Super Mario Odyssey Review

Cappy is the best new Mario verb since the wall jump, and Nintendo builds a whole game out of the fact that possessing a thing means inheriting its physics. A Bullet Bill flies, a Cheep Cheep swims, a Goomba stacks, and each capture arrives with a kingdom-sized playground built to interrogate it. Moons are handed out constantly, which some read as devaluation and others as generosity; the truth is that it turns the world into a scavenger's dream where nearly every curious impulse pays out.

New Donk City is the confident swing, a real-scale metropolis that should not work beside a cartoon dinosaur kingdom and does, and the Festival sequence winks at thirty years of Nintendo history without collapsing into nostalgia. Movement remains best in class, with dive, roll and cap bounce chaining into routes the designers clearly anticipated. The plot is the usual kidnapping with a wedding attached and carries no weight at all, and the kingdoms run thin on difficulty until the postgame finally opens up.