“A Traditional Festival,” or, a Shameless Gift of Nostalgia: Super Mario Odyssey
I was born eight years before the first Mario game was released. Though technically this is incorrect because the first “Mario” game was not actually a Super Mario game because its title was Donkey Kong, and the protagonist of that story was a carpenter named, kid you not, “Jumpman.”
Listen, anyone reading this who was born before the year 2000, videogames were new and they didn’t have much in the way of stories.
Asteroids was about shooting asteroids.
Pac-Man was about eating.
Galaga was about shooting bugs.
Libble Rabble was about…well, I’m not sure just yet, but stay tuned because I’ve been thinking about that last one[LINK].
What’s most important about Donkey Kong was that it gave the videogame industry new energy, and, more importantly, gave the entertainment company Nintendo Ltd.a hit from which to build more capital that would in turn lead to the Famicom Console in Japan and the Nintendo Entertainment System(NES) in the North American market. Shigeru Miyamoto, the industrial designer and artist turned videogame maestro was behind the game and would soon enough take a leading role in the company’s development of various intellectual properties with hits to his name such as Super Mario Bros, The Legend of Zelda, and StarFox. Donkey Kong was a financial, critical, and popular success in no small part because the game was, above all things, fun to play.
But, before this continues I have to remind myself that this is supposed to be an essay about a single level in Super Mario Odyssey and not Donkey Kong. Though the latter game is important for the topic on hand.
Super Mario Odyssey was the flagship title for the Nintendo Switch console and its design philosophy revealed where Nintendo was going in terms of game design, general aesthetic, and its awareness of the customer base it was selling videogames to. The narrative of the game is typical Super Mario fodder: Bowser has kidnapped Princess Peach (again) and plans to marry her regardless of what she thinks or says. Mario chases after Bowser’s giant flying ship but is impeded by four extravagantly dressed rabbits called Broodals who are the latest add-ons to Bowser’s ever growing army of wackos. Mario is thrown off the ship and lands in the “Cap Kingdom” where he meets one of the “Bonneters'” named Cappy whose sister was also kidnapped by Bowser and is being used as Peach’s crown for the wedding. If there was any justice to the world we would get a shot of Cappy and Mario making an iconic Predator handshake meme, but there isn’t so we instead get a shot of Cappy becoming Mario’s hat. Cappy shows Mario that throwing him at enemies allows Mario to take over their body or else destroy them completely, and using this power Cappy leads Mario to a ruined ship named the Odyssey which will transport them world-to-world as they follow Bowser and try to stop the wedding.
In terms of content and gameplay Super Mario Odyssey isn’t terribly revolutionary, and I wanna be clear: that ain’t a bad thing.
Too often I’ve read or watched critics of Super Mario games arguing that the gameplay isn’t “new” enough for their liking, and what this word “new” means is honestly anyone’s guess. I speculate what’s being expressed is a lizard-brain craving for an endorphin rush that satisfies nostalgia while also creating something that equals the emotional and intellectual impact of a previous game. Some players simply want every Super Mario videogame to be the last Super Mario videogame, or at the least the first Super Mario videogame they ever played.
I’m a different sort, I guess, because I’ve played just about every Super Mario videogame, and I love Super Mario Odyssey.
It's a solid jam dude.
But, to quote the novelist and philosopher Albert Camus, “Hater’s gonna hate I suppose.”
Nostalgia is at the heart of Super Mario Odyssey however because while the game was released to a new generation on a new console, the developers elected to design sections of levels in which players take Mario down a green pipe and instantly discover Mario has transformed back into the original 2D side scrolling icon he was 30 years ago. These sections could have just been a superficial throwback, but often they are actually enjoyable and challenging platform mini-games within levels that allow a shift in the dramatic presentation from the rest of the game.
The shift of 3D to 2D isn’t anything new to Nintendo’s roster of games. Several years before the Switch became the rockstar darling of non-cell-phone mobile gaming, there was the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo 3Ds. These handheld consoles were the next step for the Gameboy systems, and one of the games for these consoles provides an excellent insight to Super Mario Odyssey’s aesthetic trajectory. Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds included a mechanic that allowed Link to become 2-dimensional to navigate around obstacles. This was also part of the main narrative, but I haven’t played the game in full yet to be able to properly discuss that at this time.
It’s a Legend of Zelda videogame, so trust me, I’m almost certainly going to write about it.
Stay tuned.
What’s important is that Nintendo had already used 2D scrolling in 3D games to commercial and critical success.
With Super Mario Odyssey, Nintendo decided to incorporate design and nostalgia to beautiful effect, and nowhere in the game does this shine brighter than the mission, “A Traditional Festival!”
Just about every Super Mario videogame is designed as an obstacle course and/or a playground, and when Mario and Cappy arrive at New Donk City this is no exception. Up to this point the two have experienced a water world, a jungle paradise, and a desert level, all of which is in-keeping with the tradition of a Super Mario Bros. game. New Donk City is a mini-metropolis with sky-scrapers, public parks, taxis, cross-walks, back-alleys, and a population of borderline plagiarized SIMS characters all wearing gray and black suits. Not going to lie, the sight of Mario standing amongst these realistic looking humans was a tad uncanny and remains so even after multiple playthroughs. But walking about Mario continues his search for Moons and eventually stumbles across a side-quest wherein one of the Mayor’s assistants asks Mario if he could track down the musicians for the yearly festival.
This mission involves exploring New Donk City, finding each of the four musicians, and asking them to meet at City hall where they will then be found jamming to a crowd of suited people.
If this quest sounds familiar it’s probably because you play videogames, or at least have played Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The latter title includes a side-quest where Link must find the members of a four-piece band and have them assemble outside the closed flower-buds of the Great Fairies who provide Link with upgrades to his armor and outfits. Like Super Mario Odyssey the quest involves exploration and puzzle-solving in order to find and convince the musicians to return to the band and make music. While I was working on this essay I found an article published on the website/magazine Unwinnable that was published 13 March 2023, and titled Getting the Band Back Together: Players Orchestrating Worlds. Written by Johnathen Fenn, the article observes several examples of videogames that include the narrative of reunited musicians, and in one paragraph he discusses Super Mario Odyssey. He writes:
While all this narrative weight is doubtless effective, there’s a lot to be said for using similar approaches as a way to simply relish the joy of good music while involving the player in the process of its creation. The climactic set-piece of Mario Odyssey’s New Donk City level requires Mario to traverse the rooftops and alleyways of the city to find members of Pauline’s jazz band, their individual instruments playing lonely melodies across the level’s different districts. Upon finding the whole band, this quest culminates in a marvelously over-the-top festival, involving nostalgia-heavy 2D platforming sections across the cityscape, all soundtracked by the newly-assembled band playing the game’s main theme, “Jump Up Superstar”
Fenn is keen to point out that the aesthetic goal and effect of the festival is joy.
And with that I should now address the festival itself.
Once the musicians have been collected together Mario is given the option of starting the Festival. Once I accept the mission, a cut-scene begins to play with the mayor leading the Jazz band, and the mayor is, as Fenn noted in the previous quote, a woman named Pauline. And if the reader remembers the start of this essay that name is important because Pauline was the woman Mario was trying to save in the original Donkey Kong game. Fireworks begin to fill the sky as Pauline leads the band in a song(while wearing a flattering red dress(and a hat that gives her Carmine San-Diego vibes)), and every rooftop is filled with citizens dressed in their suits hopping up and down to the rhythm. Mario appears on a rooftop nearby, with a green warp-pipe only a few steps away. And once I step into it the 2D/3D scrolling begins.
It doesn’t take long for me to notice that the platforms I’m walking across are red steel beams with rolling barrels regularly coming towards me. All at once the name New Donk City begins to assume a pressing significance as I move Mario’s 2D sprite through these platforms, and when I eventually see Donkey Kong at the end of the level chucking barrels at me the circle is complete.
As of this writing I’m 35 years old, and I’ve been playing Super Mario videogames as long as I’ve been able to hold a gamepad in my hands. I’m also aware, as I write this sentence, how nostalgia has been employed by entertainment companies to grab every last dollar I have. Just Googling the phrase “nostalgia in entertainment” results in 86,500,000 results and the first dozen entries are a series of articles and blog-posts by writers lamenting or expressing concern for how an influx of targeted nostalgia in media (mostly films) will have long term consequences for cultural development.
I’ll leave my reader to dig into this mountain of commentary because, after reading through many of these essays and blog-posts I began to ask a question.
Is the mission “A Traditional Festival” empty nostalgia?
All that I can offer as an answer is: I don’t believe it is.
Jumping over burning barrels of oil, and collecting coin after coin as I navigate the 3D maze of platforms is fun, and part of the joy is definitely because of the nostalgia. I won’t deny playing this sequence was a lovely throwback to spending most of my childhood hours playing Super Mario AllStars on my parents Super Nintendo Entertainment System(SNES). The familiar Mario sprite was an icon of my formative years, more so than any other other figure in popular culture than I remember. The games provided me hours of comfort and entertainment, and so it would be ridiculous to argue that I would have no emotional attachment to it.
But, in the same breath, I would argue that I don’t play Super Mario Odyssey to remember my childhood. I play it because it’s a fun videogame that inspires joy.
Also my childhood sucked.
Why would I want to remember that malarkey?
Moving Mario through the 3D world of New Donk City inspires joy not because it’s just a nostalgic throwback to the early days of the franchise. Super Mario Odyssey is a fun videogame because it incorporates controls and mechanics that make moving Mario enjoyable and allows creative ways to explore the various kingdoms and worlds Mario will visit. The camera angles that follow his character, the sound designs that trigger when picking up coins, hopping on enemies, throwing Cappy onto some new npc, and the music that’s unique to every level is energetic and makes me engage more and more with the visual aesthetic. Every world is brimming with secrets and puzzles that lead me further and further into the game. And the 2D/3D scrolling diversifies the platforming so that the game never becomes stale.
Just getting to the mission of A Traditional Festival is rewarding because it has involved so much opportunity for play. So much so that the Festival feels like a climax that is celebrating me the player rather than Nintendo.
That distinction is everything.
While there have been numerous videogame production companies that celebrate themselves through their games, Nintendo’s rhetorical tactic has been to inspire the player. And I should be clear, Nintendo is a corporation which means their ultimate goal is profit. I am not trying to paint Nintendo as a benevolent organization with no selfish interests. Anyone who emulates videogames knows full well the ruthlessness that is Nintendo’s legal department. What can’t be denied is that playing A Traditional Festival creates a perception in the player that they are a part of something larger and older than themselves. Even if players never played Super Mario on a NES, SNES, Nintendo 64 or even the original arcade cabinet, they will come away from the mission with a sense of joy because they’ve experienced a game that was designed with a knowledge of where the technology began and where it is going.
Donkey Kong figuratively and literally established a platform that would allow Mario, and players, a new ground to approach entertainment software design. By the time Super Mario Odyssey hit the market it was clear that players and designers were still imagining possibilities for the future, and having a lot of fun while doing so.
By the end of the mission I had Mario stand beside Pauline and dance for a few minutes before grabbing the Multi-Moon. Part of this was because Mario looked great(and ridiculously cute) wearing his black suit and a sombrero, but the other reason was because I wasn't ready for the fun to end.
There is a joy in knowing however that even when this party ends, there will be another one waiting for me to get started.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
2.17.2024
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