This Week In Retro: Super Mario Sunshine (Patreon)

July 19, 2002: "His best friend is a talking pump" "SOLD!"

by Diamond Feit

Nintendo needs Mario. I know that sounds a little silly; Nintendo owns Mario, he does what they say, shows up where they say, and he'll never grow old or get mixed up in any scandals that would require the company to ostracize him. As mascots go, Mario's unimpeachable.

What I'm saying here is Mario means a lot to Nintendo. The company has plenty of popular characters and franchises by now, and the ongoing success of Splatoon—a relatively new creation that has captured kids' attention worldwide—shows that the idea well won't run dry anytime soon. However, whatever other exclusive games Nintendo can offer to fans, Mario has to show up; if not at launch, then soon afterward.

When Nintendo brought the Nintendo 64 to market in 1996, Mario did more than show up on launch day, he transformed the medium as Super Mario 64 became the standard for 3D action platformers. After years of running from left to right on a 2D plane, tackling sequential levels one after another, suddenly Mario had the freedom to explore a variety of environments with a newfound sense of athleticism. Super Mario 64 doesn't reach "open world" levels of travel—Mario cannot pick a distant mountain and run off into the horizon—but compared to the linearity of his 2D adventures, his first 3D outing felt revolutionary.

A funny thing happened next (well, not so funny if you're Nintendo): Mario took a few years off from starring in video games. He didn't retire, showing up to race karts with his friends and have party after party after party, but the Nintendo 64 never saw a second 3D Mario adventure. Mario had taken breaks before, starring in Super Mario World to launch the Super Nintendo, then sitting out until Super Mario 64 arrived for the Nintendo 64. In that case, however, Nintendo had stopgaps in place, remaking all the 8-bit Mario games and releasing them on a single cartridge as Super Mario All-Stars. He also played a significant part in 1995's Yoshi's Island, even though Yoshi commands the lead role. However, from 1996 until the summer of 2002, Super Mario went on a super hiatus.

20 years ago, we finally got to see what Mario had been up to when he at last arrived on the Nintendo GameCube in Super Mario Sunshine. Debuting nearly a year after the new console's launch, Sunshine made a few radical changes to the Super Mario 64 formula, and not all of them impressed the fans.

Experienced Nintendo fans will notice the biggest alteration made to the Mario formula right off the bat: Super Mario Sunshine tells a story. After almost 20 years of Mario having little motivation beyond "rescue princess," Sunshine sees him and the princess take a long-overdue vacation together to tropical Isle Delfino. Things go wrong immediately as the resort community is under siege from a graffiti artist who enjoys sloshing large letter-Ms with toxic paint all over the island. Complicating matters even further, the apparent culprit looks just like Mario, resulting in our hero's immediate arrest and conviction for the crimes. His sentence: Clean up all graffiti in Isle Delfino.

Even if you've only played one Mario game in your entire life, you're probably thinking "wait, I remember Mario running and jumping and throwing things, but how can he wash away unwanted paint?" Sunshine answers that question by introducing F.L.U.D.D., a sentient robotic water pump that Mario wears on his back. F.L.U.D.D. comes with two default settings, allowing it to spray water horizontally—ideal for cleaning walls or splashing others—as well as spray water straight down which lets Mario hover in the air for a few seconds. Later nozzles allow F.L.U.D.D. to propel Mario at high speeds and even fire him high into the sky, all using an internal tank of water that must be refilled. Combining F.L.U.D.D.'s abilities with Mario's usual array of jumps and flips gives players more mobility options than they had in Super Mario 64.

When the two first meet, F.L.U.D.D. knows all about Mario as well as the local troubles, so it briefs Mario on Isle Delfino's sunshine crisis. More than any aesthetic issues, the graffiti has caused the island's Shine Sprites to disappear, robbing the residents of their power and livelihoods. By cleaning up the public defacement, Mario will recover these Shine Sprites and restore Isle Delfino to its former glory.

Super Mario Sunshine brings Mario to an all-new location, gives him brand-new skills, presents a narrative more advanced than anything seen in a previous Mario game, and by virtue of appearing on new hardware, delivers all of this with more impressive graphics and sound than Super Mario 64. Plus, Yoshi even makes his 3D debut, showing up later in the game to assist Mario by eating fruit and spitting juice. Laid out like this, Super Mario Sunshine sounds like a Super Mario Sensation, and looking at reviews from 2002, the critics would seem to agree with near-perfect scores from outlets around the world. Game Informer called Sunshine "the perfect sequel," Computer and Video Games declared it "better than Mario 64," and GameSpot called it the Best Platformer on the GameCube that year.

So why do I hate Super Mario Sunshine? Not just in hindsight either; I've felt disdain for this hot mess of a follow-up to one of my favorite games of all time for 20 years now. Initially, I tied my disappointment to elevated expectations. Super Mario 64 reinvented Nintendo's hero for the third dimension, and I played it over and over again. After six years, I thought Super Mario Sunshine would revolutionize the genre yet again, but instead the game closely mirrors the 64 formula of a hub world that leads to individual courses which players must explore multiple times to collect all the Stars, excuse me, Shines.

Whenever a game in a long-running series feels a little too familiar, fans often counter complaints with the phrase "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Super Mario 64 rightly holds a place in my heart for all it got right, but its camera system barely worked. However, I can forgive 64 as an awkward first attempt, as Mario had never done 3D action before. Six years should have been enough to mend the camera in time for Super Mario Sunshine, but while the camera controls fare slightly better this time, relying on the GameCube C-stick instead of buttons to pan around, I still rarely felt like I had the damn thing facing in the right direction to do what I wanted.

Given more time both to collect my thoughts and see what Mario would do in future games, I recognize Sunshine's biggest problem: Everything Nintendo did add to the game doesn't actually make the game any better, and in some ways actively makes it worse. Front and center in that conversation is F.L.U.D.D., a nuisance of a partner that barely works. Controlling Mario should bring me some measure of joy, and in most games it does, but there is no joy in F.L.U.D.Dville. Properly aiming the nozzle irritates me as finicky splash detection makes cleaning even the smallest graffiti feel like busywork. Boss battles often require precision aiming to spray water at weak points; good luck doing that when surrounded by enemies. The hover function fares better, but even that lacks the entertainment of Mario's previous gliding tools like the Raccoon Tail or Cape.

Worse still, F.L.U.D.D. talks. Why does it talk? When Mario's brother got his own high-tech accessory in Luigi's Mansion—specifically a vacuum cleaner that sucks up ghosts—the appliance didn't need to chat him up and tell him what to do. F.L.U.D.D. doesn't talk all that much during Super Mario Sunshine as a whole, but it says a lot during the initial minutes of the game, making an irritating first impression.

Separated from launch and held in the light alongside Mario's other outings, Super Mario Sunshine let down a lot of people. I remember reading negative takes on the game before the early 2000s ended, and by the time Sunshine turned 10 year old (making it officially retro), I noticed a flood of complaints hit the internet as a whole. However, you can see that despite the overwhelming critical praise in 2002, at least a few people went on record back then with their displeasure. A number of otherwise glowing reviews acknowledge the flawed camera, and even people who loved Sunshine admit that it "doesn't shake up the genre" like Super Mario 64 did six years earlier. Amusingly, despite naming Sunshine as the Best Platformer on the GameCube, GameSpot also declared it the Most Disappointing Game on the console that same year.

Beyond all my personal complaints with Super Mario Sunshine, it just happened to arrive during a difficult time for me concerning my view on video games. In 2002 I found myself encountering a string of high-profile disappointments as I bought a number of games that either didn't live up to my own expectations or outright pissed me off. I felt so disillusioned by year's end that I wondered if video games no longer meant as much to me as they did during my youth, a tough question to ask oneself after loving the medium for over 20 years at that point. I've since rebounded from that disastrous period, coming to terms with the highs and lows of games in general, and just accepting that no, I'm not to blame, Super Mario Sunshine under delivered.

As much as I loathed Mario's wet-n-wild vacation, Super Mario Sunshine certainly sold very well considering the overall fortunes of the GameCube. Yet Nintendo must have recognized that saddling Mario with a talking sprinkler didn't improve the plumber's heroics, as F.L.U.D.D. would not return in future Super Mario titles. Indeed, subsequent games in the series eschewed any accessories for Mario at all, refocusing on the core experience of running and jumping and throwing things. I can't say any of his 3D outings ever matched the high I felt when I first played Super Mario 64, but at least I never felt the crushing dissatisfaction of hosing down street sludge again.

As far as vacations go, Mario's never taken another six year break between games ever again. As of this writing, it has been five years since Super Mario Odyssey debuted on the Switch, but during this period Nintendo has ported Wii U exclusive Mario games to the handheld/home hybrid console with new enhancements and features, making these re-releases de facto new titles. Since the Wii U flopped at retail even harder than the GameCube did, most Switch owners had never played New Super Mario Bros. U or Super Mario 3D World before. I know my son was far too young to play either Wii U release, but he has since beaten NSMBU Deluxe on Switch, the first video game he's ever cleared.

Speaking of re-releases, Super Mario Sunshine also came to the Switch as part of the Super Mario 35th anniversary celebration in 2020. I tried to revisit it for its 20th anniversary this week and, after wrestling with the camera controls all over again, struggling to toss fruits into a basket to earn blue coins, and having my fingers fall asleep as I tried to drown Petey Piranha, I ragequit rather than spend any more time in Isle Delfino. I find it telling that despite my children's general  interest in Mario, they've never asked to try Super Mario Sunshine for themselves. I should remember that fact the next time I question my abilities as a parent; clearly I'm doing something right!

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch. By the way, with a vacation next week followed by BitSummit, expect the next column in mid-August.