The Super Mario Galaxy games are widely considered to be among the crown jewels of 3D Mario platforming. Fans may differ on which Galaxy game is better or if Odyssey is the new apex of the form, but the fact that they’re even in the conversation makes them some of the best Nintendo games of the last two decades. That makes it all the more strange that it has consistently been so difficult to play them. You could play on Wii or Wii U, but otherwise the only way to play Galaxy on modern hardware was with the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection, a bizarrely time-limited collection that was still missing Galaxy 2. So the remastered Galaxy and Galaxy 2 on Switch and Switch 2 is a treat simply for making these great games available and easy to access–but a handful of improvements make them better than ever.
If you already own the All-Stars release, the remastered version of Galaxy is largely the same, but the new remaster-package version does look noticeably better. It’s sharper and the UI elements have been moved ever-so-slightly toward the edges to give you more screen real estate. A new Assist Mode makes the game a bit easier, with more generous lives and the ability to bounce back onto terra firma if you fall off an edge–which is not uncommon in the Galaxy games, since they’re centered around small planetoids. Menus have also mostly been revised to allow button-based selection, so you don’t need to point the cursor at the screen to proceed to a stage or respond to a dialogue prompt.
The cursor functionality is still present, however, for picking up star bits, the little confection-colored pieces that pop up in Galaxy games and largely substitute for coins, which are made more rare than usual. You’ll still need to wave the cursor over the screen to grab star bits, or have a second player do it for you, and that element of the Galaxy games has maybe aged the most poorly. I wished there were some way to turn on auto-gathering, maybe at a trade-off of not accurately collecting 100% of the ones that appear, just so I wouldn’t have to mess with the cursor at all.
The Joy-Cons work just like the Wii Remote, while the Pro Controller option lets you tap the R button to recenter the cursor and then uses motion controls to calibrate from there, even if it’s not facing toward the screen. In handheld mode, it uses the touch functionality to manage cursor functionality. The Joy-Cons work the best, as you might expect, but they all work at least well enough. And you can press a button to do the spin maneuver that was mapped to a quick wrist-flick in the original release, as you could in the All-Stars release.
Those little touches are subtle–these are remasters, not remakes, after all–but they all add up to help the games themselves shine. Galaxy and Galaxy 2 were both excellent games, exploring a wealth of ideas in quick succession. The core gameplay concept–Mario traveling to relatively small planetoids with their own centralized gravity, means that this is Mario platforming that plays like improv sketches. The stage design throws out ideas so quickly that you’re never doing anything for more than a few minutes at a time. One moment you may be puzzling out how to burrow straight through a planet to reach a platform on the other side, and the next you’re floating from star node to star node, wall-jumping past a tricky platforming section, or battling a space dragon. There’s a wild, rapid-fire inventiveness to these games that we haven’t seen in 3D Mario before or since.
That said, this approach does come with a shift in perspective that can be tricky. Instead of viewing Mario from the side as in the classic 2D games, or even from behind the back like in Mario 64, Sunshine, or Odyssey, the two Galaxy games (and especially the first) often have you viewing Mario from above, or sometimes at a slight offset. That can sometimes be awkward, and leads to slight confusion when you don’t run the direction you meant to. It doesn’t happen too often, but it definitely does make these games feel different than the others. Galaxy 2 assuaged this by largely centering itself around larger planetoid structures. They’re still very different from one another, but there are more traditional stage designs and fewer tiny pill-shaped planets in the second game.
Galaxy 2 often feels like a honed and sharpened version of the original concept. While the first game focused heavily on the introduction of Rosalina and her story, centered around her Comet Observatory, Galaxy 2 is much more tightly focused. There’s a more straightforward map structure, and your hub ship is less sprawling. It feels as if Nintendo wanted to put all of its resources into the level design itself, which makes it the stronger of the two in most ways, even if its story is a little lacking compared to the first. It also has the better power-ups–Cloud Mario, who can create a limited number of temporary platforms, is an all-timer of a Mario concept, and it’s a shame we never saw it used again. For better and worse, though, it also makes the cursor much more necessary, not just for collecting star bits but for core platforming functionality like grabbing enemies and objects with Yoshi’s tongue. If you just want to kick back without worrying about the cursor, that simply won’t be an option for large swaths of Galaxy 2.
The Super Mario Galaxy games were widely hailed as some of the best Mario games of all time. As a pair, they complement each other. Super Mario Galaxy is the rapid-fire, “new idea every minute” reinvention that brought us Mushroom Kingdom mainstays like Rosalina and the Lumas, while Galaxy 2 is the all-killer, no-filler refinement that stretches its concepts as far as they can go. Taken together, they represent an important part of Mario history, and they just hold up as some of the best the series has to offer.
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