Good choice of words for this idea. The "island problem" looks to me like it's a relic of the primordial stages of 3D game development where large environments were not possible to render in their entirety, and shortcuts had to be employed to get as close to a complete representation of the location as possible. Since Nintendo was a primary innovator during the dawn of 3D game design, I can imagine it's easier for them in comparison to a younger studio to slip back into old habits like this.
I wouldn't say that's the case. Plenty of N64 3D platformers managed to avoid this issue perfectly well. Banjo-Kazooie, Glover, DK64, Jet-Force Gemini, even a lot of the levels in Mario 64 make the effort to not feel like floating landmasses. Even Sonic Jam gets it right. I think there are two possible reasons why this happened in Odyssey. One is that this style is a natural extension of the way that levels were designed in 3D World, and either the level designers couldn't get themselves out of that mindset, or they wrongfully assumed that "floating islands are just part of the Mario series identity". Two is that the Switch just isn't powerful enough to deliver boxed-in locations with this level of graphical fidelity while still running at a locked 1080p 60fps. It takes a lot less resources to make the surrounding environment a low-detail skybox than it does to make it a mountainous perimeter wall.
@@alfo2804 Personally, I would say it's perhaps not about whether you *can* make a location boxed-in, but whether you *want* to. Sure, the Island Problem is immersion breaking, but I feel like it just wouldn't look great if every location had some sort of infinite mountains, buildings, whatever to fully box them in. Especially with how high some parts of the kingdoms are, you would need huge objects that look silly and basically block off the whole sky. Similarly, if you make things look more close-by than the current skyboxes and just wall them off with invisible walls, it might confuse and/or frustrate players, or break their immersion into the world anyway.
@@_Moralle All of the games I mentioned manage to do it perfectly well. Plus, Odyssey also already uses invisible walls, so that wouldn't be an issue. It doesn't need to always be 'boxed-in'. There are ways to elegantly and covertly stop the player from getting out. And besides, you don't need to block the horizon. In fact, you ideally shouldn't. Showing the fact that the world sprawls out beyond the boundaries of the playable map would make those out-of-bounds areas look less jarring.
@@alfo2804 Odyssey's existing invisible walls are pretty subtle though, you barely stumble upon any of them organically. Also, the games you mentioned are vastly different from Odyssey both in level design and movesets. As I said, a lot of kingdoms have very high parts, and that combined with the insane movement Mario has, even just on a casual level, would require very high "boxes" of mountains, buildings, whatever, because if they aren't high enough you end up with very obvious invisible walls, frustration, and a broken immersion again.
@@_Moralle No. There's almost no points where you can use height to reach the boundaries of the world, glitches aside. Besides, it would be trivial to just extend the playable, accessible land area out to the furthest possible point you can reach by jumping from the highest points. Even so, there still could be a few death pits, that are clearly visible and impassible, even if they aren't strictly 'bottomless'. What I am describing is really no insurmountable task. You might not be able to visualise it, but it's perfectly possible.
This is why the Steam Gardens are the absolute best level in the game, hands down. On top of just being a robust, platforming playground with lots of paths and secrets to explore, It wasn't just a floating island in the middle of an arbitrary void. It was a mountaintop in the middle of a dense forest that you could fall into and explore as well! All this and it had one of the most banger soundtracks as the cherry on top. 10/10, would pick flowers again.
@@davidguthary8147 Number 1: It literally isn't. Only one side is a pit, with the other sides being walled off with cliffs. Number 2: It's about presentation. A black abyss in deep dark woods is much easier to swallow than a city floating over a city.
@@Cyberguy64 A void is a void. Presentation doesn't change that. Also, that "wall" is the "mountain" you mentioned earlier. The island is made complete by the pit below Deep Woods and the opposite end of the main map, where you fall to your death instead of landing in Deep Woods.
I think Lake Kingdom and Seaside are also good about not being like this. The boundaries for those two make a lot of sense, they aren't floating in a void. Lake Kingdom is in a valley of sorts and Seaside opens up into the open ocean like you'd expect it to from the way it looks
@@davidguthary8147 How reductive can you get? This is a video game and video games only have so much content the devs can include. Boundaries have to be drawn somewhere, it's inevitable. It's always better when the devs put forth the effort to draw them in appealing and natural ways. Wooded Kingdom puts forth significant effort to create the illusion of being a mountain surrounded by deep, dark forest. Most of others don't even try to look natural. New Donk, Tostarina, and the Mushroom Kingdom in particular are so lazy about their placement as to be offensive.
Organic, well-defined boundaries are very important when it comes to good 3D level design in my opinion. At least Odyssey doesn't have any inappropriately placed invisible walls; that's even worse.
I don't know; I think i'd prefer invisible walls in most cases, though within reason of course. With an invisible wall, it's easy to just say, "Oh, this thing doesn't exist in-universe and is only there for gameplay purposes," without it breaking your immersion, like HUD elements, but with the island thing, if you want to say the same thing, then you have to imagine that the world visually looks very different than what you're actually shown.
@@Baconator2558 This. You can justify boundaries/invisible walls in a lot of ways. Closed gates, roadblocks, debris, mountain ranges, policemen or guards guarding the place, etc... Adding limits or invisible walls are inherently a bad thing, it just need to make somewhat organic sense
Invisible walls are fine. Sunshine does these with the barriers of their levels. They don’t exist in-universe and are just telling you you’re not supposed to go there.
@@APootisBirb The one rule I personally have for invisible walls is to never make it look like there might be something traversable on the other side. Games such as Sunshine and Breath of the Wild are good at this because the areas beyond are mostly empty. However, something like Kirby and the Forgotten Land's first level is immersion-breaking to me, since at the very start you're greeted with buildings that look explorable within your moveset, yet are somehow beyond the map's boundaries.
Ironically, the one kingdom I feel that doesn't suffer from this problem is Lost Kingdom. It's completely surrounded by a sea of poison, but unlike Cascade Kingdom the sea level is close to the land so it's believable that some could reach it without a flying machine provided their ship could withstand the poison. (Note: I am discounting Cloud Kingdom and Ruined Kingdom as those are basically just lone arenas for certain bosses.) Lake Kingdom and Snow Kingdom do slightly better with being completely surrounded by natural walls... but it still raises the question of how anyone gets out without flying machines. This is just speculation, but it might be a holdover from Super Mario 3D Land and 3D World's brand of level design, which has something similar with random landmasses protruding from bottomless pits, far away from any other solid land, with no indication of how people could get to or from their. However, in those games it was more excusable as those levels weren't meant to be actual locations people lived in but rather just elaborate obstacle courses for the player(s) to traverse.
I think the level designers just got stuck in that 3D Land/World headspace. They forgot that they were making a game where the worlds are supposed to be a little bit more than just obstacle courses.
Also, even if Lost Kingdom was more like the other kingdoms in that aspect, you can definitely forgive it a lot more either way, because being an isolated island in the middle of absolutely nowhere is literally the entire _point_ of the kingdom. The other places, not necessarily so much.
@@alfo2804 I don′t think they necessarily forgot, as Odyssey does a lot of world building and lore (at least compared to past Mario games) for it′s areas, but they prioritized level design a bit too much over a immersive, narratively-logical world, which is fine for 3D platformers to an extent, but very disappointing here, especially when Sunshine set a great standard for world design with Isle Delfino′s connected map. They could′ve just gotten lazy as well, but it′s hard to say since Odyssey has so much effort put into it.
I think the biggest problem is the fact that they are literally islands in the middle of nowhere with bottomless pits. It makes sense for Cap, Wood, and Bowser, but Seaside and Lost have actual solutions, and they're some of the best looking kingdoms for that reason
Best part is like, for Cascade Kingdom it’s such an easy fix. Just like… make it stop floating? Put it directly in the water, add a dock with a bunch of tourists and bam you’re done
@@sinisternorimaki the same thing that’s in seaside kingdom, put an invisible wall far out from anything interesting, and players will just accept that that’s as far as they can go
This issue isn't unique to Mario Odyssey but it's definitely the one game where it felt the most jarring, especially in a game themed around its inhabitants frequently traveling between the locales. IMO I think it's fine to barrier off the level with a bottomless pit, but when almost every level uses this method without thinking about the logistics of it, it starts to push up against my suspension of disbelief. Even in Peach's Castle they added one, when the place was already surrounded by mountains that did a fine enough job to begin with.
An exception to this problem are the Lake and Snow kingdoms, however I still feel they suffer from the same problem, being walled off and such. How does anyone get there? Can't see flying taxis in those kingdoms afaik, as with many others.
I think in some ways earlier games benefited from the smaller scale of levels. Many stages in Super Mario 64 have sheer vertical walls enclosing them, but when the stage is, say, the inside of a giant clock, that makes a lot of sense. Ironically, if the levels in Odyssey had been even weirder and quirkier than they are, it would be easier to suspend disbelief about how disconnected the world is (Galaxy benefited from this a lot). Odyssey has the stylistic diversity of Galaxy combined with the abundance of NPCs you see in Sunshine, and while these both seem like good things in the abstract I feel like they work poorly together because they pull the world design in two different directions.
Yeah it always seemed weird to me how everyone else supposedly got around when you were on Cappy-based travel and the hot air balloon. What happened to games including background elements that you can’t necessarily use but are there to show how the characters would get around? It adds more environmental storytelling and immersion. Instead you’re constantly reminded “Oh this is a video game” when you hit an edge of a world
@@StalinkTz Good. Builds them character and gives them memories they'll remember for years. Maybe they'll bond with a friend over both being scared over the cheep cheep.
I think an easy way they could've fixed New Donk is instead of just having the section of city you play on isolated high up from the rest of it, instead have it all connected, but limit where the player can go by the use of bridges that are blocked off by heavy traffic or construction, preventing you from being able to access those directions.
Sunshine was insanely ahead of its time in terms of world building. Every stage is a location somewhere on Delfino Island, and you can even see areas like Pinna Park and Ricco Harbor in the background of other levels. Odyssey tries to bring that interconnected feeling back, but it ended up being more akin to Banjo Kazooie / Tooie. The kingdoms just kind of exist in their own little void.
Seeing the other areas was genius! I remember trying to see what Sirena Beach looked like in the day time. I think you can kinda see it from Gelato Beach.
Fun Fact: The individual stages in Super Mario Sunshine are a noticeable bit bigger when you're in that stage's level than when you're seeing it from other levels. (For example, Pianta Village would overlap with Bianco hills if they were both using their in-level models rather than their out-of-level models) This isn't an issue because Mario Sunshine does such a good job at worldbuilding an suspension of disbelief that you can barely think about how much the world makes sense because of how real it feels. Also, bonus Fun Fact: The area where you fight Gooper Blooper in Noki Bay is modelled in Pianta Village's map, making it the only part of Noki Bay visible from other levels.
I prefer islands in the middle of nowhere to invisible walls/barriers any day. It reminds me of the Spyro games to be honest. Especially spyro 3 which is probably my favourite platformer ever (though mainly cos it has like 7 playable characters that all play completely differently to spyro and to each other, plus it has skateboarding levels). But yeah every level in that is just an island in the middle of nowhere and nobody ever complained about that. These are 3D platformers. They're supposed to be cartoony and abstract. Who wants a hyper realistic 3D collectathon platformer?
I'm struggling to think of examples. At least, ones unlike 3D world that aren't just made in a level editor and make no attempt to make the world inhabitable. Can you share some examples?
@@SilverLining1 64, 3D land, and 3D World mainly...and maybe some more modern Sonic games like Lost World. I would mention Galaxy...but that's actually excusable with what the levels are.
@@jaydenc367 Super Lucky's Tale comes to mind, although it's one of my top favorite platformers not only are the worlds isolated in levels themselves, the hub worlds are too. Seeing how interconnected and whole the worlds were in Banjo/Kazooie and Conker it's definitely noticeable when less ambitious platformers stick to floating landmasses in their game design.
I love Mario Odyssey, but as you said in the video, compared to Mario Sunshine where you can see other areas from certain vantage points, it’s disappointing that Odyssey’s levels feel completely disconnected from each other. Even the Mushroom Kingdom is floating above an abyss, even though several previous games have had it surrounded by mountains or something to that effect to hide the fact that there’s nothing beyond the level area.
This is definitely some fair critique towards Odyssey despite my love for it; I would even say maybe it could've taken a Battle for Bikini Bottom approach where the world is all one plane and feels connected but there are clear areas where you can't go, probably marked by lines and darker shaded areas. At worst it might stick out a bit, but I think it'd still do wonders.
@@zjzr08 Yeah, though I think for stuff on land it was basically just mountain barriers and the like. Since Odyssey takes place in some locales that couldn't really use mountains to their advantage, this is why I believe the "marked off areas" idea would've worked well too.
The best thing about the marked off areas in bfbb is that there wasnt any invisible walls persay Hans just takes you back to a checkpoint if you walk in them for too long And you can still explore said areas with glitches or mods! Its a win-win! Err, lets not talk about bfbb rehydrated tho, that was an invisible wall fest...
I still adore how Steam Garden subverts having yet another island syndrome! It can lull you into thinking so in how the main area has raised walls around the edge, and it just makes the valley all the more cooler if you do end up falling.
@@StalinkTz banjo-kazooie does a great job at making the places feel real and lived in. There's like barely any floating platforms or anything in that game too
@@foursidekm that's what i meant. the thing is, banjo kazooie is actually so old and still does a better job and world building that odyssey, it shouldn't be like that.
@@StalinkTz But, is it a problem? This "need" for absolute logical consistency reminds of people who think the existence of plot holes in media ruins the entire experience of that media. It's a little bit, ridiculous? Sunshine is on one island, so it can easily be interconnected. Odyssey has levels be entirely different countries, you can't really avoid the island "problem" without getting weird with the geometry or level to explain minute unneeded details. And it's also Mario. Where blocks float in the air.
@@harrietr.5073I think people who share the same opinion as you are kind of missing the point. Immersion isn’t always a high priority in a game, but it’s greatly appreciated. It’s around the same level as aesthetics and lore. With that said, some genres are more well known for placing certain aspects over others. Odyssey specifically has gameplay as one of its firsts, but it goes further with adding charming characters and small themes for sub-areas. The bigger issue isn’t that the game is gameplay first before immersion, it’s that it goes so far with the immersion aspect but drags it down a bit with this one major flaw. Basically, this isn’t a horrible smear upon a masterpiece; this is a small shortcoming that we wanted to point out and analyze so that others could know and so that the devs could possibly take in that feedback for future games.
That’s a cool approach but also gets old. Mario Odyssey did that with Snow and Lake Kingdoms, but Seaside and Lost also did it in a cool way with an interactive water surface that eventually leads to the world‘s borders. You gotta have some variety. I admit though, they could’ve tried the mountain thing with Mushroom and Luncheon, too.
Ironically despite people disliking Banjo Tooie for a lot of things, the word is the one thing i think it does better than the first. I say ironically because Tooie's world is in an island but the levels all interconnect with each other, while still being restricted to their own. The only level i feel that does a bad job at this is Jolly Roger's Lagoon, there's just a cliff surrounding it instead of it connecting to the ocean, or having slightly more natural look to it, but other than that i'd say it does a good job.
@@Duskool What's interesting about Banjo-Tooie is that the choice to connect lots of worlds together gave the game a new thing to be judged on: whether or not those connections make sense. There's a really wide range of believability for them, ranging from stuff like the link between the two kickball stadiums (which is clever and thematically appropriate) to pretty much anything leading to Terrydactyland (they're all contrived as hell). You're right about Jolly Roger's Lagoon, although so little of the level takes place above the surface that you tend not to think about it much while playing. It's really not a lagoon at all, more of a swimming pool with big dreams.
Sunshine may not be as polished overall as Odyssey, but it's way more immersive, it really feels like every location in the game could be a real place of this cartoony world, which is why I love to just run around in that game's levels, even if I don't find any collectible it'll still be a pleasent experience. Compare this to Odyssey, where I always expect to find collectibles, because I'm not really that connected to these worlds, since they clearly don't make sense even for a cartoony world like Mario's. Ironically enough, the one that feels the most realistic is the moon, since it's a world outside our own, which makes the weird island with death barriers actually feel plausible, because hey, you're not on planet earth anymore, this is an alien place, you can't expect it to be like your home planet, and so the alienating experience actually gives charm to it, which is why I always love the moon kingdom when I play in it (plus I love moon physics in any game, so it's a plus).
i always find it really weird that Sunshine has half as many levels as Odyssey but still feels like a bigger and more interesting world to explore, it goes to show polish doesn't matter as much as the game just having a good core
I want to add that there's additional kingdoms in Odyssey that make sense for the island concept, which are cloud, lost, ruined, dark side and darker side, because none of those places are meant for tourists and for people to visit, they are remote places with no established inhabitants, so it's fine that they aren't really connected with a transportation service. At the same time tho, out of all of those, only lost can be considered a kingdom, the others are so small or linear that they feel more like traditional levels than explorable worlds.
@@jaydenc367 In many cartoons and games there's always logic behind everything, even if that logic is unrealistic for the real world, it's established for that cartoon world and it's fine (stuff like you can walk off ledges as long as you don't look, double jumps, power ups and so on), the thing is that usually they make it clear what's possible in that world, but in odyssey there's no explanation on how the many tourists get around the world and the moon, especially considering that we only have the confirmation of flying taxis and flying machines (the ones like the odyssey found in cap kingdom), which don't appear in every kingdom. I didn't mean to say odyssey isn't immersive, but for me it's not immersive enough to make me feel like these could be real places in Mario's world (not even mushroom kingdom, that was the biggest disappointment for me, a simple circle with the void for the Mushroom Kingdom? Come on now).
This touches on something other games have made me think about before. I remember replaying Metroid Fusion a few years ago and thinking "wait, this game's setting is a research lab where scientists are supposed to work. Why did they build it around Samus's inhuman platforming skills?!" Every time I play through Radical Highway in SA2 I have a moment where I'm like "who uses this place apart from Shadow?!" At the end of the day game devs are going to prioritize function over form 9 times out of 10. It seems like a difficult balancing act to design locations that both feel immersive and work well as levels in a game.
With Metroid Fusion at least, along with all other 2-D games, I always figure it’s a liveable place due to the fact that others are walking into and out of the foreground and background, basically using the third dimension.
The biggest issue is the fact every other 3D Mario game had some sort of excuse to justify this design choice. The OG 64 was in paintings, they obviously have endings to them. Sunshine was well you said it best, it's the best plotted and thought out Mario game out of all imo, despite the obvious time crunch. Galaxy was GALAXY! It's planets galore it doesn't need islands. 3D World + Land were cartoony enough that it was more than justified. And Odyssey... Odyssey didn't have an excuse, it's just unnerving sometimes with how the world is created, when staring into the abyss of the moon or so many other places, it's just.... why? Nintendo notoriously has the mindset of: "Gameplay first, ask questions never." (You can tell this by the fact they specifically made sure Mario Galaxy 2 has little to no story.) Which honestly sucks, because a good story/world building is like a good side dish, you can make the main dish as best as you want it to be but even a decent side of potatoes can bring in so much more enjoyment and variety to the mix, and serve as a nice break from the main course, of course it could also instead be the garnish or other allegories but you get my drift. But hey, that's just my opinion.
Even though 64 is technically paintings Odyssey implies that paintings are basically the equivalent of portals to real places which kind of makes Odyssey’s worlds feeling like they are designed in a very similar way almost make more sense with that in mind.
Sunshine isn't the most thought out Mario game of all time, it being rushed is evidence of that. eh...3D land and World had no real excuse though...cartoony or not.
3D land/world is of a course clear obstacle course, it would be pretty darn difficulty to make it look believable. Bowser's fury does exist, but the courses are less linear and don't have bottomless pits (as well as just being a smaller game overall)
"How did the citizens get here? How did they leave?" The biggest H I've seen in my entire life chilling on top of one of the skyscrapers suggests that the entire in-game world is filled with these islands (even going outside of these kingdoms) and the way of getting from an island to the normal world (or to another island) is by helicopter. That's my theory.
This feels liek a lazy fix for the problem of "how do I stop players from leaving the play area?" for example, if NDC was in an actual city, players would absolutely try to use Marios' insane movement to scale the invisible walls/whatever potential obstacle would serve as a play barrier. I won't pretend that I have the right answer, but making these "islands" is surely an effective, but lazy answer at the cost of player immersion.
You either make islands, or you make huge valleys you can't climb out of, or you use invisible walls. Those are the only options. Invisible walls are easily the worst by a long way. Big valleys are probably the best. Like Shadow of the Colossus's world is in one big valley you can't climb out of. So that solves that problem, it's all self contained, albeit it's enormous and there's hundreds of secrets to find and hundreds of places to climb to if you're good enough. Like people actually did in Odyssey eventually. Speedrunners and the like managed to scale buildings that looked like they were impossible to scale. But Nintendo knew people would eventually find a way to do it and so they'd include things up there on the roofs of tall buildings, like giant piles of coins and stuff like that. So Nintendo knew people would eventually do it. So in a lot of ways, Mario Odyssey and Shadow of the Colossus have a lot of similarities funnily enough. Just with how people will go to extreme lengths to explore every square in of the games, and the developers knew people would end up finding all these hidden places and so included secrets there even though 99% of players would never see them. I like that kind of design philosophy.
In regards to Metro Kingdom, I would probably had have the whole level sit on top of a giant skyscraper, there is ground beneath, but its so far that Mario would simply die by falling down I think that's what the Devs where going for anyways, but they probaby could have added an elevator that you could see travelling up and down the building to show how the citizens actually got here. Floating islands are a thing that was long since established in the Mario Universe, so I don't view this aspect as too big of a deal, but I do agree that they could have used a bit more variety (Cascade for example could have simply be surrounded by water)
They could’ve easily replaced the drab concrete walls that descend into the misty void with windows and balconies and stuff to suggest that New Donk is a city atop a massive skyscraper.
This bothered me too, so I'm glad someone is finally talking about it. Another small detail that I haven't seen many people pick up on is that the secondary names of the levels (New Donk City, Tostarena, etc.) aren't actually alternate names for the kingdoms, but are instead the names of the specific _parts_ of the kingdoms that we're exploring. For example, "New Donk City" isn't another name for Metro Kingdom; it's one city _in_ Metro Kingdom that we explore in the level. This is most easily seen in Mushroom Kingdom, where the secondary name is "Peach's Castle." Obviously, the Mushroom Kingdom doesn't entirely consist of Peach's Castle and the grassy area surrounding it, but the area we get to explore does. However, this only contributes to the island problem. Because New Donk City is just one city in a larger kingdom, it further begs the question of how people are supposed to get to it in the first place.
I love Odyssey, and though it does a lot to lessen this problem, it also very much falls victim to the franchise's overall very poor worldbuilding. There are so many things that are just inconsistent and don't connect at all. And obviously it's not a massive issue; Mario games are about gameplay first, then charm and personality, then storytelling, and *then* worldbuilding last, but it is kind of a shame when the series is so good at the other elements. I'm not saying the game needs to have some super complex and thought-provoking lore or anything, but some little details to make things feel more connected to the other games would be nice. Mushroom Kingdom actually does a decent job at some of this, but on the opposite end is Bowser's Kingdom, which is probably the worst in the game in terms of world-building. The idea of Bowser's Kingdom taking archetectural inspiration from Japan is great, but it would've been nice if the buildings were situated in a somewhat more traditional volcanic region, which could still be a floating island. It also would've been nice if Bowser's Castle itself had a more traditional design, while the other buildings and the decorations could've kept the Japanese theming. But beyond that, the kingdom suffers the most from not feeling lived in. I would've loved to have been able to talk to some of Bowser's minions in the kingdom and get to hear their thoughts, maybe in a similar vain to BOTW's Gerudo Town, where Mario would have to wear a disguise to get them to avoid attacking him and enter the shop. I also think that having the kingdom be separated onto so many floating platforms doesn't do much for it, not even in terms of difficulty, since you're just taking an electrical wire between them anyway. Even just pushing the islands so they're all next to each other would've helped it feel a bit more cohesive without actually impacting the level design.
@@Baconator2558 Eh....does the franchise really have poor worldbuilding? It's not super consistent but it's not all inconsistent and there are things that genuinely connect, like how Odyssey itself sets up lore that explains where Mario and Luigi came from before they went to the Mushrom Kingdom and where Donkey Kong actually took place. Bowser's Kingdom world building isn't really bad...it's just that Bowser really loves to change his own castle over and over again, and it's not the worst in the game in terms of world building. It doesn't suffer from that as it does feel lived in with how the enemies you fight are clearly the Kingdom's inhabitants. I would have loved to be able to talk to some of Bowser's minions too though.
On your comment about "there's a kingdom name and town name" - even that kind of falls apart. Overall, the game uses kindgom and its location synonymously. Like, when flying to the Metro Kingdom for the first time, Cappy reads from the travel broshoure how "the whole kingdom is one vast city", which implies that New Donk City is the only city that this kingdom is made up of. And technically, here in New Donk City, we do see many buildings and bridges and stuff out of bounds, which are implied to be the continuiation of the kingdom. But the islands are still islands, and the edges of these islands look weird. Like the city having huge drops. The taxis just going around in circles, nobody ever gets in and out of them. Not to mention, the whole place looking stupidly tiny when looking from the top of the NDC Hall. The game simply fails at immersion.
@@wariolandgoldpiramid Yes they are islands...which would be part of a vast city in this case. We don't see anybody get in or out of the taxis but we still know that people use them to fly to different places. It doesn't look tiny at all...it's just the center city. It really doesn't.
Yeah, I found it to be quite charming. Each kingdom being its own little world is quite nice and cute. I always imagined the Odyssey to be similar to Super Mario 64's paintings, as these were mentioned by other commenters.
For new donk city I always figured they used elevators within the buildings, though it's quite impressive that they can have a whole mini city within a skyscraper... What really grinds my gears is the presence of taxis though, why would anyone ever use them within the small areas of new donk city?
You described about 90% of all open world games. The key difference is most open world games take place in a literal island while Odyssey has its levels on a void.
YES! FINALLY SOMEONE SAYS IT! This has been something that has bugged me since day one. I don't find that it particularly "breaks my immersion", since I can accept that it's a silly wahoo Mario game that doesn't really care much about believability and immersion. However, I think it's just weird. Like, if I were to do a drawing of few little enclosed sandbox areas, I wouldn't draw every single one as a floating island in the middle of nowhere. I'd want to give a little bit of suggestion that this area is part of a larger world. The absolute worst offender is the Mushroom Kingdom. I was expecting something like Mario Galaxy's introduction area, or at the very least 64's castle grounds, but it's just Peach's castle sitting on a dirt cylinder. I wonder if part of the reason for this is something to do with performance. Maybe they wanted every kingdom to be a lovely, enclosed area that feels like a small section of a much larger location, but then found that the Switch doesn't have the hardware capability to run that at 1080p 60fps without significantly downgrading the visuals. You can get away with cheaping out on resources by making the surrounding landscape little more than a glorified skybox. In the case that it was intentional, however, then it probably evolved out of 3D World's style of level design, which itself is an evolution of Galaxy's style. I'm glad that Bowser's Fury shows that the "floating island" school of Mario level design is coming to an end. Hopefully, anyway. Also - because nobody is going to talk about this ever again - WHY IS THE DESERT KINGDOM'S ICE CAVE SKYBOX SO LOW RESOLUTION? It seriously looks like it could have been ripped straight out of an N64 game, it's so bad and it distracts and disturbs me so much.
there's a skybox in this game that literally looks like a jpeg from MAGMML it upsets me so much The one moon that has you start in a 3D area, but you go into a 2D area, and if you jump out of a 2d plane you go back into 3D and fall to your death.
Fair, but immersion doesn't inherently mean realism. The game can have an immersive world that still consists of weird magical worlds with floating platforms and even floating islands, but it just needs to make sense in-universe. Flying taxis are ridiculous and completely unrealistic, but if they were made more prevalent in the NPCs' dialogue, then it would still be immersive in spite of the inherint silliness of the whole thing.
The only game before watching this video where I actually noticed this problem and couldn't really get past it was Mario 64, particularly the Whomp's Fortress level. It made no sense to me that this supposed military fortress with a garden surrounding it is just floating in the sky, not even pretending to be connected to something. The first time I got pushed off by those things that come out of the wall and those platforms that move back and forth too, I actually thought to myself wait wtf it's not even gonna pretend to be connected to something? I also am younger, so I played the DS version first. So it almost felt even more weird that they didn't at least put it on a dirt cylinder or something to make it make more sense. Nope, they were like yeah this military base floating around in the sky is fine
@@Baconator2558 I never said immersion = realism. I meant that mainline Mario games have never cared too much about worldbuilding, consistency or proving explanations for things. Locations exist primarily for Mario to jump around in, and tertiarily as somewhat fleshed-out locations. The few mainline games that do have immersive worlds are the outliers.
@@alfo2804 Yeah but Mario Odyssey clearly wants you to be immersed with all the different NPCs, their towns and the way they travel to other worlds after finishing the game
This is something that always stuck out to me about Odyssey, and you put it into words perfectly! Personally it's not a big deal breaker to me, probably because the expansive and beautiful skyboxes distracted me from thinking about it too much. In some kingdoms it definitely sticks out more than others, especially the Mushroom Kingdom. It was a nice surprise to discover it but I was also a bit confused that Peach's Castle is just sitting on an island of meadows surrounding infinite meadows. Peach's Castle never has had a 100% consistent location but it's mostly shown with a town surrounding it (PM64, SMG, Mario & Luigi, etc) and for it to just be sitting like that in Odyssey kinda throws me off.
They could’ve changed cap kingdom so that the starting area is surrounded by a thick fog that sends you back to your spawning point (like in BoTW’s lost woods) instead of it just being a bottomless pit. For the metro kingdom, it could’ve been a central island (in the water) that you’re playing on that’s connected to the outer parts of the city by bridges that get blocked or demolished when bowser comes and after beating him some construction vehicles show up and block the bridges or they work like how the edges of the screen in Mario bros do
I always assumed this was done because invisible walls would've broken the immersion. But yeah, i've also noticed this problem after a while. I mean, why is the mayor located on some floating island instead of the mainland?
I've always loved Sunshine's world building. It blew my mind as a kid when I saw the rocket storage glitch that let you see that the whole island was created with some representation of each level included for every stage.
the alternative is seeing a cool spot over yonder, but before you get there- "woops, my ass doesn't fit beyond this point, let's go back" invisible wall.
When it come to the Cascade Kingdom, at least it is much more convincing for it to be an isolated monolith, since the area is much more natural then the metro kingdom, and has more believable geography then the sand kingdom, where the whole area seemingly floats above a deep canyon abyss. The Cascade Kingdom feels much more seamless as The background is full of smiler looking large landmasses high up above the sea, making the kingdom fit into the general area and feel like a small part of the environment.
THANK YOU! I’ve been thinking this for years and I’ve never seen anyone point it out. It’s why Sunshine stages often feel larger and more real to me, despite being physically smaller than many Odyssey stages
Will admit, on a perspective issue, this has been something that has bothered me for a while (with the same reasoning you gave for New Donk City too) While with Mario 64, even though those levels are "shut off" and "small" at least that game did have an excuse most the time because you went into *paintings* so technically, even though it may seem like you traveled to a new world, it was just something that existed in those paintings, and probably not real since the power stars made the paintings turn into real places. The kingdoms however do NOT have that excuse as they are supposed to represent real places in universe.
The areas in Super Mario 64 are likely real places, and the paintings probably just act as portals. They have their own histories and inhabitants. Most of them feel pretty grounded and real, with just a handful of floating ones. Even Tall Tall Mountain feels like it's not just a floating island. And furthermore, we are shown Whomp's Fortress in Galaxy 2, which is floating in space. So it was probably always meant to be floating. Perhaps Cool Cool Mountain is the same. Odyssey's big flaw is that this is a big globe-trotting adventure, yet all the areas feel artificial when it comes to their connection with the rest of the world.
Uh no, the paintings have been confirmed to not be the areas themselves, but rather more like warping and teleportation shortcuts to get there, and Galaxy 2 and Odyssey debunk this
Regardless of whether the places in the paintings are real or not, the fact that these are paintings means that these will more likely be isolated places; you're not gonna paint a picture of something that doesn't fit on the canvas unless you're going for landscapes. Interestingly, while the game does have landscape levels, their paintings, like the other levels, choose a focus that fits in frame like a snowman or a goomba instead. In other words, there's a selection bias in the levels prioritizing the worlds that fit in a canvas. If anything, it's interesting how many levels don't have the island problem despite this explanation. That said, it wouldn't even be the same island problem since these worlds are not necessarily meant to be inhabitable. Rather, the problem would be a lack of variety in boundaries which, while odyssey still has this problem, sm64 most certainly does not.
To answer both comments... I remember seeing it in game being said that "Bowser created his own world" and while it probably has been retconned by now, back when the game was first made a Toad *does* mention it sounding like they are fabricated worlds. (Main entrance) "Am I glad to see you! The Princess...and I...and, well, everybody...we're all trapped inside the castle walls. Bowser has stolen the castle's Stars, and he's using their power to create his own world in the paintings and walls. Please recover the Power Stars! As you find them, you can use their power to open the doors that Bowser has sealed. There are four rooms on the first floor. Start in the one with the painting of Bob-omb inside. It's the only room that Bowser hasn't sealed. When you collect eight Power Stars, you'll be able to open the door with the big star. The Princess must be inside!" (found from the Super Mario wiki, but I always remember the first Toad you meet mentioning all this info) Edit: I’ll actually add on to this that, while the places could also be real places, they also could have been thought up as (until Galaxy 2/Odyssey) places created by the Power Stars that take form based on their location (like how the secret aquarium does NOT feel like a real place… same with the secret slide… or the Bowser levels) Especially since only 2 levels in the game throw you out if exiting the level by falling or finding a hole in the wall (the sky star secret near the end and where Bowser’s submarine leaves in Dire Dire Docks), otherwise you are thrown out of the painting (which doesn’t occur in the other games)
@@Dizzy-Luc Bowser's "own world" is stuff like Bowser in the fire sea and Bowser in the sky. The secret aquarium is like the secret slide, and Bowser has nothing to do with them
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I've thinked about the "Island Problem" (nice name btw) a lot, in the context of Sonic games. The visual design of stages started of strong in SA1, with every stage feeling as much as a place in the world as they could feel in a '98 platformer game. SA2 and Heroes dropped the ball, and most levels felt like a weird landmass floating in a non-distinct place. Somehow in Shadow the Hedgehog of all games, they picked up again with stages that feel with a place in the world and never looked back since.
These are all clearly choices made to prevent Mario from traveling out of bounds, without resorting to cheap tricks like invisible walls or the infamous insurmountable waist-height fence. Mario games don't have to be realistic, they just need to have an internal logic and strong theming. Gameplay needs take priority over worldbuilding. If you're *really* itching to know how people travel to New Donk City, it's obvious that they use flying taxis with giant sails. The same way the Sphinx traveled to the moon. That's just how the Mario universe works.
Sonic games also get this fairly well. Unleashed has you travel the globe by tornado but limits you to specific portions of cities, towns, and villages, where you don't need to worry much about it, holaska has an npc mention how they use bobsleds to get around (and then how one is destroyed right after completing the day stage there in a nice touch), and adabat, also shows the tornado docked at what is probably a area for boats to stop, also adventure uses the transport to change what adventure field you are in amd even has the train staff go on strike to explain why you can't travel somewhere else. Also sonic was the only franchise in lego dimensions to have an island hub successfully because it's set on angel island
Yeah but that is an entirely different game genre. That is a high speed 3D platformer with linear beat em up levels as well. That can do it easier because you don’t have to explore the environment as much as Mario, since you are blazing through a level. Sonic Frontier, which is more like Super Mario Odyssey, fails in this as well, not only due to the pop-in. But also keeping every location on an island surrounded by water with no other/little land in the background.
One of my favorite parts of Sunshine was that you could often see other parts of the island from different locations. I think you could see Ricco Harbor in the background of Bianco Hills, or Pinna Park from the Plaza. It made the world feel more real.
Iv always taken this as more of a charming quirk of the genre. None of new donk city makes sense of a city because it's not really a city it's a playground to explore
The best immersive part of sunshine is the fact that you can actually see the other locations from almost any of the levels. I was hoping there'd be something like this when odyssey was first announced but unfortunately not. Also, even back then Pianta village always stood out to me as odd but I couldn't put my finger on it. I think this explains it well though it's the only one disconnected like it is. But even then at least the map tells you where it is on the island I guess
On the one hand, I too would prefer if the locations felt like they were actually connected to the rest of the world. On the other hand, this is Mario, wherein a random pipe sticking out of a couple blocks floating in midair can feasibly connect to literally anywhere else in the universe. These games basically adhere to cartoon logic, and often revel in their own un-realness. A lot of people just chalk this kind of thing up to Nintendo being Nintendo; just dragging it's heels and sticking with old ways of doing things, and maybe that's true. But honestly, balancing realism and whimsy is no easy feat, particularly in a platformer since the worlds need to be designed more like obstacle courses than functional towns or natural environments.
Well, while in a Sonic game, you can see loops in a city level. Cartoonish games have this non-sense paths that can make you scratch your head. But hey, it's a videogame. It wouldn't be funny if we travel through "normal" paths. But, for the island problem, this remind me of the Spyro the Dragon trilogy for PS1 (that was remade in 2018) where this situation occurs there too. Seems like it's a question that developers usually face when they make an open level environment: Put invisible walls? Put physical walls? Or bottomless pits?
I agree that games like this often work with cartoon logic. But you can’t dismiss consistency that way. The difference between cartoon logic and “real-world” logic isn’t that cartoons don’t need to have internal consistency. It’s that the terms of consistency are broader and more imaginative than what we’re used to seeing in this world. There's gotta be a way to connect the different kingdoms in a way that feels like it belongs in the whole Mario universe.
@@ejipuh I'm not dismissing consistency. For all the random wackiness of the Mushroom universe, it's a remarkably consistent place. My original post was more intended to point out that realism isn't all that common in Mario games, so while a clear connection between the Kingdoms to their surroundings would have been nice, it's not necessary.
I feel like it's a kind of throwback to when Mario 64 did it due to technical limitations, but this issue reminds me that the trailers made me feel like New Donk was going to be some huge city you could explore as Mario, and it makes me feel like the next 3D Mario could take a page from Sonic Frontiers (though that, in turn, took a page or two from a certain other Nintendo game released in 2017) and focus on having bigger places to explore rather than more of them
I don't see why they didn't just have inaccessible bridges at the edge of the island where the roads cut off, they're a huge part of what makes NYC what it is and it would be a clever way to connect this island to the rest of the kingdom.
Personally, i feel like it makes it even cooler of a world, for me it always left me with sense of wonder rather than confusion. Especially little touches like steam gardens where you actually get to traverse the ground floor.
Yeah, I was always impressed by the sheer expansiveness of the areas in kingdoms that I wasn't able to access. 1:03 New Donk City is the best example of this, as you can see just how huge the surrounding cities are. Even if it doesn't make sense, I just find it really neat.
It kinda does bother me when when the kingdoms feel isolated, but luckily, not all of them are on islands, (ones of which I can’t name.) And the forest one I feel has a good excuse
The problem is that you're going by immersion. Nintendo doesn't want you to get immersed in Mario games anymore. That's why Paper Mario is what it is now.
This was a nice, succinct video that pointed out a problem I've never heard people discussing before. I'm not a huge fan of Odyssey for a variety of reasons, and while this is not one of the main ones, I think it's still absolutely worth pointing out.
@@islandboy9381 Well it's not necessarily a unique opinion, but I do feel like the sheer quantity of Power Moons makes them feel less satisfying to obtain. And the conditions to obtain them can be very arbitrary, which makes them feel like less of an achievement. I also don't like the abundance of sub areas. They're contextless voids that destroy the sense of reality for the worlds they're in. It's much more enjoyable for me when platforming challenges are naturally integrated into the context of a grounded location. I think Lost Kingdom does this quite well actually, and it's probably my favorite kingdom for this reason. It strikes a very good balance between feeling like a believable location in the world and having fun, interesting platforming challenges.
In regards to the comments about how the tourists get around I believe Cappy says something about how the Odyssey is outdated but it's gonna have to make do so maybe they all have more advanced machines
Halfway through the video, I was thinking to myself "Weird how Super Mario Sunshine did a great job avoiding this problem". Weird. I find it funny that , despite SMO clearly has a lot of small details where attention was paid, bigger things like "how do people live here" isn't touched on. For Super Mario 64, they justified it with each world being a painting that you jump into. Whenever I create a world or a character for something like a TRPG campaign, I always make an effort to consider how a full, 24-hour period would go for the place or person. Hell, I'm willing to go as far as considering how a character would simply drink a glass a water. If you think that's still, sure, it is, but I doubt you know someone who drinks water the same fashion as you do.
I feel like they were trying to make this mario's version of breath of the wild. so just imagine how weird it would be to have the different botw regions be "floating islands". I love seeing the transition from beaches to jungles to grasslands to deserts to canyons to snowy mountains and so on in a satisfyingly cohesive way. granted, botw's setting is more realistic in its biomes than smo. but imagine how cool it would've been to see cohesive transitions like that for the kingdoms
Stuff like this doesn’t really bother me at all in platformers, since the point is having great level design from a gameplay perspective, so the world being immersive or not doesn’t really enter my mind. Having a pretty looking sky box to sell the location is all I need. That said, in genres like RPGs or adventure games, things like this could take me out of it to the point of dropping the game altogether, depending on how the game is presented. For example, it bothered me so much in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time that I just stopped playing a couple of hours in. It was super immersion breaking compared to the first game.
I don't mind it for obvious platforming challenges, like when you go into sub-areas or whatnot in the main Kingdoms. The problem is that the Kingdom hub worlds are clearly trying to have their cake and eat it too, doing a lot of "tell, don't show" in their worldbuilding.
@@Cyberguy64 I guess I just don’t care about world building in most platformers, and especially not in Mario platformers. To me, it’s just visual dressing for the platforming. I want it to be pleasing to my eyes, sure, and to evoke some mood or feeling in me, but I don’t care wether it’s immersive or feel ”lived in”, so to speak. And when they do allude to world building, it doesn’t have to make cogent sense to me, as I just see it as a little fun bonus rather than serious lore that has to make sense. To each their own, of course. There’s no objective right or wrong here, just subjective perspectives.
@@CrossfacePanda I think its fair to say the immersion breaking is objectively a critical point in Odyssey specifically when the game sells itself as a big exploration of lived in or once inhabited locales with their own history/characters (you know like a ODYSSEY), much like how Sunshine did that for one focused locale: a tropical resort island. In fact Odyssey's level design structure of it progressing in appearance once you do some big moons feels a lot similar to the episodes in Sunshine so it's even more noticeable that Odyssey is lacking in this detail comparatively.
@@islandboy9381 I guess it’s a matter of perspective (which would, again, be subjective). Miyamoto has long talked about how Mario games don’t have consistent lore, in the way for example Zelda does. He see it more like how Osamu Tezuka approached his characters, where they are like actors taking on different roles for different projects. And like those character, Mario games are like different stage plays, performances put on but not actually “existing” in a cogent universe, as it were. The characters, and by extension the world they inhabit, take whatever form they need to serve the gameplay. And I guess I just happen to see it similarily. These aren’t “worlds” in my eyes, they are dress settings. And I get no more upset at them not having a coherent world and presentation than I do at a stage play having painted backgrounds and scene props. The staging and performance is believable enough that I buy into it, just like how I buy into what the Mario game is presenting to me because the presentation and gameplay is believable enough for what it is, even if it isn’t literally inscrutable. Not that I don’t understand WHY this might bother people, I just don’t think it’s objectively bad (because it isn’t).
Another thing that always bothered me from PiT, is the fact that Bowser’s Castle stays the exact same with Baby Bowser’s head in the present, would’ve been neat that the present version had adult Bowser, so the map doesn’t just look like a more colored, shroobless version of the past And it was odd that they made a young Kamek for the past, he’s really just like Toadsworth in the games, and the babysitter dynamic doesn’t work that well because Kamek just looks as young as Baby Bowser, if not younger considering how energetic and capable Baby Bowser is in this game compared to him
I don't think mountains or a lake of poison truly fix the problem either, it's more like applying a fresh paint of coat. I like the idea of creating fake surrounding islands that can technically be reached but your character doesn't have the tools to use the transport
I think the reason this initially existed was to deal with technical limitation, then it was a design issue. unless you wanted to have one continuous world, there has to be a cutoff somewhere and no one likes invisible walls. I do not like Sunshine, but it gets this right. you have multiple areas, but you can see the land around you, you just can't get there. you can see where the polygons just stop in SM64, every level of SMG/SMG2 are a bunch of tiny islands, and SM3DW is just taking a different approach at SMG's style. I think the main reason it's so difficult to get Sunshine's level of fixing The Island Problem is that it usually involves committing to a singular location, or having only a few large locations to mess with. Odyssey, unfortunately, can't really do that because it's a game that takes place around the entire world and that's the entire point. this is all to say that while I -hate- don't like Sunshine, I would love a Sunshine 2.
Invisible walls are bad at ground level, but I'm fine with the visible/invisible wall combos, like in Legends Arceus where there's invisible walls along cliffs and in the water, so each section is clearly defined visibly by cliffs and water, and you only find an invisible wall by going too far into the water or climbing to the top of a cliff.
As much as I think this video labours the point a little, you have managed to identify and articulate a problem that has been bothering me since this game came out. Thank you.
I would absolutely adore a 3d platformer that subverts this, where it looks like there's a bottomless pit that you'd die if you fell in, but in actuality super skilled players can traverse it, and it unlocks an enormous new area to explore
How hard would it have been to have the Metro Kingdom be at sea level with bridges to other parts of the city that Mario simply can't cross? Honestly, just having a bunch of inaccessible areas nearby would've made each kingdom feel so much more believable.
Bro, you literally got me when you were trying to figure out how the people got to the commemorative park in Metro Park, because as I was watching this I was playing this game a couple of hours before, playing in the metro kingdom figuring out how this whole place’s transportation works, along with the other worlds in this game! Good work in this video!
imo, i like that new donk city kinda doesn't make sense as a city. like yeah it's hardly a city, it's more like a level that's city-themed... and i kinda like it like that? "level that merely uses the city as a theme in the same way that a desert level is only desert-themed" is a bold design decision and it makes for some interesting "hey wait a second, why are things like that" commentary in post
One example of a non Mario game that does a good job of creating a breathed in world is Sonic Unleashed. The countries in that game have a ton of unique npcs, different foods, and doesn’t feel disconnected from the rest of the world.
It's canonical that millions of civilians in a Mario game are just plummeting to their deaths on a daily basis because they wanted to go feed some birds at the park. Let that soak in.
I have so much I could say, because sometimes I feel like I'm alone in feeling upset about this! I'll try to condense my thoughts. Urionically, New Donk City is one of the _better_ kingdoms in this regard, because it's canonically raised out on its own apart from the rest of the city. Why? idk, but it's built on top of the power plant. But despite that, like you said, it's still really disconnected. The worst in my opinion has got to be, without a doubt, MOUNT VOLBONO. WHY DID THEY DO THIS?? With all of the other kingdoms in the game, you can at least see the pillars extend far enough below to assume they're touching the ground. But with Mount Volbono? IT'S JUST A FLOATING PLATFORM?? WHY?? And Mount Volbono feels like one of the easiest to fix! Just extend the lava lake, have some steep drop offs in some areas that kill you (like Forgotten Kingdom), and then put small mountains around the entirety of the lake. This doesn't solve the problem with how people get in and out, but it at least makes it feel grounded! **And to end this off, I'll share some possible solutions to make these locations feel more believable:** Sand & Metro: -add a broken bridge. Having bridges connect the explorable area to the rest of the world would make a lot of sense. And Bowser rampaged through these kingdoms, so having them be broken would also make sense! He'd cut off a lot of people who would try to stop him. The bridges would never be repaired, but they could have NPC's near them in the post-game that would explain that they'll get to work on fixing them. Cascade: -Run-down Helipad. Fossil Falls is very close to the Cap Kingdom, and there's even the ruins of a Cap Kingdom airship in the area. It would make sense if there was also a run down landing pad for them. Heck, maybe the Odyssey could even land there on returns to the kingdom! Mushroom Kingdom: -Tall hills, cliffs, & ruins. Surround some areas of the kingdom with tall hills, and have other areas act as drop-offs. For example, the lake that has a waterfall running off the edge makes sense to keep in. Also... Bowser attacked the Mushroom Kingdom at the beginning of the game. Why not have some ruined towers blocking off the pathway out of the area? Cap Kingdom: -This is definitely one of the harder ones imo, and it's because we don't know what it's supposed to be. Is it supposed to be a small island in a lake/ocean? or is it super high up in the air? It's fine to keep a death-plane under the fog, but it could probably benefit from some sort of harbor in some area. Maybe an airship harbor, since the Bonnetoners use airships. And finally, Cap Kingdom brings us to another big problem. ...The Skyboxes Alongside the horizon you see countless top-hat towers, implying there's an entire city surrounding you. There is no explanation. Why is Bonneton just this small area surrounded by this big city? For a handful of kingdoms I think they did a pretty bad job at making the horizons fit in well with the environments. It definitely makes the areas you visit feel even more disjointed. With New Donk City, it kinda makes sense, but with Bonneton, and arguably the Forgotten Isles, it doesn't. Solution? Keep these cities/forests/whatever, but don't make them litter the entire horizon. Have them occupy smaller areas and look like islands off in the distance. The Forgotten Kingdom consists of a bunch of big islands on the world map, but you land on a small one. Why not show the scale by having a more realistic horizon with the coast of one of these bigger islands? At the current moment it just feels like you're in a huge poison lake, smack in the middle of one of those big islands.
i really think this was a stylistic choice to pay homage to super mario 64's island-like level design rather than something nintendo did out of laziness. i get it's funny to nitpick since most mario games don't make a whole lot of sense but i don't see how this is a legitimate flaw
I always felt something was “off” about Odyssey but could never put my criticism into words. You nailed it, I think. The game tries to sell these kingdoms as real places in Mario’s world that you’re really exploring, but almost all of them run on video game logic to the point that the illusion falls apart quickly. It’s still a video game first and foremost (and a really good one at that!), but instead of just owning that, it tries to present itself as some kind of grand experience and falls short.
It would be so cool if New Donk City was actually connected to the rest of the Metro Kingdom, but they don't let you leave to other parts of it because you got to New Donk City illegally, but Mayor Pauline still lets you be in New Donk City because she loves Mario that much. Literally just an idea I thought of in a minute, such a shame they didn't do something like that
Iirc with metro kingdom, i dont remember exactly where or when, but i could have sworn you could see taxis driving straight vertically up and down the roads to the gameplay area, from the city below, as if gravity didn't matter at all i saw that + the flying taxis (which are capable of going to the moon even) and kind of dispelled the entire island issue as 'it really doesn't seem to matter at all' as I was playing
Maybe it's just me, but the more ridiculous and questionable a location is in a game like Mario, the more charm it exudes. The very nature of the Mushroom Kingdom is like an acid trip to begin with, to start dismantling that by adding in logic and reason is when the game stops feeling like a Mario game entirely.
Admiring how Sunshine adds logic and reason to its world doesn't ruin the charm of it at all, it only adds onto it because it becomes a much more believable location within Mario's universe
@@zoomzike sure, but Sunshine exists in a location far away from the Mushroom Kingdom, it makes sense that Mario was vacationing to a location where the rules are different.
Just proof that Sunshine was decades ahead of its time. You could see near enough every level, from every level and the hub, in the distance. It was a living, breathing island.
I think the alternative also runs into an immersion breaking problem though - invisible walls Sunshine looks seamless but you can swim into that invisible wall and all childhood mystery is lost Odysseys team logic was probably that it's better and more cohesive to make every island float. Sm64 would wall off it's levels with hills but I bet the Odyssey team feared people using Mario's arsenal to try to get over the boundaries when you're not even intended to do it at all. Sm64's bonkable invisible walls that start at the tops of the hills couldn't work in the context of odyssey
This video finally put my thoughts into words; I have never been the biggest Metro Kingdom fan because the floating island thing absolutely ruins the immersion for me. Like, for other kingdoms sure but the fact metro kingdom is just floating there makes it seem so fucking artificial and wrong.
You know, I've always been aware of the island problem per se, thinking it an unrealistic but necessary abstraction ever since Whomp's Fortress. But I never really had a problem with the immersion-breaking aspect like you mentioned for New Donk, where citizens and tourists couldn't properly navigate the city. I always just brushed it off as "Well in reality there's stuff where we don't have any in game" like the aforementioned Whomp's Fortress just standing on regular solid ground. Nevertheless, it is something that should definitely be considered to be fixed, but how do you go about it if you don't want to raise huge platforms high into the air. The reverse has the same problem, being the valley problem that the Lake Kingdom or Bob Omb Battlefield have: "How does anyone get in and out of this valley?" Then we look to Sunshine (or even the Seaside Kingdom), which largely uses high walls as well, but combines them with invisible walls on the open sea, which works quite well. This method with using the water works well, since it already slows down you movement and you see that there is nothing to find in the distance. The devs of Bowser's Fury must've thought the same thing, which is why it's set on a lake. Though having the invisible walls on dry land would be more difficult, and not every level has direct access to the sea, which we even see in Sunshine, where Pianta Village and Bianco Hills are set in the mountains of Isle Delfino, making them much more segregated as a result. My best proposal would be to make a game in similar style to Bowser's Fury; open-ended and everything, but with the level scope of Mario Odyssey and short paths between the individual stages. As for a theme to accomodate this open world-style Mario game I would probably suggest an amusement park of sorts, with the attractions being the levels strewn across the park. Imagine a bigger Witchyworld from Banjo Tooie. You could even have a roller coaster in the park as fast travel between the worlds. Either that or you go with the standard Mushroom Kingdom but have it very condensed or just make it a new geographical location (or an old one like maybe Sarasaland) with different biomes like Mario & Luigi: Dream Team's Pi'ilo Island.
Counterpoint: Painting and pipe traversal might be the main form of public transit in Mario's world given Mario 64's Whomp Fortress was established to be an actual place in Galaxy 2 rather than a obstacle course made by Bowser, the hidden painting moons in this game, the pinata village pipe in sunshine, and the clear pipes that lead to the different portions of the Sprixie Kingdom in 3D World. Thus society is much more prone to weird urbanization patterns like settling islands in the middle of nowhere. Yes, I recognize I'm probably putting entirely way too much thought into this.
A way to make Metro Kingdom work would be to have a bridge that connects metro to the outside that for whatever reason Mario cannot cross (one example would be to used one of those bridges that lifts up to let boats pass, and have it be up all the time). Alternatively, instead of the bridge being where Mario could reach it, you could have the bridge be extremely low down below the death planes, and have it look like it goes into some sort of tunnel beneath metro that could be some sort of underground parking area. And then there is the far off building that you can only reach by using the painting. I don't even know how to begin to fix that
In all honesty - this reality has never even occurred to me. But I don’t think it will effect my enjoyment of the game. But I love the way your brain analyzes things! Great video - June is gonna be great!
My main problem with the Island Problem isn’t the suspension of disbelief, but the fact that it just looks ugly. Metro looks so cool on the inside but once you get to the edge, it’s a bottomless pit of gray fog.😭 It would’ve looked so much nicer and fixed said belief problem is they just continued a city onto it. They could’ve made like construction sites or something to keep us in the intended barriers!
tbh this is pretty valid complaint. it doesn't take away from the overall experience of the game but once you really think about it the more it kinda bugs you
tho i feel you didn't really need to mention how the devs could be doing this and be doing that. like i said this is a pretty small and miniscule immersion-breaker but the devs (infact all devs) should have the respect for perfecting everything else about the game
Good point, I agree that this breaks immersion, especially with some Kingdoms more than others. I will say that I think it's implied that after the events of the main story, the Cap Kingdom's airships were repaired and the airship industry was revitalized, allowing individuals to travel to different kingdoms. I think this bit of lore is interesting, but it would be nice if we actually got to see more of how that works, such as seeing more airships in kingdoms around the world.
I noticed something similar all the way back in Super Mario 3D Land. I called it the "Lava Bowl Issue." When I first got the game, I was excited to finally get to explore the inside of Bowser's Castles in 3D (as opposed to a Road, Volcano, or Planetoids). Yet, the actual levels are just a highly linear set of platforms suspended in lava, free-floating, or exploring the outside. As such, many of these final levels are very disappointing to me, especially compared to Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island. To my knowledge, there has never been a 3D Mario game with a hostile castle interior or non-linear design. Peach's Castle in the OG 64 does not quite count, as it is a friendly area. If anything, that just makes the idea of platforming through an evil large castle even more intriguing. I find this especially odd, as the series does plenty of indoor levels with caves, boo houses, challenge rooms, etc. Heck, multiple Mario Kart tracks and the RPGs pull it off well, so I am not sure what the problem is.
That's a good point, we've never had a 3D Mario game that let us properly explore Bowser's Castle as a location rather than an abstract series of obstacles to be overcome in a platforming challenge. It's definitely a really fun idea, and it's honestly pretty weird that it has still never happened yet. Give the fans what they want Nintendo!
This is why I preferred galaxy to its sequel. The first game felt like I was adventuring on small planets. The second felt like I was playing on artificial, developer-made levels
you can also consider Sonic Unleashed as another way of having the different places being both full of life and having a legitimate reason of getting there with the whole game taking you around the globe, having culture in every one of the places you visit.
to give at least cascade kingdom the benefit of the doubt if you look beyond the island you are in you see other islands that are just as tall if not taller then the one you are on
I think this is why I like Sunshine so much, there is not a single map on the island that doesn’t feel out of place, there’s no snow world, no metropolis, no desert. Every location feels like it belongs on that island and yet every location felt unique. Not to mention you can actually see other maps in the background of some location. Like it’s definitely the best emersion I’ve seen in a Mario Game.
I don't care. I really don't. I don't need to ask myself these questions because mario can't die, there are feet-tall golden coins everywhere and there's a hat that lets you invade the body of most living and some non-living things around. Since when is a city block on top of another skyscraper an issue? There could be elevators in that bottom building leading up to the part you visit, and that was enough for me.
There's a difference between fiction (hat that invades body of people) vs. believability within the fictional universe (New Donkers simply cannot access the park) There is no opening for an elevator up there sadly
@@zoomzike I agree the park and many other places in the game don't make sense but in my opinion it's just a missed opportunity, not an actual issue. It's cool when a place is both fun to play in and believable, but one is clearly way more important than the other.
Another way Sunshine avoids the problem, that I’m surprised you didn’t mention, is that you can see other levels in the backgrounds. It really makes the island feel interconnected and real
Finally somebody explaining not only why Odyssey as great as it was felt weird but why ukulele felt kind of terrible when it came to its level design. I honestly think that the engine for Odyssey has miles to go for what better level design could bring to us and I'm excited for what the fans are going to create. Nintendo did a good job with Odyssey but it didn't feel quite as organic as I hoped it would. I'd be over the moon if we got sunshine DLC that was the whole big island. Maybe even the surrounding islands that we saw and always wondered about
honestly i had this thougt recently about kirby and the forgotten land, and none of the levels feel like "this is a videogame level" Or at least very few of them do. and perfect contrast is the treasure roads whichni think helps the other levels feel more natural by comparison lol
I was thinking of Kirby, but wouldn't want every 3D platformer to become contained in the same way. We had to trade unlimited height plus a lot of movement options and camera control. There are also a lot of triggers which work as bottomless pits where you lose health based on the camera even if there is no fall damage and you were just down there a few seconds earlier. It may appear to have solved the problem but it just has new issues. The only games that I think got around it for me were the Jak and Daxter games, but nothing is perfect.
@@thelastgogeta yea but thats more about how its set up, the actual environment design and the way that things get kind of naturally blocked off would be ideal if you just lifted them out and plonked the same method on a more open design
@@flophawk I really don't think it's that easy imo,the benefit of more linear design is that the creators don't have to worry about where the player is going or where are they looking,so they can make a levels look realistic and varied without compromising power or immersion.
@GamerTower my point is more like, if new donk had a wall of buildings on the edges you wouldnt think "how do they get past the buildings" as much as you think "how the fuck do thy cross this giant chasm" or even if theres a big invisible wall, if sand kingdom just had a hard line in the desert no one would bat an eye. hell they already do that in seaside. and snow and lake have very natural feeling giant fuckoff walls, like even in this game they pull it off well in some areas. obviously a curated line is gonna be more put together but thats not really what my pointnis and besides, you can make a believable space otherwise. if metro DID have the skyscraper barriers then the middle part would feel perfectly natural, and its the application of those borders that im talking about here
The “island problem” actually worked to sm64’s benefit bc every level was so fantastical and not meant to be a tourist destination. Isolating 64’s worlds made them feel like only the castle’s magic walls could take you to them.
Bowser's Fury was where I felt this problem. Just constant generic platforms with no real context or reasons beyond just having you go to them to do some platforming challenges
Friendly reminder about June Zoom's 4th Rule:
"Upload time goes by the Pacific Time Zone"
LET'SA GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OK, thanks for the reminder
Bro
What about us other places man???
No, I'm joking, I don't care.
Wow you’re playing very risky
Damn the early bird
2 two times in a row? That's right, always trust the ZoomZike
Good choice of words for this idea. The "island problem" looks to me like it's a relic of the primordial stages of 3D game development where large environments were not possible to render in their entirety, and shortcuts had to be employed to get as close to a complete representation of the location as possible. Since Nintendo was a primary innovator during the dawn of 3D game design, I can imagine it's easier for them in comparison to a younger studio to slip back into old habits like this.
I wouldn't say that's the case. Plenty of N64 3D platformers managed to avoid this issue perfectly well. Banjo-Kazooie, Glover, DK64, Jet-Force Gemini, even a lot of the levels in Mario 64 make the effort to not feel like floating landmasses. Even Sonic Jam gets it right.
I think there are two possible reasons why this happened in Odyssey.
One is that this style is a natural extension of the way that levels were designed in 3D World, and either the level designers couldn't get themselves out of that mindset, or they wrongfully assumed that "floating islands are just part of the Mario series identity".
Two is that the Switch just isn't powerful enough to deliver boxed-in locations with this level of graphical fidelity while still running at a locked 1080p 60fps. It takes a lot less resources to make the surrounding environment a low-detail skybox than it does to make it a mountainous perimeter wall.
@@alfo2804 Personally, I would say it's perhaps not about whether you *can* make a location boxed-in, but whether you *want* to. Sure, the Island Problem is immersion breaking, but I feel like it just wouldn't look great if every location had some sort of infinite mountains, buildings, whatever to fully box them in. Especially with how high some parts of the kingdoms are, you would need huge objects that look silly and basically block off the whole sky.
Similarly, if you make things look more close-by than the current skyboxes and just wall them off with invisible walls, it might confuse and/or frustrate players, or break their immersion into the world anyway.
@@_Moralle All of the games I mentioned manage to do it perfectly well. Plus, Odyssey also already uses invisible walls, so that wouldn't be an issue.
It doesn't need to always be 'boxed-in'. There are ways to elegantly and covertly stop the player from getting out. And besides, you don't need to block the horizon. In fact, you ideally shouldn't. Showing the fact that the world sprawls out beyond the boundaries of the playable map would make those out-of-bounds areas look less jarring.
@@alfo2804 Odyssey's existing invisible walls are pretty subtle though, you barely stumble upon any of them organically.
Also, the games you mentioned are vastly different from Odyssey both in level design and movesets. As I said, a lot of kingdoms have very high parts, and that combined with the insane movement Mario has, even just on a casual level, would require very high "boxes" of mountains, buildings, whatever, because if they aren't high enough you end up with very obvious invisible walls, frustration, and a broken immersion again.
@@_Moralle No. There's almost no points where you can use height to reach the boundaries of the world, glitches aside.
Besides, it would be trivial to just extend the playable, accessible land area out to the furthest possible point you can reach by jumping from the highest points. Even so, there still could be a few death pits, that are clearly visible and impassible, even if they aren't strictly 'bottomless'.
What I am describing is really no insurmountable task. You might not be able to visualise it, but it's perfectly possible.
This is why the Steam Gardens are the absolute best level in the game, hands down. On top of just being a robust, platforming playground with lots of paths and secrets to explore, It wasn't just a floating island in the middle of an arbitrary void. It was a mountaintop in the middle of a dense forest that you could fall into and explore as well!
All this and it had one of the most banger soundtracks as the cherry on top. 10/10, would pick flowers again.
That just moves the island one level lower. Deep Woods is itself a floating island in the middle of an arbitrary void.
@@davidguthary8147
Number 1: It literally isn't. Only one side is a pit, with the other sides being walled off with cliffs.
Number 2: It's about presentation. A black abyss in deep dark woods is much easier to swallow than a city floating over a city.
@@Cyberguy64 A void is a void. Presentation doesn't change that. Also, that "wall" is the "mountain" you mentioned earlier. The island is made complete by the pit below Deep Woods and the opposite end of the main map, where you fall to your death instead of landing in Deep Woods.
I think Lake Kingdom and Seaside are also good about not being like this. The boundaries for those two make a lot of sense, they aren't floating in a void. Lake Kingdom is in a valley of sorts and Seaside opens up into the open ocean like you'd expect it to from the way it looks
@@davidguthary8147 How reductive can you get? This is a video game and video games only have so much content the devs can include. Boundaries have to be drawn somewhere, it's inevitable. It's always better when the devs put forth the effort to draw them in appealing and natural ways. Wooded Kingdom puts forth significant effort to create the illusion of being a mountain surrounded by deep, dark forest. Most of others don't even try to look natural. New Donk, Tostarina, and the Mushroom Kingdom in particular are so lazy about their placement as to be offensive.
Chucksters are the real answer on how people go back and forth Pianta Village and the rest of Isle Delfino. Those dudes lift bro.
I'm a chuckster!
@@narnianninja4964*Murderer.*
@@narnianninja4964*proceeds to throw you in the void because you were a pixel off on the positioning*
Organic, well-defined boundaries are very important when it comes to good 3D level design in my opinion. At least Odyssey doesn't have any inappropriately placed invisible walls; that's even worse.
I don't know; I think i'd prefer invisible walls in most cases, though within reason of course. With an invisible wall, it's easy to just say, "Oh, this thing doesn't exist in-universe and is only there for gameplay purposes," without it breaking your immersion, like HUD elements, but with the island thing, if you want to say the same thing, then you have to imagine that the world visually looks very different than what you're actually shown.
@@Baconator2558 This. You can justify boundaries/invisible walls in a lot of ways. Closed gates, roadblocks, debris, mountain ranges, policemen or guards guarding the place, etc... Adding limits or invisible walls are inherently a bad thing, it just need to make somewhat organic sense
Invisible walls are fine. Sunshine does these with the barriers of their levels. They don’t exist in-universe and are just telling you you’re not supposed to go there.
Kirby and the fl uses a lot of invisible walls hear and there but theyre honestly not that bad
@@APootisBirb The one rule I personally have for invisible walls is to never make it look like there might be something traversable on the other side. Games such as Sunshine and Breath of the Wild are good at this because the areas beyond are mostly empty. However, something like Kirby and the Forgotten Land's first level is immersion-breaking to me, since at the very start you're greeted with buildings that look explorable within your moveset, yet are somehow beyond the map's boundaries.
Ironically, the one kingdom I feel that doesn't suffer from this problem is Lost Kingdom. It's completely surrounded by a sea of poison, but unlike Cascade Kingdom the sea level is close to the land so it's believable that some could reach it without a flying machine provided their ship could withstand the poison. (Note: I am discounting Cloud Kingdom and Ruined Kingdom as those are basically just lone arenas for certain bosses.)
Lake Kingdom and Snow Kingdom do slightly better with being completely surrounded by natural walls... but it still raises the question of how anyone gets out without flying machines.
This is just speculation, but it might be a holdover from Super Mario 3D Land and 3D World's brand of level design, which has something similar with random landmasses protruding from bottomless pits, far away from any other solid land, with no indication of how people could get to or from their. However, in those games it was more excusable as those levels weren't meant to be actual locations people lived in but rather just elaborate obstacle courses for the player(s) to traverse.
Seaside does it the best tho
I think the level designers just got stuck in that 3D Land/World headspace. They forgot that they were making a game where the worlds are supposed to be a little bit more than just obstacle courses.
Also, even if Lost Kingdom was more like the other kingdoms in that aspect, you can definitely forgive it a lot more either way, because being an isolated island in the middle of absolutely nowhere is literally the entire _point_ of the kingdom. The other places, not necessarily so much.
@@paulgrotebeverborg1119 True
@@alfo2804 I don′t think they necessarily forgot, as Odyssey does a lot of world building and lore (at least compared to past Mario games) for it′s areas, but they prioritized level design a bit too much over a immersive, narratively-logical world, which is fine for 3D platformers to an extent, but very disappointing here, especially when Sunshine set a great standard for world design with Isle Delfino′s connected map. They could′ve just gotten lazy as well, but it′s hard to say since Odyssey has so much effort put into it.
I think the biggest problem is the fact that they are literally islands in the middle of nowhere with bottomless pits. It makes sense for Cap, Wood, and Bowser, but Seaside and Lost have actual solutions, and they're some of the best looking kingdoms for that reason
Best part is like, for Cascade Kingdom it’s such an easy fix. Just like… make it stop floating? Put it directly in the water, add a dock with a bunch of tourists and bam you’re done
@@shieldlesscap6124 Then what's stopping Mario from leaving the edges of the world?
@@sinisternorimaki the same thing that’s in seaside kingdom, put an invisible wall far out from anything interesting, and players will just accept that that’s as far as they can go
@@sinisternorimakia fish, like Spore
@@matheusanacleto5922I always loved that in spore and subnautica does it and I love it when games do that
This issue isn't unique to Mario Odyssey but it's definitely the one game where it felt the most jarring, especially in a game themed around its inhabitants frequently traveling between the locales.
IMO I think it's fine to barrier off the level with a bottomless pit, but when almost every level uses this method without thinking about the logistics of it, it starts to push up against my suspension of disbelief. Even in Peach's Castle they added one, when the place was already surrounded by mountains that did a fine enough job to begin with.
I like to think the flying taxis you can see sometimes through the scopes explain how people get around
An exception to this problem are the Lake and Snow kingdoms, however I still feel they suffer from the same problem, being walled off and such. How does anyone get there? Can't see flying taxis in those kingdoms afaik, as with many others.
I think in some ways earlier games benefited from the smaller scale of levels. Many stages in Super Mario 64 have sheer vertical walls enclosing them, but when the stage is, say, the inside of a giant clock, that makes a lot of sense. Ironically, if the levels in Odyssey had been even weirder and quirkier than they are, it would be easier to suspend disbelief about how disconnected the world is (Galaxy benefited from this a lot).
Odyssey has the stylistic diversity of Galaxy combined with the abundance of NPCs you see in Sunshine, and while these both seem like good things in the abstract I feel like they work poorly together because they pull the world design in two different directions.
Yeah it always seemed weird to me how everyone else supposedly got around when you were on Cappy-based travel and the hot air balloon. What happened to games including background elements that you can’t necessarily use but are there to show how the characters would get around? It adds more environmental storytelling and immersion. Instead you’re constantly reminded “Oh this is a video game” when you hit an edge of a world
The Cascade Kingdom would have been easy to fix, just raise the water level to a point where it doesn't feel like a floating island anymore
And then if you swim too far away from the island, you run the risk of being snapped by something like a Mosasaur or a Paleolithic Cheep Cheep
@@johnclark926 that sounds pretty cool but that would probably scare childs like the cheep cheep on sm64 did
@@johnclark926 *Warning: entering ecological dead zone. Added report to databank*
@@StalinkTz I am sure a lot more things in Odyssey scare the childs.
@@StalinkTz Good. Builds them character and gives them memories they'll remember for years. Maybe they'll bond with a friend over both being scared over the cheep cheep.
I think an easy way they could've fixed New Donk is instead of just having the section of city you play on isolated high up from the rest of it, instead have it all connected, but limit where the player can go by the use of bridges that are blocked off by heavy traffic or construction, preventing you from being able to access those directions.
A Pichu holding the Monado, nothing is wrong 😅
@@pedrobeckup456 shulk lost all his stocks and the pichu grabbed the sword
Sunshine was insanely ahead of its time in terms of world building. Every stage is a location somewhere on Delfino Island, and you can even see areas like Pinna Park and Ricco Harbor in the background of other levels.
Odyssey tries to bring that interconnected feeling back, but it ended up being more akin to Banjo Kazooie / Tooie. The kingdoms just kind of exist in their own little void.
Seeing the other areas was genius! I remember trying to see what Sirena Beach looked like in the day time. I think you can kinda see it from Gelato Beach.
@@honeycombavenue1715 There's a good view of it from inside Pinna Park
Also like Donkey Kong 64 too.
Fun Fact: The individual stages in Super Mario Sunshine are a noticeable bit bigger when you're in that stage's level than when you're seeing it from other levels.
(For example, Pianta Village would overlap with Bianco hills if they were both using their in-level models rather than their out-of-level models)
This isn't an issue because Mario Sunshine does such a good job at worldbuilding an suspension of disbelief that you can barely think about how much the world makes sense because of how real it feels.
Also, bonus Fun Fact: The area where you fight Gooper Blooper in Noki Bay is modelled in Pianta Village's map, making it the only part of Noki Bay visible from other levels.
I prefer islands in the middle of nowhere to invisible walls/barriers any day.
It reminds me of the Spyro games to be honest. Especially spyro 3 which is probably my favourite platformer ever (though mainly cos it has like 7 playable characters that all play completely differently to spyro and to each other, plus it has skateboarding levels). But yeah every level in that is just an island in the middle of nowhere and nobody ever complained about that.
These are 3D platformers. They're supposed to be cartoony and abstract. Who wants a hyper realistic 3D collectathon platformer?
Now that you mention it, this is actually a pretty common issue in these 3D platformer games in general
I'm struggling to think of examples. At least, ones unlike 3D world that aren't just made in a level editor and make no attempt to make the world inhabitable. Can you share some examples?
@@SilverLining1 64, 3D land, and 3D World mainly...and maybe some more modern Sonic games like Lost World. I would mention Galaxy...but that's actually excusable with what the levels are.
@@jaydenc367 Super Lucky's Tale comes to mind, although it's one of my top favorite platformers not only are the worlds isolated in levels themselves, the hub worlds are too. Seeing how interconnected and whole the worlds were in Banjo/Kazooie and Conker it's definitely noticeable when less ambitious platformers stick to floating landmasses in their game design.
@@Diwasho That does sound like a good example.
@baranx They had the same thing? Hm...I didn't know that, I still need to play those games and I'm planning on it.
How to solve the island problem:
Turn the problem into an island, amd make a game out of it
I love Mario Odyssey, but as you said in the video, compared to Mario Sunshine where you can see other areas from certain vantage points, it’s disappointing that Odyssey’s levels feel completely disconnected from each other. Even the Mushroom Kingdom is floating above an abyss, even though several previous games have had it surrounded by mountains or something to that effect to hide the fact that there’s nothing beyond the level area.
To be fair though, odyssey is supposed to be a globetrotting adventure. being able to see "mexico" while in "new york" would be a bit stupid.
The Mushroom Kingdom in Odyssey is not even accurate to Mushroom Kingdom in previous games.
@@dark-gaming--8232is that a problem?
@@HungryWardento me it is a big problem
@@pedrobeckup456 would you rather have the same place every single time? It’s like saying Zelda should have the same Hyrule every time.
This is definitely some fair critique towards Odyssey despite my love for it; I would even say maybe it could've taken a Battle for Bikini Bottom approach where the world is all one plane and feels connected but there are clear areas where you can't go, probably marked by lines and darker shaded areas. At worst it might stick out a bit, but I think it'd still do wonders.
Interestingly didn't they do this with Sunshine where there's invisible walls when you get to the water but you can see other stages far beyond?
@@zjzr08 Yeah, though I think for stuff on land it was basically just mountain barriers and the like. Since Odyssey takes place in some locales that couldn't really use mountains to their advantage, this is why I believe the "marked off areas" idea would've worked well too.
The best thing about the marked off areas in bfbb is that there wasnt any invisible walls persay
Hans just takes you back to a checkpoint if you walk in them for too long
And you can still explore said areas with glitches or mods! Its a win-win!
Err, lets not talk about bfbb rehydrated tho, that was an invisible wall fest...
At least Bowser's Fury took this into account, even if it did mean that the length of the game was sacrificed a bit
I still adore how Steam Garden subverts having yet another island syndrome! It can lull you into thinking so in how the main area has raised walls around the edge, and it just makes the valley all the more cooler if you do end up falling.
I don't really find the island problem to be a problem in collectathons, but they're also the genre I give the most suspension of disbelief to.
yeah but even banjo kazooie does this better than odyssey, lol
@@StalinkTz banjo-kazooie does a great job at making the places feel real and lived in. There's like barely any floating platforms or anything in that game too
@@foursidekm that's what i meant. the thing is, banjo kazooie is actually so old and still does a better job and world building that odyssey, it shouldn't be like that.
@@StalinkTz But, is it a problem? This "need" for absolute logical consistency reminds of people who think the existence of plot holes in media ruins the entire experience of that media.
It's a little bit, ridiculous?
Sunshine is on one island, so it can easily be interconnected. Odyssey has levels be entirely different countries, you can't really avoid the island "problem" without getting weird with the geometry or level to explain minute unneeded details.
And it's also Mario. Where blocks float in the air.
@@harrietr.5073I think people who share the same opinion as you are kind of missing the point. Immersion isn’t always a high priority in a game, but it’s greatly appreciated. It’s around the same level as aesthetics and lore. With that said, some genres are more well known for placing certain aspects over others. Odyssey specifically has gameplay as one of its firsts, but it goes further with adding charming characters and small themes for sub-areas. The bigger issue isn’t that the game is gameplay first before immersion, it’s that it goes so far with the immersion aspect but drags it down a bit with this one major flaw.
Basically, this isn’t a horrible smear upon a masterpiece; this is a small shortcoming that we wanted to point out and analyze so that others could know and so that the devs could possibly take in that feedback for future games.
I always loved how Banjo-Kazooie had mountains around the levels
That’s a cool approach but also gets old. Mario Odyssey did that with Snow and Lake Kingdoms, but Seaside and Lost also did it in a cool way with an interactive water surface that eventually leads to the world‘s borders. You gotta have some variety. I admit though, they could’ve tried the mountain thing with Mushroom and Luncheon, too.
Ironically despite people disliking Banjo Tooie for a lot of things, the word is the one thing i think it does better than the first. I say ironically because Tooie's world is in an island but the levels all interconnect with each other, while still being restricted to their own. The only level i feel that does a bad job at this is Jolly Roger's Lagoon, there's just a cliff surrounding it instead of it connecting to the ocean, or having slightly more natural look to it, but other than that i'd say it does a good job.
@@Duskool What's interesting about Banjo-Tooie is that the choice to connect lots of worlds together gave the game a new thing to be judged on: whether or not those connections make sense. There's a really wide range of believability for them, ranging from stuff like the link between the two kickball stadiums (which is clever and thematically appropriate) to pretty much anything leading to Terrydactyland (they're all contrived as hell).
You're right about Jolly Roger's Lagoon, although so little of the level takes place above the surface that you tend not to think about it much while playing. It's really not a lagoon at all, more of a swimming pool with big dreams.
Sunshine may not be as polished overall as Odyssey, but it's way more immersive, it really feels like every location in the game could be a real place of this cartoony world, which is why I love to just run around in that game's levels, even if I don't find any collectible it'll still be a pleasent experience. Compare this to Odyssey, where I always expect to find collectibles, because I'm not really that connected to these worlds, since they clearly don't make sense even for a cartoony world like Mario's. Ironically enough, the one that feels the most realistic is the moon, since it's a world outside our own, which makes the weird island with death barriers actually feel plausible, because hey, you're not on planet earth anymore, this is an alien place, you can't expect it to be like your home planet, and so the alienating experience actually gives charm to it, which is why I always love the moon kingdom when I play in it (plus I love moon physics in any game, so it's a plus).
i always find it really weird that Sunshine has half as many levels as Odyssey but still feels like a bigger and more interesting world to explore, it goes to show polish doesn't matter as much as the game just having a good core
Eh....I dunno Odyssey is immersive too, They do make sense for a cartoony world...but Mario's world never even made much sense to begin with.
I want to add that there's additional kingdoms in Odyssey that make sense for the island concept, which are cloud, lost, ruined, dark side and darker side, because none of those places are meant for tourists and for people to visit, they are remote places with no established inhabitants, so it's fine that they aren't really connected with a transportation service.
At the same time tho, out of all of those, only lost can be considered a kingdom, the others are so small or linear that they feel more like traditional levels than explorable worlds.
@@jaydenc367 In many cartoons and games there's always logic behind everything, even if that logic is unrealistic for the real world, it's established for that cartoon world and it's fine (stuff like you can walk off ledges as long as you don't look, double jumps, power ups and so on), the thing is that usually they make it clear what's possible in that world, but in odyssey there's no explanation on how the many tourists get around the world and the moon, especially considering that we only have the confirmation of flying taxis and flying machines (the ones like the odyssey found in cap kingdom), which don't appear in every kingdom.
I didn't mean to say odyssey isn't immersive, but for me it's not immersive enough to make me feel like these could be real places in Mario's world (not even mushroom kingdom, that was the biggest disappointment for me, a simple circle with the void for the Mushroom Kingdom? Come on now).
@@TheFrantastic Eh...I dunno, "Kingdom" is kind of vague...so even the smaller ones are still kingdoms.
This touches on something other games have made me think about before. I remember replaying Metroid Fusion a few years ago and thinking "wait, this game's setting is a research lab where scientists are supposed to work. Why did they build it around Samus's inhuman platforming skills?!" Every time I play through Radical Highway in SA2 I have a moment where I'm like "who uses this place apart from Shadow?!"
At the end of the day game devs are going to prioritize function over form 9 times out of 10. It seems like a difficult balancing act to design locations that both feel immersive and work well as levels in a game.
tails.
Half Life 1
Shit didn't feel like an obstacle course all the way through even though it is
Except the island issue has nothing to do with functionality other than maybe performance
ohh, actually, counterpoint: Portal series. In the right context, form from function can work great.
With Metroid Fusion at least, along with all other 2-D games, I always figure it’s a liveable place due to the fact that others are walking into and out of the foreground and background, basically using the third dimension.
finally, something the snow kingdom does better than all the other kingdoms
The biggest issue is the fact every other 3D Mario game had some sort of excuse to justify this design choice.
The OG 64 was in paintings, they obviously have endings to them.
Sunshine was well you said it best, it's the best plotted and thought out Mario game out of all imo, despite the obvious time crunch.
Galaxy was GALAXY! It's planets galore it doesn't need islands.
3D World + Land were cartoony enough that it was more than justified.
And Odyssey... Odyssey didn't have an excuse, it's just unnerving sometimes with how the world is created, when staring into the abyss of the moon or so many other places, it's just.... why?
Nintendo notoriously has the mindset of: "Gameplay first, ask questions never."
(You can tell this by the fact they specifically made sure Mario Galaxy 2 has little to no story.)
Which honestly sucks, because a good story/world building is like a good side dish, you can make the main dish as best as you want it to be but even a decent side of potatoes can bring in so much more enjoyment and variety to the mix, and serve as a nice break from the main course, of course it could also instead be the garnish or other allegories but you get my drift.
But hey, that's just my opinion.
Even though 64 is technically paintings Odyssey implies that paintings are basically the equivalent of portals to real places which kind of makes Odyssey’s worlds feeling like they are designed in a very similar way almost make more sense with that in mind.
Sunshine isn't the most thought out Mario game of all time, it being rushed is evidence of that.
eh...3D land and World had no real excuse though...cartoony or not.
3D land/world is of a course clear obstacle course, it would be pretty darn difficulty to make it look believable.
Bowser's fury does exist, but the courses are less linear and don't have bottomless pits (as well as just being a smaller game overall)
@@enderallygolem 3D World-Land is just 2D Mario level design being put in 3D.
@@jaydenc367 In terms of immersion it is, at least (although, the secret stages are quite a mystery).
"How did the citizens get here? How did they leave?"
The biggest H I've seen in my entire life chilling on top of one of the skyscrapers suggests that the entire in-game world is filled with these islands (even going outside of these kingdoms) and the way of getting from an island to the normal world (or to another island) is by helicopter.
That's my theory.
This feels liek a lazy fix for the problem of "how do I stop players from leaving the play area?" for example, if NDC was in an actual city, players would absolutely try to use Marios' insane movement to scale the invisible walls/whatever potential obstacle would serve as a play barrier. I won't pretend that I have the right answer, but making these "islands" is surely an effective, but lazy answer at the cost of player immersion.
I think they really wanted to make it clear where players can and can't go. More about readability than laziness.
You either make islands, or you make huge valleys you can't climb out of, or you use invisible walls. Those are the only options.
Invisible walls are easily the worst by a long way. Big valleys are probably the best. Like Shadow of the Colossus's world is in one big valley you can't climb out of. So that solves that problem, it's all self contained, albeit it's enormous and there's hundreds of secrets to find and hundreds of places to climb to if you're good enough. Like people actually did in Odyssey eventually. Speedrunners and the like managed to scale buildings that looked like they were impossible to scale. But Nintendo knew people would eventually find a way to do it and so they'd include things up there on the roofs of tall buildings, like giant piles of coins and stuff like that. So Nintendo knew people would eventually do it.
So in a lot of ways, Mario Odyssey and Shadow of the Colossus have a lot of similarities funnily enough. Just with how people will go to extreme lengths to explore every square in of the games, and the developers knew people would end up finding all these hidden places and so included secrets there even though 99% of players would never see them. I like that kind of design philosophy.
I love the worlds, but the void around them always was strange.
In regards to Metro Kingdom, I would probably had have the whole level sit on top of a giant skyscraper, there is ground beneath, but its so far that Mario would simply die by falling down
I think that's what the Devs where going for anyways, but they probaby could have added an elevator that you could see travelling up and down the building to show how the citizens actually got here.
Floating islands are a thing that was long since established in the Mario Universe, so I don't view this aspect as too big of a deal, but I do agree that they could have used a bit more variety (Cascade for example could have simply be surrounded by water)
Thats what I thought was what Metro Kingdom was
They could’ve easily replaced the drab concrete walls that descend into the misty void with windows and balconies and stuff to suggest that New Donk is a city atop a massive skyscraper.
This bothered me too, so I'm glad someone is finally talking about it. Another small detail that I haven't seen many people pick up on is that the secondary names of the levels (New Donk City, Tostarena, etc.) aren't actually alternate names for the kingdoms, but are instead the names of the specific _parts_ of the kingdoms that we're exploring. For example, "New Donk City" isn't another name for Metro Kingdom; it's one city _in_ Metro Kingdom that we explore in the level. This is most easily seen in Mushroom Kingdom, where the secondary name is "Peach's Castle." Obviously, the Mushroom Kingdom doesn't entirely consist of Peach's Castle and the grassy area surrounding it, but the area we get to explore does. However, this only contributes to the island problem. Because New Donk City is just one city in a larger kingdom, it further begs the question of how people are supposed to get to it in the first place.
I love Odyssey, and though it does a lot to lessen this problem, it also very much falls victim to the franchise's overall very poor worldbuilding. There are so many things that are just inconsistent and don't connect at all. And obviously it's not a massive issue; Mario games are about gameplay first, then charm and personality, then storytelling, and *then* worldbuilding last, but it is kind of a shame when the series is so good at the other elements. I'm not saying the game needs to have some super complex and thought-provoking lore or anything, but some little details to make things feel more connected to the other games would be nice. Mushroom Kingdom actually does a decent job at some of this, but on the opposite end is Bowser's Kingdom, which is probably the worst in the game in terms of world-building. The idea of Bowser's Kingdom taking archetectural inspiration from Japan is great, but it would've been nice if the buildings were situated in a somewhat more traditional volcanic region, which could still be a floating island. It also would've been nice if Bowser's Castle itself had a more traditional design, while the other buildings and the decorations could've kept the Japanese theming. But beyond that, the kingdom suffers the most from not feeling lived in. I would've loved to have been able to talk to some of Bowser's minions in the kingdom and get to hear their thoughts, maybe in a similar vain to BOTW's Gerudo Town, where Mario would have to wear a disguise to get them to avoid attacking him and enter the shop. I also think that having the kingdom be separated onto so many floating platforms doesn't do much for it, not even in terms of difficulty, since you're just taking an electrical wire between them anyway. Even just pushing the islands so they're all next to each other would've helped it feel a bit more cohesive without actually impacting the level design.
@@Baconator2558 Eh....does the franchise really have poor worldbuilding? It's not super consistent but it's not all inconsistent and there are things that genuinely connect, like how Odyssey itself sets up lore that explains where Mario and Luigi came from before they went to the Mushrom Kingdom and where Donkey Kong actually took place. Bowser's Kingdom world building isn't really bad...it's just that Bowser really loves to change his own castle over and over again, and it's not the worst in the game in terms of world building. It doesn't suffer from that as it does feel lived in with how the enemies you fight are clearly the Kingdom's inhabitants. I would have loved to be able to talk to some of Bowser's minions too though.
@@Baconator2558 I would’ve loved to have a Koopa be the shopkeeper instead of random New Donkers in Bowser‘s Kingdom
On your comment about "there's a kingdom name and town name" - even that kind of falls apart.
Overall, the game uses kindgom and its location synonymously.
Like, when flying to the Metro Kingdom for the first time, Cappy reads from the travel broshoure how "the whole kingdom is one vast city", which implies that New Donk City is the only city that this kingdom is made up of.
And technically, here in New Donk City, we do see many buildings and bridges and stuff out of bounds, which are implied to be the continuiation of the kingdom. But the islands are still islands, and the edges of these islands look weird. Like the city having huge drops. The taxis just going around in circles, nobody ever gets in and out of them. Not to mention, the whole place looking stupidly tiny when looking from the top of the NDC Hall.
The game simply fails at immersion.
@@wariolandgoldpiramid Yes they are islands...which would be part of a vast city in this case. We don't see anybody get in or out of the taxis but we still know that people use them to fly to different places. It doesn't look tiny at all...it's just the center city.
It really doesn't.
I actually enjoy this island feeling, the levels being "micro worlds" on themselves, I really like this aspect in Mario games
Yeah, I found it to be quite charming. Each kingdom being its own little world is quite nice and cute. I always imagined the Odyssey to be similar to Super Mario 64's paintings, as these were mentioned by other commenters.
For new donk city I always figured they used elevators within the buildings, though it's quite impressive that they can have a whole mini city within a skyscraper... What really grinds my gears is the presence of taxis though, why would anyone ever use them within the small areas of new donk city?
You described about 90% of all open world games. The key difference is most open world games take place in a literal island while Odyssey has its levels on a void.
YES! FINALLY SOMEONE SAYS IT!
This has been something that has bugged me since day one. I don't find that it particularly "breaks my immersion", since I can accept that it's a silly wahoo Mario game that doesn't really care much about believability and immersion.
However, I think it's just weird. Like, if I were to do a drawing of few little enclosed sandbox areas, I wouldn't draw every single one as a floating island in the middle of nowhere. I'd want to give a little bit of suggestion that this area is part of a larger world. The absolute worst offender is the Mushroom Kingdom. I was expecting something like Mario Galaxy's introduction area, or at the very least 64's castle grounds, but it's just Peach's castle sitting on a dirt cylinder.
I wonder if part of the reason for this is something to do with performance. Maybe they wanted every kingdom to be a lovely, enclosed area that feels like a small section of a much larger location, but then found that the Switch doesn't have the hardware capability to run that at 1080p 60fps without significantly downgrading the visuals. You can get away with cheaping out on resources by making the surrounding landscape little more than a glorified skybox.
In the case that it was intentional, however, then it probably evolved out of 3D World's style of level design, which itself is an evolution of Galaxy's style. I'm glad that Bowser's Fury shows that the "floating island" school of Mario level design is coming to an end. Hopefully, anyway.
Also - because nobody is going to talk about this ever again - WHY IS THE DESERT KINGDOM'S ICE CAVE SKYBOX SO LOW RESOLUTION? It seriously looks like it could have been ripped straight out of an N64 game, it's so bad and it distracts and disturbs me so much.
there's a skybox in this game that literally looks like a jpeg from MAGMML it upsets me so much
The one moon that has you start in a 3D area, but you go into a 2D area, and if you jump out of a 2d plane you go back into 3D and fall to your death.
Fair, but immersion doesn't inherently mean realism. The game can have an immersive world that still consists of weird magical worlds with floating platforms and even floating islands, but it just needs to make sense in-universe. Flying taxis are ridiculous and completely unrealistic, but if they were made more prevalent in the NPCs' dialogue, then it would still be immersive in spite of the inherint silliness of the whole thing.
The only game before watching this video where I actually noticed this problem and couldn't really get past it was Mario 64, particularly the Whomp's Fortress level. It made no sense to me that this supposed military fortress with a garden surrounding it is just floating in the sky, not even pretending to be connected to something. The first time I got pushed off by those things that come out of the wall and those platforms that move back and forth too, I actually thought to myself wait wtf it's not even gonna pretend to be connected to something? I also am younger, so I played the DS version first. So it almost felt even more weird that they didn't at least put it on a dirt cylinder or something to make it make more sense. Nope, they were like yeah this military base floating around in the sky is fine
@@Baconator2558 I never said immersion = realism.
I meant that mainline Mario games have never cared too much about worldbuilding, consistency or proving explanations for things. Locations exist primarily for Mario to jump around in, and tertiarily as somewhat fleshed-out locations.
The few mainline games that do have immersive worlds are the outliers.
@@alfo2804 Yeah but Mario Odyssey clearly wants you to be immersed with all the different NPCs, their towns and the way they travel to other worlds after finishing the game
This is something that always stuck out to me about Odyssey, and you put it into words perfectly! Personally it's not a big deal breaker to me, probably because the expansive and beautiful skyboxes distracted me from thinking about it too much. In some kingdoms it definitely sticks out more than others, especially the Mushroom Kingdom. It was a nice surprise to discover it but I was also a bit confused that Peach's Castle is just sitting on an island of meadows surrounding infinite meadows. Peach's Castle never has had a 100% consistent location but it's mostly shown with a town surrounding it (PM64, SMG, Mario & Luigi, etc) and for it to just be sitting like that in Odyssey kinda throws me off.
Colorful hills from NSMB Wii surround it too
They could’ve changed cap kingdom so that the starting area is surrounded by a thick fog that sends you back to your spawning point (like in BoTW’s lost woods) instead of it just being a bottomless pit.
For the metro kingdom, it could’ve been a central island (in the water) that you’re playing on that’s connected to the outer parts of the city by bridges that get blocked or demolished when bowser comes and after beating him some construction vehicles show up and block the bridges or they work like how the edges of the screen in Mario bros do
but how would you make water not explorable
@@pepijnmichiels2627 the island can be tall enough such that mario would die when he tries to jump into the water
@@pepijnmichiels2627 I mean Odyssey already does that in Seaside with invisible walls
"The taxis that you see flying around are a good start for making this place feel believable"
Now THAT'S a good choice of words
I always assumed this was done because invisible walls would've broken the immersion. But yeah, i've also noticed this problem after a while. I mean, why is the mayor located on some floating island instead of the mainland?
It’s a landmark. City Hall is built on top of the Power Plant for show. Think if the president’s office was in the Statue of Liberty.
invisible walls are way better than this weird islands.
I've always loved Sunshine's world building. It blew my mind as a kid when I saw the rocket storage glitch that let you see that the whole island was created with some representation of each level included for every stage.
the alternative is seeing a cool spot over yonder, but before you get there- "woops, my ass doesn't fit beyond this point, let's go back" invisible wall.
When it come to the Cascade Kingdom, at least it is much more convincing for it to be an isolated monolith, since the area is much more natural then the metro kingdom, and has more believable geography then the sand kingdom, where the whole area seemingly floats above a deep canyon abyss.
The Cascade Kingdom feels much more seamless as The background is full of smiler looking large landmasses high up above the sea, making the kingdom fit into the general area and feel like a small part of the environment.
THANK YOU! I’ve been thinking this for years and I’ve never seen anyone point it out. It’s why Sunshine stages often feel larger and more real to me, despite being physically smaller than many Odyssey stages
Will admit, on a perspective issue, this has been something that has bothered me for a while (with the same reasoning you gave for New Donk City too)
While with Mario 64, even though those levels are "shut off" and "small" at least that game did have an excuse most the time because you went into *paintings* so technically, even though it may seem like you traveled to a new world, it was just something that existed in those paintings, and probably not real since the power stars made the paintings turn into real places.
The kingdoms however do NOT have that excuse as they are supposed to represent real places in universe.
The areas in Super Mario 64 are likely real places, and the paintings probably just act as portals.
They have their own histories and inhabitants.
Most of them feel pretty grounded and real, with just a handful of floating ones. Even Tall Tall Mountain feels like it's not just a floating island.
And furthermore, we are shown Whomp's Fortress in Galaxy 2, which is floating in space. So it was probably always meant to be floating. Perhaps Cool Cool Mountain is the same.
Odyssey's big flaw is that this is a big globe-trotting adventure, yet all the areas feel artificial when it comes to their connection with the rest of the world.
Uh no, the paintings have been confirmed to not be the areas themselves, but rather more like warping and teleportation shortcuts to get there, and Galaxy 2 and Odyssey debunk this
Regardless of whether the places in the paintings are real or not, the fact that these are paintings means that these will more likely be isolated places; you're not gonna paint a picture of something that doesn't fit on the canvas unless you're going for landscapes. Interestingly, while the game does have landscape levels, their paintings, like the other levels, choose a focus that fits in frame like a snowman or a goomba instead. In other words, there's a selection bias in the levels prioritizing the worlds that fit in a canvas. If anything, it's interesting how many levels don't have the island problem despite this explanation. That said, it wouldn't even be the same island problem since these worlds are not necessarily meant to be inhabitable. Rather, the problem would be a lack of variety in boundaries which, while odyssey still has this problem, sm64 most certainly does not.
To answer both comments... I remember seeing it in game being said that "Bowser created his own world" and while it probably has been retconned by now, back when the game was first made a Toad *does* mention it sounding like they are fabricated worlds.
(Main entrance) "Am I glad to see you! The Princess...and I...and, well, everybody...we're all trapped inside the castle walls. Bowser has stolen the castle's Stars, and he's using their power to create his own world in the paintings and walls. Please recover the Power Stars! As you find them, you can use their power to open the doors that Bowser has sealed. There are four rooms on the first floor. Start in the one with the painting of Bob-omb inside. It's the only room that Bowser hasn't sealed. When you collect eight Power Stars, you'll be able to open the door with the big star. The Princess must be inside!"
(found from the Super Mario wiki, but I always remember the first Toad you meet mentioning all this info)
Edit: I’ll actually add on to this that, while the places could also be real places, they also could have been thought up as (until Galaxy 2/Odyssey) places created by the Power Stars that take form based on their location (like how the secret aquarium does NOT feel like a real place… same with the secret slide… or the Bowser levels)
Especially since only 2 levels in the game throw you out if exiting the level by falling or finding a hole in the wall (the sky star secret near the end and where Bowser’s submarine leaves in Dire Dire Docks), otherwise you are thrown out of the painting (which doesn’t occur in the other games)
@@Dizzy-Luc
Bowser's "own world" is stuff like Bowser in the fire sea and Bowser in the sky.
The secret aquarium is like the secret slide, and Bowser has nothing to do with them
I've thinked about the "Island Problem" (nice name btw) a lot, in the context of Sonic games. The visual design of stages started of strong in SA1, with every stage feeling as much as a place in the world as they could feel in a '98 platformer game. SA2 and Heroes dropped the ball, and most levels felt like a weird landmass floating in a non-distinct place. Somehow in Shadow the Hedgehog of all games, they picked up again with stages that feel with a place in the world and never looked back since.
I think the never look back came after 06, where some stages still kinda look like they were actually there.
These are all clearly choices made to prevent Mario from traveling out of bounds, without resorting to cheap tricks like invisible walls or the infamous insurmountable waist-height fence. Mario games don't have to be realistic, they just need to have an internal logic and strong theming. Gameplay needs take priority over worldbuilding.
If you're *really* itching to know how people travel to New Donk City, it's obvious that they use flying taxis with giant sails. The same way the Sphinx traveled to the moon. That's just how the Mario universe works.
Sonic games also get this fairly well.
Unleashed has you travel the globe by tornado but limits you to specific portions of cities, towns, and villages, where you don't need to worry much about it, holaska has an npc mention how they use bobsleds to get around (and then how one is destroyed right after completing the day stage there in a nice touch), and adabat, also shows the tornado docked at what is probably a area for boats to stop, also adventure uses the transport to change what adventure field you are in amd even has the train staff go on strike to explain why you can't travel somewhere else.
Also sonic was the only franchise in lego dimensions to have an island hub successfully because it's set on angel island
Yeah but that is an entirely different game genre. That is a high speed 3D platformer with linear beat em up levels as well. That can do it easier because you don’t have to explore the environment as much as Mario, since you are blazing through a level. Sonic Frontier, which is more like Super Mario Odyssey, fails in this as well, not only due to the pop-in. But also keeping every location on an island surrounded by water with no other/little land in the background.
One of my favorite parts of Sunshine was that you could often see other parts of the island from different locations. I think you could see Ricco Harbor in the background of Bianco Hills, or Pinna Park from the Plaza. It made the world feel more real.
Iv always taken this as more of a charming quirk of the genre. None of new donk city makes sense of a city because it's not really a city it's a playground to explore
The best immersive part of sunshine is the fact that you can actually see the other locations from almost any of the levels. I was hoping there'd be something like this when odyssey was first announced but unfortunately not.
Also, even back then Pianta village always stood out to me as odd but I couldn't put my finger on it. I think this explains it well though it's the only one disconnected like it is. But even then at least the map tells you where it is on the island I guess
On the one hand, I too would prefer if the locations felt like they were actually connected to the rest of the world. On the other hand, this is Mario, wherein a random pipe sticking out of a couple blocks floating in midair can feasibly connect to literally anywhere else in the universe. These games basically adhere to cartoon logic, and often revel in their own un-realness.
A lot of people just chalk this kind of thing up to Nintendo being Nintendo; just dragging it's heels and sticking with old ways of doing things, and maybe that's true. But honestly, balancing realism and whimsy is no easy feat, particularly in a platformer since the worlds need to be designed more like obstacle courses than functional towns or natural environments.
Well, while in a Sonic game, you can see loops in a city level. Cartoonish games have this non-sense paths that can make you scratch your head. But hey, it's a videogame. It wouldn't be funny if we travel through "normal" paths.
But, for the island problem, this remind me of the Spyro the Dragon trilogy for PS1 (that was remade in 2018) where this situation occurs there too. Seems like it's a question that developers usually face when they make an open level environment: Put invisible walls? Put physical walls? Or bottomless pits?
I agree that games like this often work with cartoon logic. But you can’t dismiss consistency that way. The difference between cartoon logic and “real-world” logic isn’t that cartoons don’t need to have internal consistency. It’s that the terms of consistency are broader and more imaginative than what we’re used to seeing in this world. There's gotta be a way to connect the different kingdoms in a way that feels like it belongs in the whole Mario universe.
@@ejipuh I'm not dismissing consistency. For all the random wackiness of the Mushroom universe, it's a remarkably consistent place. My original post was more intended to point out that realism isn't all that common in Mario games, so while a clear connection between the Kingdoms to their surroundings would have been nice, it's not necessary.
I feel like it's a kind of throwback to when Mario 64 did it due to technical limitations, but this issue reminds me that the trailers made me feel like New Donk was going to be some huge city you could explore as Mario, and it makes me feel like the next 3D Mario could take a page from Sonic Frontiers (though that, in turn, took a page or two from a certain other Nintendo game released in 2017) and focus on having bigger places to explore rather than more of them
Bowser’s Fury did that.
I don't see why they didn't just have inaccessible bridges at the edge of the island where the roads cut off, they're a huge part of what makes NYC what it is and it would be a clever way to connect this island to the rest of the kingdom.
Personally, i feel like it makes it even cooler of a world, for me it always left me with sense of wonder rather than confusion. Especially little touches like steam gardens where you actually get to traverse the ground floor.
Yeah, I was always impressed by the sheer expansiveness of the areas in kingdoms that I wasn't able to access. 1:03 New Donk City is the best example of this, as you can see just how huge the surrounding cities are. Even if it doesn't make sense, I just find it really neat.
It kinda does bother me when when the kingdoms feel isolated, but luckily, not all of them are on islands, (ones of which I can’t name.) And the forest one I feel has a good excuse
The problem is that you're going by immersion. Nintendo doesn't want you to get immersed in Mario games anymore. That's why Paper Mario is what it is now.
True :(
thousand year door just texted me, it says “i lived, b*tch”
This was a nice, succinct video that pointed out a problem I've never heard people discussing before. I'm not a huge fan of Odyssey for a variety of reasons, and while this is not one of the main ones, I think it's still absolutely worth pointing out.
If you don't mind asking, what are some of those other reasons?
@@islandboy9381 Well it's not necessarily a unique opinion, but I do feel like the sheer quantity of Power Moons makes them feel less satisfying to obtain. And the conditions to obtain them can be very arbitrary, which makes them feel like less of an achievement. I also don't like the abundance of sub areas. They're contextless voids that destroy the sense of reality for the worlds they're in. It's much more enjoyable for me when platforming challenges are naturally integrated into the context of a grounded location. I think Lost Kingdom does this quite well actually, and it's probably my favorite kingdom for this reason. It strikes a very good balance between feeling like a believable location in the world and having fun, interesting platforming challenges.
In regards to the comments about how the tourists get around I believe Cappy says something about how the Odyssey is outdated but it's gonna have to make do so maybe they all have more advanced machines
Halfway through the video, I was thinking to myself "Weird how Super Mario Sunshine did a great job avoiding this problem". Weird.
I find it funny that , despite SMO clearly has a lot of small details where attention was paid, bigger things like "how do people live here" isn't touched on. For Super Mario 64, they justified it with each world being a painting that you jump into. Whenever I create a world or a character for something like a TRPG campaign, I always make an effort to consider how a full, 24-hour period would go for the place or person. Hell, I'm willing to go as far as considering how a character would simply drink a glass a water. If you think that's still, sure, it is, but I doubt you know someone who drinks water the same fashion as you do.
I feel like they were trying to make this mario's version of breath of the wild. so just imagine how weird it would be to have the different botw regions be "floating islands". I love seeing the transition from beaches to jungles to grasslands to deserts to canyons to snowy mountains and so on in a satisfyingly cohesive way. granted, botw's setting is more realistic in its biomes than smo. but imagine how cool it would've been to see cohesive transitions like that for the kingdoms
Stuff like this doesn’t really bother me at all in platformers, since the point is having great level design from a gameplay perspective, so the world being immersive or not doesn’t really enter my mind. Having a pretty looking sky box to sell the location is all I need.
That said, in genres like RPGs or adventure games, things like this could take me out of it to the point of dropping the game altogether, depending on how the game is presented. For example, it bothered me so much in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time that I just stopped playing a couple of hours in. It was super immersion breaking compared to the first game.
I don't mind it for obvious platforming challenges, like when you go into sub-areas or whatnot in the main Kingdoms. The problem is that the Kingdom hub worlds are clearly trying to have their cake and eat it too, doing a lot of "tell, don't show" in their worldbuilding.
@@Cyberguy64 I guess I just don’t care about world building in most platformers, and especially not in Mario platformers. To me, it’s just visual dressing for the platforming. I want it to be pleasing to my eyes, sure, and to evoke some mood or feeling in me, but I don’t care wether it’s immersive or feel ”lived in”, so to speak. And when they do allude to world building, it doesn’t have to make cogent sense to me, as I just see it as a little fun bonus rather than serious lore that has to make sense.
To each their own, of course. There’s no objective right or wrong here, just subjective perspectives.
@@CrossfacePanda I think its fair to say the immersion breaking is objectively a critical point in Odyssey specifically when the game sells itself as a big exploration of lived in or once inhabited locales with their own history/characters (you know like a ODYSSEY), much like how Sunshine did that for one focused locale: a tropical resort island. In fact Odyssey's level design structure of it progressing in appearance once you do some big moons feels a lot similar to the episodes in Sunshine so it's even more noticeable that Odyssey is lacking in this detail comparatively.
@@islandboy9381 I guess it’s a matter of perspective (which would, again, be subjective).
Miyamoto has long talked about how Mario games don’t have consistent lore, in the way for example Zelda does. He see it more like how Osamu Tezuka approached his characters, where they are like actors taking on different roles for different projects. And like those character, Mario games are like different stage plays, performances put on but not actually “existing” in a cogent universe, as it were. The characters, and by extension the world they inhabit, take whatever form they need to serve the gameplay.
And I guess I just happen to see it similarily. These aren’t “worlds” in my eyes, they are dress settings. And I get no more upset at them not having a coherent world and presentation than I do at a stage play having painted backgrounds and scene props. The staging and performance is believable enough that I buy into it, just like how I buy into what the Mario game is presenting to me because the presentation and gameplay is believable enough for what it is, even if it isn’t literally inscrutable.
Not that I don’t understand WHY this might bother people, I just don’t think it’s objectively bad (because it isn’t).
Another thing that always bothered me from PiT, is the fact that Bowser’s Castle stays the exact same with Baby Bowser’s head in the present, would’ve been neat that the present version had adult Bowser, so the map doesn’t just look like a more colored, shroobless version of the past
And it was odd that they made a young Kamek for the past, he’s really just like Toadsworth in the games, and the babysitter dynamic doesn’t work that well because Kamek just looks as young as Baby Bowser, if not younger considering how energetic and capable Baby Bowser is in this game compared to him
I don't think mountains or a lake of poison truly fix the problem either, it's more like applying a fresh paint of coat. I like the idea of creating fake surrounding islands that can technically be reached but your character doesn't have the tools to use the transport
I think the reason this initially existed was to deal with technical limitation, then it was a design issue. unless you wanted to have one continuous world, there has to be a cutoff somewhere and no one likes invisible walls.
I do not like Sunshine, but it gets this right. you have multiple areas, but you can see the land around you, you just can't get there. you can see where the polygons just stop in SM64, every level of SMG/SMG2 are a bunch of tiny islands, and SM3DW is just taking a different approach at SMG's style.
I think the main reason it's so difficult to get Sunshine's level of fixing The Island Problem is that it usually involves committing to a singular location, or having only a few large locations to mess with. Odyssey, unfortunately, can't really do that because it's a game that takes place around the entire world and that's the entire point.
this is all to say that while I -hate- don't like Sunshine, I would love a Sunshine 2.
Invisible walls are bad at ground level, but I'm fine with the visible/invisible wall combos, like in Legends Arceus where there's invisible walls along cliffs and in the water, so each section is clearly defined visibly by cliffs and water, and you only find an invisible wall by going too far into the water or climbing to the top of a cliff.
As much as I think this video labours the point a little, you have managed to identify and articulate a problem that has been bothering me since this game came out. Thank you.
I would absolutely adore a 3d platformer that subverts this, where it looks like there's a bottomless pit that you'd die if you fell in, but in actuality super skilled players can traverse it, and it unlocks an enormous new area to explore
How hard would it have been to have the Metro Kingdom be at sea level with bridges to other parts of the city that Mario simply can't cross? Honestly, just having a bunch of inaccessible areas nearby would've made each kingdom feel so much more believable.
Bro, you literally got me when you were trying to figure out how the people got to the commemorative park in Metro Park, because as I was watching this I was playing this game a couple of hours before, playing in the metro kingdom figuring out how this whole place’s transportation works, along with the other worlds in this game! Good work in this video!
imo, i like that new donk city kinda doesn't make sense as a city. like yeah it's hardly a city, it's more like a level that's city-themed... and i kinda like it like that? "level that merely uses the city as a theme in the same way that a desert level is only desert-themed" is a bold design decision and it makes for some interesting "hey wait a second, why are things like that" commentary in post
One example of a non Mario game that does a good job of creating a breathed in world is Sonic Unleashed. The countries in that game have a ton of unique npcs, different foods, and doesn’t feel disconnected from the rest of the world.
I wouldn't go so far as to claim it's "immersion breaking," but it is weird when you step back for a moment.
It's canonical that millions of civilians in a Mario game are just plummeting to their deaths on a daily basis because they wanted to go feed some birds at the park.
Let that soak in.
I have so much I could say, because sometimes I feel like I'm alone in feeling upset about this!
I'll try to condense my thoughts.
Urionically, New Donk City is one of the _better_ kingdoms in this regard, because it's canonically raised out on its own apart from the rest of the city. Why? idk, but it's built on top of the power plant. But despite that, like you said, it's still really disconnected.
The worst in my opinion has got to be, without a doubt, MOUNT VOLBONO.
WHY DID THEY DO THIS?? With all of the other kingdoms in the game, you can at least see the pillars extend far enough below to assume they're touching the ground. But with Mount Volbono? IT'S JUST A FLOATING PLATFORM??
WHY?? And Mount Volbono feels like one of the easiest to fix! Just extend the lava lake, have some steep drop offs in some areas that kill you (like Forgotten Kingdom), and then put small mountains around the entirety of the lake. This doesn't solve the problem with how people get in and out, but it at least makes it feel grounded!
**And to end this off, I'll share some possible solutions to make these locations feel more believable:**
Sand & Metro:
-add a broken bridge. Having bridges connect the explorable area to the rest of the world would make a lot of sense. And Bowser rampaged through these kingdoms, so having them be broken would also make sense! He'd cut off a lot of people who would try to stop him. The bridges would never be repaired, but they could have NPC's near them in the post-game that would explain that they'll get to work on fixing them.
Cascade:
-Run-down Helipad. Fossil Falls is very close to the Cap Kingdom, and there's even the ruins of a Cap Kingdom airship in the area. It would make sense if there was also a run down landing pad for them. Heck, maybe the Odyssey could even land there on returns to the kingdom!
Mushroom Kingdom:
-Tall hills, cliffs, & ruins. Surround some areas of the kingdom with tall hills, and have other areas act as drop-offs. For example, the lake that has a waterfall running off the edge makes sense to keep in. Also... Bowser attacked the Mushroom Kingdom at the beginning of the game. Why not have some ruined towers blocking off the pathway out of the area?
Cap Kingdom:
-This is definitely one of the harder ones imo, and it's because we don't know what it's supposed to be. Is it supposed to be a small island in a lake/ocean? or is it super high up in the air? It's fine to keep a death-plane under the fog, but it could probably benefit from some sort of harbor in some area. Maybe an airship harbor, since the Bonnetoners use airships.
And finally, Cap Kingdom brings us to another big problem.
...The Skyboxes
Alongside the horizon you see countless top-hat towers, implying there's an entire city surrounding you. There is no explanation. Why is Bonneton just this small area surrounded by this big city? For a handful of kingdoms I think they did a pretty bad job at making the horizons fit in well with the environments. It definitely makes the areas you visit feel even more disjointed. With New Donk City, it kinda makes sense, but with Bonneton, and arguably the Forgotten Isles, it doesn't. Solution? Keep these cities/forests/whatever, but don't make them litter the entire horizon. Have them occupy smaller areas and look like islands off in the distance. The Forgotten Kingdom consists of a bunch of big islands on the world map, but you land on a small one. Why not show the scale by having a more realistic horizon with the coast of one of these bigger islands? At the current moment it just feels like you're in a huge poison lake, smack in the middle of one of those big islands.
I love the irony that Delfino ISLAND is the place that doesn't suffer from the ISLAND problem
i really think this was a stylistic choice to pay homage to super mario 64's island-like level design rather than something nintendo did out of laziness. i get it's funny to nitpick since most mario games don't make a whole lot of sense but i don't see how this is a legitimate flaw
In Mario 64 you enter worlds that are almost entirely onirical and/or surreal, it makes just sense thetre
I always felt something was “off” about Odyssey but could never put my criticism into words. You nailed it, I think. The game tries to sell these kingdoms as real places in Mario’s world that you’re really exploring, but almost all of them run on video game logic to the point that the illusion falls apart quickly. It’s still a video game first and foremost (and a really good one at that!), but instead of just owning that, it tries to present itself as some kind of grand experience and falls short.
You're taste is dumb and your opinions suck
It would be so cool if New Donk City was actually connected to the rest of the Metro Kingdom, but they don't let you leave to other parts of it because you got to New Donk City illegally, but Mayor Pauline still lets you be in New Donk City because she loves Mario that much. Literally just an idea I thought of in a minute, such a shame they didn't do something like that
Every location in every game has either an island problem, an invisible wall problem, or is stuck in a box canyon or ocean.
Iirc with metro kingdom, i dont remember exactly where or when, but i could have sworn you could see taxis driving straight vertically up and down the roads to the gameplay area, from the city below, as if gravity didn't matter at all
i saw that + the flying taxis (which are capable of going to the moon even) and kind of dispelled the entire island issue as 'it really doesn't seem to matter at all' as I was playing
Maybe it's just me, but the more ridiculous and questionable a location is in a game like Mario, the more charm it exudes. The very nature of the Mushroom Kingdom is like an acid trip to begin with, to start dismantling that by adding in logic and reason is when the game stops feeling like a Mario game entirely.
Admiring how Sunshine adds logic and reason to its world doesn't ruin the charm of it at all, it only adds onto it because it becomes a much more believable location within Mario's universe
@@zoomzike sure, but Sunshine exists in a location far away from the Mushroom Kingdom, it makes sense that Mario was vacationing to a location where the rules are different.
Just proof that Sunshine was decades ahead of its time.
You could see near enough every level, from every level and the hub, in the distance. It was a living, breathing island.
I think the alternative also runs into an immersion breaking problem though - invisible walls
Sunshine looks seamless but you can swim into that invisible wall and all childhood mystery is lost
Odysseys team logic was probably that it's better and more cohesive to make every island float.
Sm64 would wall off it's levels with hills but I bet the Odyssey team feared people using Mario's arsenal to try to get over the boundaries when you're not even intended to do it at all. Sm64's bonkable invisible walls that start at the tops of the hills couldn't work in the context of odyssey
This video finally put my thoughts into words; I have never been the biggest Metro Kingdom fan because the floating island thing absolutely ruins the immersion for me. Like, for other kingdoms sure but the fact metro kingdom is just floating there makes it seem so fucking artificial and wrong.
You know, I've always been aware of the island problem per se, thinking it an unrealistic but necessary abstraction ever since Whomp's Fortress. But I never really had a problem with the immersion-breaking aspect like you mentioned for New Donk, where citizens and tourists couldn't properly navigate the city. I always just brushed it off as "Well in reality there's stuff where we don't have any in game" like the aforementioned Whomp's Fortress just standing on regular solid ground.
Nevertheless, it is something that should definitely be considered to be fixed, but how do you go about it if you don't want to raise huge platforms high into the air. The reverse has the same problem, being the valley problem that the Lake Kingdom or Bob Omb Battlefield have: "How does anyone get in and out of this valley?"
Then we look to Sunshine (or even the Seaside Kingdom), which largely uses high walls as well, but combines them with invisible walls on the open sea, which works quite well. This method with using the water works well, since it already slows down you movement and you see that there is nothing to find in the distance. The devs of Bowser's Fury must've thought the same thing, which is why it's set on a lake.
Though having the invisible walls on dry land would be more difficult, and not every level has direct access to the sea, which we even see in Sunshine, where Pianta Village and Bianco Hills are set in the mountains of Isle Delfino, making them much more segregated as a result.
My best proposal would be to make a game in similar style to Bowser's Fury; open-ended and everything, but with the level scope of Mario Odyssey and short paths between the individual stages. As for a theme to accomodate this open world-style Mario game I would probably suggest an amusement park of sorts, with the attractions being the levels strewn across the park. Imagine a bigger Witchyworld from Banjo Tooie. You could even have a roller coaster in the park as fast travel between the worlds.
Either that or you go with the standard Mushroom Kingdom but have it very condensed or just make it a new geographical location (or an old one like maybe Sarasaland) with different biomes like Mario & Luigi: Dream Team's Pi'ilo Island.
Counterpoint: Painting and pipe traversal might be the main form of public transit in Mario's world given Mario 64's Whomp Fortress was established to be an actual place in Galaxy 2 rather than a obstacle course made by Bowser, the hidden painting moons in this game, the pinata village pipe in sunshine, and the clear pipes that lead to the different portions of the Sprixie Kingdom in 3D World. Thus society is much more prone to weird urbanization patterns like settling islands in the middle of nowhere. Yes, I recognize I'm probably putting entirely way too much thought into this.
A way to make Metro Kingdom work would be to have a bridge that connects metro to the outside that for whatever reason Mario cannot cross (one example would be to used one of those bridges that lifts up to let boats pass, and have it be up all the time).
Alternatively, instead of the bridge being where Mario could reach it, you could have the bridge be extremely low down below the death planes, and have it look like it goes into some sort of tunnel beneath metro that could be some sort of underground parking area.
And then there is the far off building that you can only reach by using the painting. I don't even know how to begin to fix that
In all honesty - this reality has never even occurred to me. But I don’t think it will effect my enjoyment of the game. But I love the way your brain analyzes things! Great video - June is gonna be great!
My main problem with the Island Problem isn’t the suspension of disbelief, but the fact that it just looks ugly. Metro looks so cool on the inside but once you get to the edge, it’s a bottomless pit of gray fog.😭 It would’ve looked so much nicer and fixed said belief problem is they just continued a city onto it. They could’ve made like construction sites or something to keep us in the intended barriers!
tbh this is pretty valid complaint. it doesn't take away from the overall experience of the game but once you really think about it the more it kinda bugs you
tho i feel you didn't really need to mention how the devs could be doing this and be doing that. like i said this is a pretty small and miniscule immersion-breaker but the devs (infact all devs) should have the respect for perfecting everything else about the game
Good point, I agree that this breaks immersion, especially with some Kingdoms more than others. I will say that I think it's implied that after the events of the main story, the Cap Kingdom's airships were repaired and the airship industry was revitalized, allowing individuals to travel to different kingdoms. I think this bit of lore is interesting, but it would be nice if we actually got to see more of how that works, such as seeing more airships in kingdoms around the world.
I noticed something similar all the way back in Super Mario 3D Land. I called it the "Lava Bowl Issue." When I first got the game, I was excited to finally get to explore the inside of Bowser's Castles in 3D (as opposed to a Road, Volcano, or Planetoids). Yet, the actual levels are just a highly linear set of platforms suspended in lava, free-floating, or exploring the outside. As such, many of these final levels are very disappointing to me, especially compared to Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island. To my knowledge, there has never been a 3D Mario game with a hostile castle interior or non-linear design. Peach's Castle in the OG 64 does not quite count, as it is a friendly area. If anything, that just makes the idea of platforming through an evil large castle even more intriguing. I find this especially odd, as the series does plenty of indoor levels with caves, boo houses, challenge rooms, etc. Heck, multiple Mario Kart tracks and the RPGs pull it off well, so I am not sure what the problem is.
That's a good point, we've never had a 3D Mario game that let us properly explore Bowser's Castle as a location rather than an abstract series of obstacles to be overcome in a platforming challenge. It's definitely a really fun idea, and it's honestly pretty weird that it has still never happened yet.
Give the fans what they want Nintendo!
It's a problem since Mario galaxy
This is why I preferred galaxy to its sequel. The first game felt like I was adventuring on small planets. The second felt like I was playing on artificial, developer-made levels
you can also consider Sonic Unleashed as another way of having the different places being both full of life and having a legitimate reason of getting there with the whole game taking you around the globe, having culture in every one of the places you visit.
to give at least cascade kingdom the benefit of the doubt
if you look beyond the island you are in you see other islands that are just as tall if not taller then the one you are on
I have played this game a ton and never considered this perspective. this was interesting to think about!
I think this is why I like Sunshine so much, there is not a single map on the island that doesn’t feel out of place, there’s no snow world, no metropolis, no desert. Every location feels like it belongs on that island and yet every location felt unique. Not to mention you can actually see other maps in the background of some location. Like it’s definitely the best emersion I’ve seen in a Mario Game.
lol I didn’t watch the full vid before typing, but he says it perfectly
It's way better to have islands in the middle of nowhere than to have invisible walls, any day.
simple ..... your thinking about it way to much haha
I don't care. I really don't. I don't need to ask myself these questions because mario can't die, there are feet-tall golden coins everywhere and there's a hat that lets you invade the body of most living and some non-living things around. Since when is a city block on top of another skyscraper an issue? There could be elevators in that bottom building leading up to the part you visit, and that was enough for me.
There's a difference between fiction (hat that invades body of people) vs. believability within the fictional universe (New Donkers simply cannot access the park)
There is no opening for an elevator up there sadly
@@zoomzike I agree the park and many other places in the game don't make sense but in my opinion it's just a missed opportunity, not an actual issue. It's cool when a place is both fun to play in and believable, but one is clearly way more important than the other.
I still feel like sand kingdom would have been better having a windy sandstorm at its edges instead of a void.
Another way Sunshine avoids the problem, that I’m surprised you didn’t mention, is that you can see other levels in the backgrounds. It really makes the island feel interconnected and real
Finally somebody explaining not only why Odyssey as great as it was felt weird but why ukulele felt kind of terrible when it came to its level design. I honestly think that the engine for Odyssey has miles to go for what better level design could bring to us and I'm excited for what the fans are going to create. Nintendo did a good job with Odyssey but it didn't feel quite as organic as I hoped it would. I'd be over the moon if we got sunshine DLC that was the whole big island. Maybe even the surrounding islands that we saw and always wondered about
honestly i had this thougt recently about kirby and the forgotten land, and none of the levels feel like "this is a videogame level" Or at least very few of them do. and perfect contrast is the treasure roads whichni think helps the other levels feel more natural by comparison lol
was just thinking about this while scrolling through the comments so its nice to know im not the only one
I was thinking of Kirby, but wouldn't want every 3D platformer to become contained in the same way. We had to trade unlimited height plus a lot of movement options and camera control.
There are also a lot of triggers which work as bottomless pits where you lose health based on the camera even if there is no fall damage and you were just down there a few seconds earlier. It may appear to have solved the problem but it just has new issues.
The only games that I think got around it for me were the Jak and Daxter games, but nothing is perfect.
@@thelastgogeta yea but thats more about how its set up, the actual environment design and the way that things get kind of naturally blocked off would be ideal if you just lifted them out and plonked the same method on a more open design
@@flophawk I really don't think it's that easy imo,the benefit of more linear design is that the creators don't have to worry about where the player is going or where are they looking,so they can make a levels look realistic and varied without compromising power or immersion.
@GamerTower my point is more like, if new donk had a wall of buildings on the edges you wouldnt think "how do they get past the buildings" as much as you think "how the fuck do thy cross this giant chasm"
or even if theres a big invisible wall, if sand kingdom just had a hard line in the desert no one would bat an eye. hell they already do that in seaside. and snow and lake have very natural feeling giant fuckoff walls, like even in this game they pull it off well in some areas.
obviously a curated line is gonna be more put together but thats not really what my pointnis and besides, you can make a believable space otherwise. if metro DID have the skyscraper barriers then the middle part would feel perfectly natural, and its the application of those borders that im talking about here
The “island problem” actually worked to sm64’s benefit bc every level was so fantastical and not meant to be a tourist destination. Isolating 64’s worlds made them feel like only the castle’s magic walls could take you to them.
Bowser's Fury was where I felt this problem. Just constant generic platforms with no real context or reasons beyond just having you go to them to do some platforming challenges