Rebutting Joseph Anderson's SMO analysis

Until recently I had been a big fan of Joseph Anderson. I greatly enjoyed his analysis on Fallout 4, No Man's Sky and The Witness and thought he had plenty of interesting things to say about those games. Then recently he released a video dissecting the latest mainline Mario game, Super Mary-Oh Odyssey, which quickly changed my mind about Joseph from an insightful writer to a huge fucking idiot.

That might sound like the butthurt of a fanboy who's upset that his favourite reviewer didn't give the game a 10/10, but I'd like to clarify that that's not the case at all. I loved Breath of the Wild and watched Joseph's video on it and I found myself agreeing on a lot of points - the shrines in that game were pretty shitty, the combat could've been better and so on. If he just simply didn't like Odyssey for what it tried to do then too bad, I thought it was great but different tastes for different people, life goes on and what not. But what actually happened was that I came in expecting to see an actual analysis of the game and instead got Joe making horribly misassumptions on what Super Mario Odyssey tries to do and then basing his opinions on those misassumptions.

And you could argue about whether or not it's fair to say his understanding of the game was entirely his mistake - Nintendo did release that image before launch showing the 3D Mario games in two separate categories, with Super Mario Odyssey being categorized with 64 and Sunshine in the sandbox style of Mario games. That image quickly went viral for good reason - many people loved 64 and Sunshine and have been hoping for a return to that gameplay style for over a decade. A comparison like that raises certain expectations.

Yet despite that image, everything else about Mario Odyssey, from its structure to its level design to its pacing is so clearly meant to be taking the sandbox type of gameplay in another direction yet Joseph completely refuses to acknowledge that in his two hour long analysis of the game, which is so baffling to me that this is why I'm confident enough in calling him a huge fucking idiot (besides pissing off the fanboys who would rather find shit to get mad about than actually dive into what I have to say) - he seems to be intentionally handicapping himself in order to prevent himself from having fun with the game.

The gravest misassumption that Joseph makes is that the Moons in Odyssey are supposed to be the equivalent of Stars or Shines from 64 and Sunshine. In those games, you entered a world through a painting or some graffiti, you selected a mission, went on and completed the objective - beat the boss, collect eight red coins, blast into the wall, etcetera - and then you do your little Star animation that takes an eternity to complete before getting booted out of the level back into the hub. On occasion could you obtain Stars or Shines out of sequence - more so in 64 than in Sunshine - but in general, they were meant to cap off the mission, essentially functioning as the flag pole from Super Mario Bros.

The Moons in Super Mario Odyssey do *not* work like this. Instead, you're giving a sandbox with its own look and feel, all kinds of set pieces and enemies to Capture and that's it - go wild. If I had to make a comparison to another 64 game, the most apt one would be Banjo-Kazooie's Jiggies - the Moons are an incentive for players to go out and explore every nook and cranny of the world. You get rewarded for being clever and observant constantly which is why the worlds in Odyssey are so much fun to explore. Yet Joseph insists on comparing it to previous Mario games to the point where he complains about the YUUUGE AMOUNTS OF TIME you're left waiting for all the Moon jingles to complete, which is really only like five seconds, and then goes on to compare it to 3D World's Green Stars which had no such jingle as if these two collectables are similar in function in *any* way at all besides being a reward for exploring. 3D World's a game about getting from point A to point B with *some* exploring while Odyssey is completely *about* exploring - how anyone could think this comparison is in any way valid when the frameworks for these two games couldn't be any more different is truly baffling to me.

And yes, Moons do repeat like the dog Moons or the Captain Toad Moons or the bird moons or the Seed Moons and I could go on. That *is* a shame, but it isn't the end of the world. Do I wish Mario Odyssey had less repeating Moons? Yes, absolutely. If something can be great, it can certainly be greater. But there already is plenty to do and see and find in Odyssey that I don't find myself minding the repetitive nature of these Moons because, first of all: Joseph frames this point in such a way that makes it seem like these repeating Moons are completely 1:1 in every Kingdom, which is completely false. Sure, Captain Toad might be found in every Kingdom but the way you go about finding him *is* different in each one. Same goes for the Moons from the Toad who asks you to play different songs each time, or the different ways you have to traverse the Kingdoms to get Seeds to the pots. It's not all brilliant, obviously, but it's not as black and white as Joseph's analysis would've led you to believe.

Second of all, no one is telling you that you *have* to collect every Moon. Can't beat that hundred rope-jump challenge? Then don't do it. Don't feel like herding up more sheep? Then don't bother. The game only requires 124 Moons to get to the ending. If you want to, you can easily skip the majority of the content in Odyssey and still beat it. You'll miss out on a lot, but nothing in the game requires you to 100% it. You even only need 500 out of 880 Moons to unlock all the post-game content, which Joseph similarly derides for being repetitive ignoring once again that it's all optional anyway.

The second biggest mistake Joseph makes in his analysis is that assumes that game was meant entirely for children in what he frames to be some kind of devious scheme for Nintendo to introduce Mario to a new audience of children to make millions of dollars now that the Switch has become an overnight success. This point was so stupid and came so out of left field that I had to pause the video and wonder why he even bothered making it, or how he could've gone throughout the entire process of writing the script, rewriting it, recording it and editing the video without realizing what an idiot it makes him sounds like. The only real argument he makes to back up this claim, by the way, is that the game is easy.

The first easy argument to make against this is that Odyssey has been in development since development on 3D World ended and the game's design was already set in structure before the Switch became so successful. The second easy argument is that *all* Mario games are easy. Every single one of them, with the exception of The Lost Levels which Nintendo tries to acknowledge as little as it possibly can. He rebuts this point by bringing up the optional harder content like the Special World in Super Mario World, which again Odyssey also does with the Darker and Darkest Sides of the Moon which apparently isn't quite enough to fill his arbitrary quota of hard content in a children's game.

Yet despite this, and to return to a point I made earlier, he purposefully handicapped himself in his first playthrough of Odyssey by not using any of the advanced moves, which he himself admitted to in his analysis. This despite the fact that making full use of Mario's in-depth moveset - which he himself has praised for the most part - allows you take plenty of tricky shortcuts across the Kingdoms and even get to otherwise inaccessible areas where Nintendo placed plenty of coins for you to find, so it's not like the game doesn't even reward you for mastering Mario's moveset or do nothing with it despite his arguments towards the contrary. This was another point Joseph made that baffled me beyond belief - complaining that the game is too easy but then not taking the steps that would allow him to actually have more of a challenge with the game for no good reason.

I could go on and on but I don't want to extend this rebuttal into a two hour long novel where I pad it out with constant examples like some kind of assburger because I don't require YouTube shekels to survive. What it all boils down to is that Joseph Anderson doesn't understand what Odyssey does, doesn't seem to want to, and is instead content with smugly deriding the game on Twitter while making a complete ass out of himself. GG no re.

- Anon