User:Nintendo101

Nintendo fanatic and enthusiast. (You probably are too if you're looking at this page.) I'm otherwise an artist and an ecologist. Within my field, I specialize in wildlife and (currently, but not exclusively) insects. I've had an account here since 2012.

I wrote the character sections for Super Mario Odyssey. I contributed a lot to the articles for Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy (which is now featured - yay!), and Super Mario Galaxy 2, alongside many other people on this wiki who have contributed their time, energy, and passion to writing about video games.

I have been a fan of Nintendo since a very young age. My first Mario games (and three of the first video games I ever owned) were Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2, Super Mario 64 DS, and Mario Kart DS. These games were good company for a young kid who moved around a lot and had difficulty keeping long-lasting friends.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I sequentially played some of my favorite games in the Super Mario series to 100% completion. This includes, in order, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, and Super Mario Odyssey. It's been really fun! These are great games, and I always wanted to marathon a series like this before but never had the time. It has been interesting to see where the series began and where it has ended up. The design philosophies, the characters, the art directions, world building, level design, narrative, etc. All good stuff. It might be fun to write something about it some day.

My favorite video game character is Yoshi.

For assets I have uploaded to the wiki, I suggest viewing them here.

Sandbox for current project

Prerelease

• Shiggy first mentions that there will definitely be a game for the Revolution during E3 2005 (I think - double check any earlier mentioning, maybe in Japan, though Ninty tends to do initial press announcements in English because their largest sale demographics are in the west)

Reception

Super Mario Galaxy has been met with universal acclaim, receiving a GameRankings score of 97.64% from 78 reviews, making it the highest rated game on the website, while scoring a 97/100 on Metacritic, as of January 2024 the fourth-highest score on the latter website. Famitsu has given Super Mario Galaxy a score of 38/40. Official Nintendo Magazine gave the game 97%. It was called the best game of the decade and praised for having excellent graphics, sound and gameplay as well as a mixture of new and classic features.

• warmly recieved, considered the best Mario game in years
• People almost immediately entered the camp of this game being excellent, and folks seem to have largely stayed there over the years, if anything its reception has only gotten more positive
• Not everyone loves Star Ball and ray surfing
• Tim Rogers is critical of how the game "feels", arguing Mario does not move with inertia and that what he feels are needless level design elements; Rosalina as a character felt unecessary (ref)

Sales

Super Mario Galaxy has been a commercial success, selling 350,000 units in Japan within its first few weeks of sale. In the United States, the game sold 500,000 units within its first week of release, earning it the highest first-week sales for a Super Mario game in the country at the time. Super Mario Galaxy is the 8th best-selling game for the Wii, selling 12.72 million copies worldwide as of September 2017. As of September 30, 2021, it sold 12.80 million copies worldwide.

• 5th best selling console game (across all consoles) in 2007, but achieved greater lifetime sales than the other four in subsequent years (I think)

Accolades

Among game media outlets, Super Mario Galaxy was regarded as 2007's "Game of the Year" by the editing staff of IGN, GameSpot, Kotaku, Yahoo! Games, GameTrailers, and Edge. It recieved the award for "Best Audio Design" from Edge as well in their annually published "Edge Awards".

Within a month of the game's release, Super Mario Galaxy won two awards at Spike TV's 2007 Video Game Awards in the United States. The game subsequently received thirteen nominations from five different organizations throughout 2008. On February 8th, the game won the award for "Adventure Game of the Year" from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences at the 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards. It was nominated in five other categories, including "Overall Game of the Year" for which it was a finalist. At the 8th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards on February 22, Super Mario Galaxy received nominations in two categories, one of which was another "Game of the Year" award. In Japan, Super Mario Galaxy won "Game of the Year" alongside Capcom's Monster Hunter Freedom 2 at the 2007 Famitsu Awards. This award was graciously accepted by Yoshiaki Koizumi. At the nationally-maintained Japan Game Awards 2008, the game received the "award for excellence" in the "Game of the Year Division" from the Computer Entertainment Supplier's Association. The game was nominated for three awards at the Golden Joystick Awards 2008 later that year.

During 2009, in what was recognized as a "surprise" by the press, Super Mario Galaxy won "Best Game" at the 5th British Academy Games Awards and was the first Nintendo game to ever receive the award. It was accepted on behalf of the development team by Rob Lowe, the senior product manager at Nintendo UK, who reportedly took the opportunity to defend the title against claims that it is not a "gamer's game." Super Mario Galaxy was nominated for the "Gameplay" and "Use of Audio" awards as well, but lost to Activision's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Electronic Arts' Dead Space, respectively. At the 2012 Kids' Choice Awards, Super Mario Galaxy was nominated for "Favorite Video Game" a year after its sequel was. It lost to Just Dance 3.

Awards
Date	Organization	Country	Award	Result	Ref.
9 December, 2007	Spike Video Game Awards	United States	Best Action Game	Won
			Best Wii Game	Won
8 February, 2008	Interactive Achievement Awards	United States	Overall Game of the Year	Nominated
			Console Game of the Year	Nominated
			Adventure Game of the Year	Won
			Outstanding Innovation in Gaming	Nominated
			Outstanding Achievement in Game Design	Nominated
			Outstanding Achievement in Game Play Engineering	Nominated
22 February, 2008	Game Developers Choice Awards	United Kingdom	Game of the Year	Nominated
			Game Design	Nominated
26 April, 2008	Famitsu Awards	Japan	Game of the Year	Won
9 October, 2008	Japan Game Awards	Japan	Award for excellence	Won
31 October, 2008	Golden Joystick Awards	United Kingdom	The Sun Family Game of the Year	Nominated
			Nintendo Game of the Year	Nominated
			BBC 1Xtra Soundtrack of the Year	Nominated
10 March, 2009	British Academy Games Awards	United Kingdom	Best Game	Won
			Gameplay	Nominated
			Use of Audio	Nominated
31 March, 2012	Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards	United States	Favorite Video Game	Nominated

Controversy

Super Mario Galaxy was the first Super Mario game to be officially localized to French for Quebec, Canada. This market had previously received games in English. This followed a deal between the Office québécois de la langue française and the video game industry to have every game available for that region in French by 2009. In the Quebec localization, non-playable characters (particularly the Lumas and the Toad Brigade) make heavy use of Joual, a social dialect of Quebec French. This localization choice sparked a minor controversy, with representatives of the Office québécois de la langue française and the Union des artistes criticizing it for promoting poor literacy to children. A Nintendo representative responded that the localization was made with "localizing for the market" in mind, as the Quebec market made up 25% of sales for Nintendo of Canada at the time.

Following the negative press surrounding Super Mario Galaxy and the similarly localized The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, nearly all subsequent French-Canadian localizations have been in standard French. As of 2024, the only exception has been Paper Mario: Sticker Star (2012), which also features the Joual dialect.

Themes

Mario after being stirred by the Apricot Luma towards the beginning of the game, with his home world far in the distance and unreachable. This is a particularly resonant moment for Jacob Geller.

Super Mario Galaxy has been noted for its narrative themes, the very presence of which has been described as exceptional when compared to other titles in the Super Mario series. The game explores themes of isolation, grief, found family, acceptance, and rebirth.

The game invokes feelings of isolation and sadness through its outer space setting. Most galaxies are enveloped by vast, dark skies pierced by stars and distant suns. There are story scenarios, missions, locations, and musical queues interlaced in the game that intentionally draw attention away from its more vigorous, joyful elements to focus on the dispassionate coldness of space, amplifying Mario's relative insignificance to a vast, endless universe. Video essayist Jacob Geller notes that these conditions give the player a moment to decompress after action-orientated gameplay and foster contemplativeness. Such conditions are interpreted as existentialistic and sad, but not despairing. Grace Benfell of GameSpot describes the evoked feeling as an "existential, joyful melancholy."

Benfell also comments on the the integration of Lumas in the game. The childlike creatures are predestined to become celestial bodies at the end of their life cycles. The objects Mario directly interacts with are implied (and sometimes even directly demonstrated) to have once been Lumas themselves, with Launch Stars having once been yellow Lumas, Pull Stars once blue ones, and so on. As a gameplay mechanic, Hungry Lumas permanently transform into wholly new planets and galaxies once fed a requested number of Star Bits. These planets are instantaneously lush with flora and sometimes already bear communities of people and creatures living on them. As Benfell argues, this mechanic implies everything in the game, from whole worlds to animals to small objects, are "made" out of Lumas. This interpretation is confirmed directly in the game. The cycle of rebirth in Lumas likely derives from the life cycle of real stars and the knowledge that the majority of elements, including all the ones that make up living things, were created and distributed across the universe by dying stars. Benfell equates transformation with death, an often negative theme in art. However, she elaborates that it is in dying that new life comes to be, including newborn Lumas, so it is an essential component to how the universe functions in an entropic cycle of continuous rebirth.

The game's themes are most deeply and explicitly channeled through the characterization of Rosalina. As overseer of the domestic Comet Observatory and caretaker of the Lumas, she is widely perceived as a maternal figure that supports a warm, securing environment only amplified by the contrasting, cold backdrop of space. She is also presented as a figure of reliable support with godlike abilities. She is omnipotent, wise, and a timeless entity that has lived for centuries. Mario cannot be harmed on the Comet Observatory, and it is implied that she is the one who brings him back to safety if he falls off the side. No harm can come to the player as long as they are with her.

However, despite the security and warmth she radiates, she is simultaneously presented as reserved, longing, and melancholic. The context for this is not explained to the player unless they enter the library on the observatory, an optional element of the game not tied to any completion criteria. It is here that she reads a storybook detailing her past. Long ago, Rosalina lived on Mario's home world. Her mother died while she was a child, and she was still grieving that loss when she encountered one of the Apricot Luma's predecessors. He too had lost his mother before crash-landing on her world, and he was waiting for her to return to him. Rosalina befriended and chose to wait for her with him. After several years of waiting, they traveled into space to directly look for her. It is while in space that Rosalina choses the role of "mama" for the Luma, when he comes to tearfully accept that his mother is really gone. Ultimately, it is from processing the grief of losing a loved one that Rosalina found her own purpose in life, taking on the role of mother for the Lumas, her new family, as her own mother did for her.

Ciara Cremin of the University of Auckland adapted philosopher Gilles Deleuze's analysis of cinema to Super Mario Galaxy, providing a foundation for how video games can be studied as a discrete artform. She understands it to be a "masterpiece" of the form.

Legacy

In-house (conceptual)

• Miyamoto considers it the true sequel to Mario 64 (as opposed to Sunshine)
• Last Mario game to see "serious" involvement from Miyamoto until Super Mario Run (ref)
• Last game directed by Yoshiaki Koizumi, who would be given greater roles as producer for other Mario projects, while Galaxy level designer Koichi Hayashida would be given directorial duties for subsequent entries
• Fostered a direct sequel - SMG2; one of the only Mario games to receive a named sequel (they're all kinda related to each other though, so how important is this actually?)
• Muted narrative elements in SMG2, per the explicit requests of Shigeru Miyamoto, and incorporated desired elements for the first game that were omitted (Starship Mario, Yoshi)
• Experience and mechanics streamlined and simplified
• SMG2 would be the last time Nintendo attempted to create a platformer with spherical worlds (have they ever said why?)
• heavily influenced design and structure of subsequent 3D Super Mario games, especially SMG2, SM3DL, and SM3DW as a course clear-style Mario game
• 3D games would become progressively more linear and more comparable to 2D Mario games; increasingly deviating from hakoniwa design philosophy of Mario 64
• When sandbox-style game did return with Odyssey, Galaxy's influence is still apparent (particularly in the lunar kingdoms, where gravity is less intense, giving Mario a floaty feel comparable to the feeling of moving in Mario Galaxy)
• Apparently Odyssey's Photo Mode derived from the developer's attempt to mitigate the complexity of camera controls (ref)
• Miyamoto expressed that Nintendo is open to developing a third game (his comments suggest Nintendo continued to pursue design choices that would make 3D games less daunting to 2D-players, hence why SM3DL and SM3DW appeared they way they do, but of note, the author of this work aligns SMG with SM64 and SMS as a sprawling adventure-type game) (ref)
• Folks clearly missed the idea of having a 3D Mario game that felt like an adventure (ref)

In-house (referential)

• Direct Galaxy-based iconography is present in every subsequent 3D game (Galaxy 2, obviously; Rosalina, Lumas, Octoombas, Comet Observatory in SM3DW; 8-Bit Rosalina and Star Bit-shaped regional coins in Odyssey)
• Rosalina would be incorporated into subsequent ensemble/spinoff games, Nintendo's marketing, have a direct presence or homage in subsequent main series games, and would become a largely beloved character
• Immediately appears in Mario Kart Wii, which was being developed simultaneously with Galaxy, and has been a fixture of every subsequent Mario Kart title
• Clampy would be incorporated as "the" clam enemy in the 2D games, one of the few enemies to have been introduced in a 3D game to become a recurring stable of the 2D ones
• Captain Toad rises in prominence within Nintendo's games and be playable in his own title; distinguished from the Toad in coming years
• Lumas and Toad Brigade would also become less frequent but consistent elements
• Space-themed portions in subsequent ensemble/spinoff games would often incorporate allusions to SMG

Industry at large

• Very few studios would attempt making platformers with spherical worlds (I recall some developer somewhere mentioning the technical difficulty with trying to do this)
• When a game does try this or attempts something comparable, it is often referred to as "Galaxy-styled" even though SMG was not the first platform game to attempt this design (Sonic Adventure 2, Ratchet & Clank, Yoshi's Island)
• Low-effort theme park-tie in clearly based on (maybe even directly stole from) Galaxy
• Both Sonic Colors (in a positive sense) and Sonic Lost World (in a negative sense) likened to Galaxy
• Cited influence behind:
  • Super Smash Bros. 4
  • Armillo
  • Solar Ash
  • Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope

Retrospectives

• Eurogamer considers SMG the game of the generation (ref)

In 2011, Super Mario Galaxy was ranked number fifty-first in Game Informer's "Top 200 Games of All Time" listing. Nintendo Power ranked it as best Super Mario mainstream title in its May 2012 issue, as well as the third-best game ever released on a Nintendo console in its final issue.

In Japan, a 2021 poll conducted by TV Asahi with over 50,000 participants found Super Mario Galaxy amongst the top 100 video games of all time, ranked number 56 out of 100.

Things to read

• 15 Years Ago, Super Mario Galaxy Made It Cool to Be a Gamer
• Super Mario Galaxy: In Space No-One Can Hear You Mamma Mia
• Super Mario Galaxy Showed Us Something The Series Hadn't Before, And Hasn't Since
• 15 years later, Super Mario Galaxy is still the series' most stellar entry
• Super Mario Galaxy Coming To Nintendo DS Thanks To Fan Project
• In Battle of Consoles, Nintendo Gains Allies
• E3 Interview: Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto
• E3 – 2006 : LIVE :: Massive Wii games ‘hands on’
• Halo 3 Arrives, Rewarding Gamers, and Microsoft
• Nintendo: Wii play now, but Wii ship later
• One on one with Nintendo at E3
• E3 2005: Shigeru Miyamoto Interview
• TGS 2005: Hands-on the Revolution Controller
• Super Mario Galaxy and the Videogame Aesthetic
• Super Mario Seriality: Nintendo’s Narratives and Audience Targeting within the Video Game Console Industry
• Redesigning Super Mario : Creating realistic versions of some characters and animations featured in Super Mario franchise
• The Fine Line Between Rehash and Sequel: Design Patterns of the Super Mario Series
• The evolution of the introductory section
• Molecular Mario: The Becoming-Animal of Video Game Compositions
• Impact of an Active Video Game on Healthy Children’s Physical Activity
• It's a-me Density!
• Super Mario 64: an exercise on freedom and style
• AusGamer Review
• Is the Japanese gaming industry in crisis?
• Nintendo defies recession with record profits
• Nintendo Wii: Lessons learned from noncustomers