They're listed in the credits as the Mario Galaxy Orchestra. I'll get to the music in a bit, because it's just one aspect of how the whole game hangs together, but I'm going to have to find the soundtrack. The music on Battlerock Galaxy is particularly good, and the Observatory Waltz piece really is beautiful.
I agree with a good bit of what you say there Randy (disagree with the control shaking, which I find in this game to be completely intuitive and totally on point at all times). I also do agree about Sunshine's merits as a jumper, compared to others. It's just a little hard to bear when you wait five years for a game that tries to do more or less exactly what its predecessor did, just not as well.
Galaxy is, in its weakest aspects, prey to the same pitfalls as Sunshine was over Mario 64. Mainly that it doesn't feel quite as free and sometimes feels a bit too "digital" (less control over Mario's movement, more linearity in level design), whereas a Mario game should be analogue from the soles of its boots to the peak of its cap, shouldn't it?
Weeeellllll.... The more I play of the game, particularly now that I've taken out the main boss, the more I see that while Sunshine tried too hard to be M64 and tripped up over its loss of freedom, Galaxy takes that loss of freedom and pretty much turns it into a strength.
In all senses, from music, art direction and right the way to game design, Galaxy is a synthesis of every Mario game thats come before it. It takes the approach to control that Mario 64 brought in, but level design is closer in spirit to the old 2D games.
Super Mario Bros was like playing music to a set composition, in that there's a beginning, a middle and an end. They're always in the same place but the way you get through them is up to you. Mario's your instrument. The better you know his ins and outs, the more say you have in bringing your own personality to how you play those tunes. You can take it a slow rythmic pace, hitting the head of every Koopa Trooper as you go, or you can bomb it like holy fuck, pinging him through it like a rubber band.
Mario 64 was more like freeform Jazz. There's a variety of different places you can go (within set boundries defined by the structure of the thing you're actually playing) and it's kind of up to you how you go about it and get to them. There's far more space and time to noodle about, and doing so can turn up some sublime surprises.
In Mario Bros, you play through levels. In Mario 64, you play around levels. Galaxy smooshes these both together, pretty bloody sucessfully, taking structure from Bros and control from 64. It's like playing 120(ish) of the best fucking pop songs you've ever heard, in quick succession. This one has exploding volcanoes and a planetfull of Goombas. That one has you skating pirouettes up waterfalls. Dont like one? Here's another!
Some of these courses are masterclasses in temporal art. What you loose in freedom, you gain in the spectacular pacing and instrumentation, condensed into a five-minute brain injection that can in places leave you reeling. Why it works holds a lot of similar ground with why 2D shooters work.
(For all this talk of music, the actual score itself is just another incredible component to the game's pacing. It can change from planet to planet while you're on the same run, always reflecting the pace or scope, epic or personal, of what you're doing. It's bloody marvelous).
It's not entirely succesful in the synthesis of these two eras of Mario gaming though. I think it enhances the structure it takes from the 2D games endlessly, but loses stuff from 64 in the mix. Control of the wee bugger is still lacking in some respects from what it was ten year ago. There are whole new lews of physics to try your moves out in, but the moveset is drastically reduced into the bargain.
The camera system, control over which is vastly more limited in Galaxy, is a good pointer to what I mean here. As we've said, Mario 64 was characterised by its open-plan free-roaming playgrounds. Playgrounds where you got dumped in a corner with a vague description of what you were aiming for, and then left to your own devices to run, twist and jump all over the place, straining yourself against the boundries of the environment until you could bend them exactly to your will. As a result, you could pretty much find yourself in any nook or cranny with a need to get to any other. Cue the 360 camera, which was absolutely crucial for squaring up your intended path and keeping your leaps in line.
In Galaxy the camera is a lot more straightforward. There seem to be two reasons for this. First is the linearity of the levels. You pick a star, and generally the only way you can go is for that star. The level gets set up for it, and the other paths are blocked off. This seems to be as true of the more open-plan levels like Honeyhive, as it does of the ones where you're launched from planetoid to planetoid backwards, forwards and upwards. Linear routes, from one place to another means you're only ever really going to end up where you're meant to end up (which isn't neccessarily a bad thing). The camera doesn't need to fuck about. It knows where you are. (But unfortunately, not always where you want to be).
The other reason I'd reckon camera control is more limited is because of where the game goes a bit more expansive than its predeccesor. Mainly, the gravity, and the bits where you have the ability to run on any surface. It can get confusing at first while you try to rewire your brain for the next step in platforming logic, and really, giving rotational control of the camera to the player at these points would probably break the game. And not in a good way.
There is a good way to break a game. And I think that this is where Galaxy loses out a bit to 64.
See, the camera in Mario 64 had a few fairly useless functions (like the ability to lock it in place and run off into the distance) and there were attacks that you'd never use (like the crouching breakdance kick). These things were there for no specific purposes other than that they were, first of all, fun, and secondly because they were a logical extension of the controls you had over the character. For every kind of movement you could make with the control stick, you could jab the A button and there'd be a corresponding jump. For every jump you could make with those two, a jab of the B button would trigger a corresponding attack, be it a punch, kick or all-out ariel dive.
From that comes an infinite range of possibilities and permutations, so that now, ten years later, I can still turn on Mario 64, run up a hill, do a U-turn jump into a wall, kick off it to gain more air before diving down a hill on my belly, springing into the sea and breaking out in a grin (I'd do that last one, not Mario).
All while the camera's locked in position ten foot back, of course.
Using these three basic components of motion, jump and attack, you can rattle off the walls and push and push until you see things you weren't meant to. But that can be a very good thing indeed. It means you're playing. You're engaging. You're testing the limits of what's possible in the system you're in. That's a basic drive of being human, and it's something only games, as a consumer entertainment medium, can bring.
So far, there's no such freedom to strain at the limits of the developer here. There's not even a proper multi-use attack button. You can feel these limitations as soon as you get control of Mario for the first time. He feels like he's on reigns compared to the way he used to be. There just isn't the same ability to send him pinging around like a bouncyball (Bouncyballs are the 3D equivalent of rubber bands). He's a bloody damn sight better than he is in Sunshine though. Nintendo thankfully seem to have realised that strapping anything to the wee guy only serves to slow him down.
What Galaxy does offer though, is precisely what I look for in Nintendo games and something which seems to have been lacking for the past while. Abundance.
There's an abundance of everything is this game. Imagination... fun... laughs... and... most importantly.... little rainbow coloured things that you can collect! Doesn't matter if they're "Rupees", or "Star Bits" or whatever. I love those things! And the less purpose they serve the better.
Shiny things are good, but generally a bit more self-important and portentous.
Rainbow things that spray out of every patch of grass in batches of ten or more and then whizz across space to fly into me with the perfect wee collecty noise? YES PLEASE!
And, you know? I'm not joking, but they might be what I like most about this game, because to me they're symptomatic of every design decision here that's been made in order to recapture that sense of limitless imagination and storybook wonder that seems to have been hiding for the last ten years.
I love Mario 64 with a passion, and the same goes for Zelda 64, but even those games felt as if they were missing something very important their series had given me back in the old SNES days. Here, in Mario Galaxy, I have that back, and if I have to lose some of the other stuff to get it, then I'm willing to make that trade-off.
Besides, seeing as it'll have all the lovely experiments from here to draw on as well, the next one'll be a fuckin dancer. |
