OrtizGames

My brother recently acquired Mario Galaxy for Wii (and by acquired I mean my mother has purchased it for him) and I got the opportunity to sit down at his console and give the game a whirl. What I experience was the strangest sensation I’ve had playing a game in a long time. While most of the time I can tell you exactly how I feel while playing something (case in point, I can tell you Final Fantasy XII has me exhausted and jaded beyond belief and yet I play it stubbornly with the intent of seeing the story through all the way) I simply can’t pinpoint what I feel about Super Mario Galaxy.

It’s a pleasant, clean-looking game with graphics so colorful and bright I become somewhat disoriented during cutscenes. It’s got an intuitive control system I didn’t have to read the manual to figure out. Mario can ground-pound. Mario can triple jump. The camera ricochets from insane angle to insane angle, giving me an intense feeling of vertigo which I can only blame on the fact that I simply am not used to walking upside-down. All in all, the game really has no tender flaws or anything that turns me off from it (except, perhaps, Peach’s voice, which made me wonder why Mario would ever dedicate his life to saving her).

But as I’m playing, I come to realize that, while I’m engaged, and while I’m interested, and while I want to pick the controller up again and play the next level right after I write this blog, I can’t for the life of me say that I am having fun.

Of course, fun is relative, but in this instance the entire experience is bewildering. My brother expresses the same confusion. We like to play it, yes. It’s not a bad game, no. We haven’t gotten tired of it or frustrated with it. We haven’t been bored while playing. But we honestly can’t say with sincerity that the game is any fun. We can’t even say it’s not fun. It just… is, in some quasi-existential sort of way.

I will look up some reviews later, when I have time, to see if this reaction is a recurring phenomena, and not simply something that my family alone is suceptible to.

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