J.T.
wat
I managed to get a copy of Super Mario Galaxy 2 on the release day by trading in my old copies of Pokemon Battle Revolution (which no one in the house ever plays nowadays) and Mario Kart Wii (which no one except my little brother's friend wants to play). Spoilers for my first impressions about the game:
While obviously being similar to the first Galaxy, it also has a lot in common with a lot of past Mario games - particularly Super Mario World, and if you consider that a bad thing you can go to hell because Mario World is the best 2D Mario game ever except maybe SMB3. It's nice to see games getting back to their roots. There are plenty of series that could do better by doing the same. hint hint Sonic
Anyway, they decided to ditch the whole Stargazer Observatory thing for the main hub, which means Rosalina's gone (and thus preventing the surge of Rule 34 material that was certain to come out with the new game). The overly depressing storytime sections seem to be gone too. Now you get your own spaceship shaped like Mario's head. It's actually kinda creepy but whatever. When you go to the wheel to control the ship, you enter the map select screen, which you may notice has a striking similarity to the SMB3 and NSMB map screens. Awwright.
The use of Yoshi, which is pretty much the big selling point of Galaxy 2, is kind of like what would happen if SMW had a kid with Super Mario Sunshine, but actually it turned out that SMW had cheated on Sunshine with Galaxy 1. When you want Yoshi to eat something, you point at the enemy you want, and a circle will appear around them. Pressing B will make him eat it. You can eat multiple things at once by highlighting them quickly enough, but the markers disappear after a short time. Like SMW, when you get hurt while riding him, he starts running around like a damn fool and you have to catch him. Unlike SMW, he has the common courtesy to stop and turn when he runs into a cliff, instead of doing the lemming thing on you. Not that it would be a huge problem if he did - there are nests that spawn new Yoshi eggs practically everywhere. He has a bunch of different abilities, judging from the back cover, which are like the suits Mario gets - just going by the back cover, there's Blimp Yoshi (he puffs up like a balloon and floats) and Dash Yoshi (he runs really damn fast). Speaking of Mario's suits, he gets at least two new ones - Rock Mario (gets into a giant rock and rolls over enemies, kind of like what Bowser does in the first Galaxy by the looks of it) and Cloud Mario (creates clouds to step on - I have yet to figure out how this works since I haven't gotten that far).
Please note that I only have 3 stars at the time of writing this, so the rest of the game might be substantially different. I'm hoping for a difficulty spike, because I was really disappointed by the final Bowser battle in the first one - the setup was so epic, but the battle was so easy.
Anyway, they decided to ditch the whole Stargazer Observatory thing for the main hub, which means Rosalina's gone (and thus preventing the surge of Rule 34 material that was certain to come out with the new game). The overly depressing storytime sections seem to be gone too. Now you get your own spaceship shaped like Mario's head. It's actually kinda creepy but whatever. When you go to the wheel to control the ship, you enter the map select screen, which you may notice has a striking similarity to the SMB3 and NSMB map screens. Awwright.
The use of Yoshi, which is pretty much the big selling point of Galaxy 2, is kind of like what would happen if SMW had a kid with Super Mario Sunshine, but actually it turned out that SMW had cheated on Sunshine with Galaxy 1. When you want Yoshi to eat something, you point at the enemy you want, and a circle will appear around them. Pressing B will make him eat it. You can eat multiple things at once by highlighting them quickly enough, but the markers disappear after a short time. Like SMW, when you get hurt while riding him, he starts running around like a damn fool and you have to catch him. Unlike SMW, he has the common courtesy to stop and turn when he runs into a cliff, instead of doing the lemming thing on you. Not that it would be a huge problem if he did - there are nests that spawn new Yoshi eggs practically everywhere. He has a bunch of different abilities, judging from the back cover, which are like the suits Mario gets - just going by the back cover, there's Blimp Yoshi (he puffs up like a balloon and floats) and Dash Yoshi (he runs really damn fast). Speaking of Mario's suits, he gets at least two new ones - Rock Mario (gets into a giant rock and rolls over enemies, kind of like what Bowser does in the first Galaxy by the looks of it) and Cloud Mario (creates clouds to step on - I have yet to figure out how this works since I haven't gotten that far).
Please note that I only have 3 stars at the time of writing this, so the rest of the game might be substantially different. I'm hoping for a difficulty spike, because I was really disappointed by the final Bowser battle in the first one - the setup was so epic, but the battle was so easy.
