Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone, Issue 13 (Patreon)

 Welcome, everyone, to the 13th issue of Supper Mario Broth: Special Zone.

Today, we are going to look at graffiti textures found in the New Donk City underground power plant in Super Mario Odyssey, and some other things related to that location.

City Graffiti

New Donk City in Super Mario Odyssey is based on the real-life New York City, and just like the location that inspired it, it is full of graffiti.  Since Mario games are, by and large, for an audience that contains all ages, the graffiti does not consist mainly of artist tags and obscenities as it would in real life, but instead either the name of the city, the initials "NDC", or something related to the city's history. It seems either the artists there have a much stronger fondness of the administration than often anti-establishment real-life graffiti artists, or the graffiti is actually a government promotion.

But today, I will not talk about the aboveground graffiti seen in the main city area. Instead, we will take a look at the unique graffiti found in the Underground Power Plant, where New Donk City's power is generated from Power Moons. The Power Plant consists of two parts, the plant proper with a central power extractor room and a vast inaccessible hall of conveyor pipes, and the gameplay-relevant side area which Mario needs to traverse to get to the power extractor room.

It is that second area that contains the graffiti I will showcase. The screenshots below are taken by me, and the textures are extracted by noclip.website and edited by me to be more visible.

Upon entering the area, you have to turn around to see the first piece. Now, note the several problems with this graffiti:

-It is extremely faint. A casual look doesn't even register that it says "Bowser & Peach: a Royal Wedding", instead only "Bowser" is visible and the rest needs to be examined carefully to see.
-It is unique and in such a location that the average player would never see, as it is inside an area that is only visited once in the main story and requires the player to turn the camera around completely in a place there is no incentive to do so.
-Finally, the pipe and light fixture are obscuring parts of the image, with the light being particularly disruptive.

All this together results in what is, in my opinion, wasted effort. Some artist on the team clearly spent a long time crafting this artwork only for it to be showcased in the most disadvantageous position possible. Luckily, with the power of datamining, we can extract the texture and take a closer look.

The texture is at least not obscured, but it is clear it was filtered very heavily from whatever the original picture drawn by the team member was. I have tried my best to use contrast and lighting adjustments to make the artwork as visible as possible:

I think this version is much closer to whatever the unfortunately irretrievable original artwork must have been. There is an amazing amount of detail here. The decorative white font separated from the rest reads "A Royal Wedding", also something very difficult to discern during gameplay.

The way through the room leads to an alcove in the back wall. To the right of that alcove is the next big piece; this one is slightly easier to see for the average player but again so faint it barely draws attention to itself. Here is my restoration:

For those who follow my Twitter account, I have previously submitted this particular texture there, but felt it would be of interest to restore all graffiti and make a longer article about it on Patreon, as well.

Inside the alcove is this mural of various "NDC" logos.

Here is my restoration. 

An interesting hidden graffiti is behind the default position of the last green platform. Only by making it rotate does it reveal the "Bowser [heart] Peach" tag.

Finally, here are the last two pieces. One above the pipe and one on the wall to the left of it.

Here is the left one. Note the checkered heart; this is likely a reference to Bowser using checkered patterns in his wedding outfit.

Finally, here is the one above the pipe. The font used for the "Bowser & Peach" text reminds me of the Yoshi's Island logo:

The letter weights and the fact that the right leg of the A is longer than the left are especially reminiscent of it, although I believe this is merely a coincidence.

Going through that pipe transports Mario to the power plant room, where I would like to point out a few additional details.

Using the Coin filter in Snapshot Mode while looking out over the sea of poison to the right reveals an extremely stretched-out rivet texture at the end of the room, appearing pixelated. This was likely another thing the programmers never intended anyone to see as the Coin filter was added as DLC in post-production and all filters coming with the original release show only darkness in that spot.

There is a very large circular reservoir for moon energy above the extractor that needs going into Snapshot Mode to view:

Together with the smaller reservoir of sloshing liquid beneath it, this bears a high resemblance to the Odyssey when it is complete:

The separation lines, among them exactly 8 meridians, are in the same places. This is likely some form of symbolism linking the power plant to the Odyssey, although what exactly the implications are is not clear.

Lastly, I would like to point out something about the power extractor. Here is footage of it in operation:

It uses up exactly 1 Power Moon per second. This is 86400 Power Moons in a day that are, according to in-game information, needed to power the entire city. It would take less than 17 minutes of this plant running to fully power up the Odyssey, and just over 2 minutes to get it enough power to go to the moon. I find it personally very thoughtful on part of the developers to reflect the abundance of Power Moons in the game world by letting Mario buy them in unlimited numbers himself. 

Looking at the Power Moons coming out of the extractor from afar, they appear to be the same as the empty Power Moons one would encounter in-game; however, they are different and only appear similar due to the low lighting. This is an empty Power Moon from the game:

It is entirely transparent and appears with a slight dithering effect. Now, here is a moon coming out of the extractor:

Instead of being transparent, it is still opaque, just desaturated. Its eyes are also still darker than the rest, while the empty Power Moons have no such distinction. It is possible that these Power Moons can somehow be recharged as they still look more solid than the ones Mario has used up. Anything beyond this is speculation; we can only hope that Super Mario Odyssey 2, should one ever be released, would go in more depth about the mechanics of getting power from the moons.

This concludes today's issue. Thank you very much for reading.