’ve seen countless copycat titles seizing upon Nintendo’s initial design, it’s getting harder to look forward to each new 3-D platformer, most of which merely introduce marginal improvements, if any at all. Super Mario Galaxy breaks the cycle and changes all of this. Somewhat similar to how Super Mario 64 introduced a new dimension to platforming gameplay, so does Galaxy. But rather than progressing from 2-D to 3-D, Galaxy transcends the conventional “static” gravity approach, and instead transitions to dynamic gravity on a macroscopic scale.
Mario encounters both large and small celestial bodies throughout his adventure; some levels see him traversing typical platforming environments that resemble those of previous Mario games, but many others find him zipping through space from one small rock to the next. You can usually circumnavigate these small planetoids, meaning that Mario actually ends up upside-down. Better yet, if there are numerous small celestial objects nearby, you can actually jump off one body with the necessary escape velocity to exit its gravitational field and be sucked to the surface of another. This concept is made obvious very early on in the game, and the effect is mind-blowing. As it was once fun to simply run and jump around the grassy plains aimlessly in Mario 64, it is now fun to simply toy with gravity, long-jumping around the perimeter of an object, launching from one planet to the next, and leaping through space at your heart’s content, governed only by the gravitational field. Just avoid the black holes—as Galaxy’s new bottomless pits, they’re very unforgiving.
Clever Design
There are just around 40 galaxies total in the game, with most of them being minor, one/two-star affairs and the rest (say, fifteen or so) being the “major” galaxies. Each of these major galaxies hides anywhere from four to seven stars (three of which are traditional, main stars), meaning you’ll revisit them a number of times throughout the course of the game. Unlike in Super Mario 64, however, subsequent visits to the same area in Galaxy are often completely different from the previous encounters. For the three main stars in the major galaxies, the paths you take through the level are always entirely unique, and nearly always the familiar parts of the level morph enough to where not even they feel all that similar. The rest of the stars are a blend of secret and comet stars. Secret stars are found along one of the three main routes, but their presence is unremarked until you complete the three main stars first (though you can find them anytime).