Super Mario Galaxy really is an exceptional game. I know, as revelations go, that’s right up there with “Water is wet”. But I’ve been on a serious SMG kick for the past few days and I know I haven’t really addressed the game here despite it being, truly, a Wii flagship title. So here’s my review: If you own a Wii, and you don’t own Super Mario Galaxy, you are criminally retarded.

So much for the review. But not so much for the game. Because for me, what Galaxy speaks to is the confusing way in which gaming has evolved over the years. The basic premise of the game is that Mario has to fly to different galaxies collecting (what else?) stars. The more stars he collects, the more worlds he is able to fly to. Once he acquires sixty stars, he will be able to fly to the final boss battle and save the Princess. Except, there are one hundred and twenty stars in the game. So you really only need to acquire half of them in order to win.

And understand this well – the game is not linear. In fact, if you do very well on the earlier boards, it is entirely possible to skip right to the boss battles for the last several worlds, bypassing all of the interim stages. Essentially, that is Galaxy’s answer to warp zones, which is another Mario staple. And yet, in the earlier Mario games, warp zones served a very specific purpose. Because you could not save your game, and because extra lives were scarce, warp zones were often the only way that many players could hope to beat the game. Gamers didn’t see them as a cheat but rather as a trick. Hell, I must have beaten the original Super Mario Brothers a dozen times before I ever saw World 7-1.

But in a gaming era where running out of extra lives is either neigh impossible or simply isn’t an option, and where you can save your game to complete it over the course of weeks or months if you care to, what function does skipping content actually provide? Certainly completing every star in Galaxy would be beyond the call for some gamers, as many stars are acquired by performing rehashes of previous levels with the situation altered (the enemies are faster, or you die the first time you get hit and so forth). Additionally, many of the hidden stars are so bloody well hidden that it would be unreasonable to expect younger or more inexperienced gamers to find them.

But if you do find them, you can essentially skip the second half of the game. And on some level, I think I have a problem with that. Content means a very different thing in games now than it does twenty-odd years ago. Nowadays, content is a commodity that is traded and paid for rather than a challenge to be overcome. Expansion packs, map packs, and now even weapon packs all cost extra cash, and what you are buying is a longer or more enriched experience. Well, that’s the theory, anyway. In an MMO, content is often locked by progression, or doled out in patches throughout the year. Some people will grind their characters for week, months, even years so they can be rewarded with new content. In Super Mario Galaxy, apparently, the reward is being able to skip that same endgame-style content.

It also raises the question of whether or not a game is about the ending or the experience. Perhaps for a game like Galaxy, where the plot is so unabashedly paper-thin that you could probably act it out with sock puppets, the game has to be about the experience – even if you accept that part of that experience is the final boss fight. And yet if the game really is measured in the sliding scale of “percentage beaten” rather than the simple pass/fail metric of reaching the end, then would a person who only achieved 99% of the game’s content be said to have not beaten it?

And to be fair, the content in Galaxy is skippable on a scale that most games would never consider. Even other Nintendo offerings, like Metroid Prime 3 and Zelda: Twilight Princess required you to at least put in the bare minimum amount of effort in every stage to progress to the next one. Sure, you didn’t have to get every last missile expansion or wolf down every last Poe, but it wasn’t as though you could skip entire planets or dungeons, either. But as far as raw content goes, you were still skipping part of the experience. And where Galaxy takes the adventure game and distills it to its most raw concepts, it’s mostly comparable.

Consider sandbox-style games like Grand Theft Auto. I know plenty of people that haven’t beaten all of the Grand Theft Auto III series, some not at 100% and some not at all. Yet they own all three titles. Which is to stay that after actively failing to play all of Vice City, they still anted up for San Andreas. Content upon content, all locked and unbeaten. For that matter, what about a game like Mass Effect – where there can be 20 hours of content or 100 hours, depending on your investment in the game. I know plenty of people who didn’t come close to beating all Mass Effect had to offer, and yet they were excited, almost irrationally so, over the downloadable content for the game.

I suspect I’ll revisit these thoughts in a few weeks when I finally sit down at tackle Assassin’s Creed, which also features a wealth of optional content. But Galaxy is still in its own league not just in terms of how much of it is skippable, but because a lot of that skippable content is extremely good. That may be the difference. Even casual players are going to unlock some of the hidden stars in Galaxy. A number of them practically bludgeon you over the head as you pass through the stage. So it won’t be tedious collection quests or annoying escort missions that players can skip. It will be some of the most challenging and engaging levels the game has to offer. It does create a line where the concept of skipping content is quite different than the concept of warping past it.

And there are probably a few people who think this entire discussion is absurd. That they just want to beat their game so they can catch the game, or go out to a show or, in the case of us addicts, load up their next game. For those players, I wonder, where exactly is the end of the game? I know for myself, I usually start out trying to acquire all of the content before beating the game – and if beating the game with 100% of the content unlocked yields a better ending, I almost follow through. But some games seem to think they can add extra play-hours by not giving you any bloody clue as to where the remaining content is. If the game world takes me an hour just to cross, and I have 99% of the collections and content finished, my desire to spend another week looking for the one little gem (or ghost. . . I’m looking at you Zelda team) that I missed? Not really there.

I guess the answer is that completionist gaming is great – until it pisses me off. More on this topic after Altair and I waste some dudes.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.