Dear Super Mario Galaxy 2

Overall, you were a pretty good game. It definitely felt like just more of the first Super Mario Galaxy, but hey it was a good game, so you were too. Plenty of levels, lots of variety, I definitely enjoyed the experience.

The story wasn't great, but that's never been what Mario's about so that's fine. Good platforming, some interesting puzzles, some unique challenges. Very much lives up to exactly what Mario is supposed to be. You had 120 stars to collect, some harder than others. This included some "hidden" stars but you had a very nice system of showing what levels were complete and which ones had stuff left to find in, so searching for hidden ones wasn't frustratingly tedious.

There were definitely some frustrating bits. There were parts that required some very precise movement, which was awkward to pull off because of the realistic way I had to accelerate from stopped, starting slowly and working my way (pretty quickly) up to a run, as well as the inability to magically control myself midair just as well as on the ground as many other games let me do. In general this added a bit of a realistic feel to the controls, adding a bit to the difficulty too. Occasionally there were spots though that felt like they were designed for an older style game where I would have had much more control mid-air and much more ease starting and stopping and turning, and those spots could get rather frustrating. You also had this tendency to have the camera at a slight angle, which may look slightly better than it being more perfectly straight, but created annoyances. The joystick, as it always has on Nintendo controllers, has an octagonal outline instead of circular, making it easy to push it perfectly straight up, down, sideways, or diagonally. But since the camera was at a slight angle, this resulted in me moving at a similar slight angle, which in certain parts was incredibly annoying and it was very difficult to move perfectly straight the way I wanted to.

The extra 120 green stars to get after finishing the game seem a little... silly. Like a cheap way to double the length of the game. I probably won't bother getting them, one extra level at the end just doesn't seem worth basically re-playing through the entire game.

Overall, you do exactly what you're supposed to, solid platforming with a variety of levels. I give you an 8.5
-SF