Plumber of Love: The Super Mario Galaxy 2 Review

TITLE: Super Mario Galaxy 2

DEVELOPER/PUBLISHER/PLATFORMS: Nintendo/Wii

FUN FACT: The first Super Mario Galaxy sold 8.8 million copies. That's....well, that's an assload of galaxies the original Jumpman ground-pounded his way through.

WHY COMPLEX IS CO-SIGNING IT: Because there's no Nintendo party like a first-party developer party. The Wii's greatest triumphs are when Ninty itself is in charge—see 2007's Super Mario Galaxy and 2006's Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess if you need proof of that. Both of the Japanese company's iconic franchises are getting their next installments this year, and Mario happened to get the jump on Link this time around. The galaxies may be different, but the mustachioed one is the same, and the game is as rapturously fun as the original. Just a huge technicolor not-broke-so-fuck-fixing-it Big Gulp of awesome.

Okay, so you're this plumber named Mario, and your eternal platonic love, the Princess, has been kidnapped by a spiked-tortoisey-firebreathing Koopa named Bowser. You sure none of this sounds familiar yet? This time around, Bowser's taken the princess—who, seriously, private security force, anyone?—so far away that Mario has to commandeer a Luma-run ship to search the universe for her. The ship, a creepy flyable Mario head that takes the place of the original SMG's Comet Observatory, has its charm but at times lacks the yay-we're-running-crazy-in-a-museum feeling of the Observatory. That being said, it's a perfectly workable platform for Mario to regroup, harvest extra lives when need be, and comb the galaxies for his beloved. In addition to the usual mailman Toad, the faceship also serves as home to a money-laundering Toad: as you accumulate reserves of Star Bits during your travels, you can deposit them with him, and he'll either distribute them to other players' save files on your copy of the game, or just hold your deposits until they accrue tiny amounts of interest very slowly. We're not really sure why this is a great idea; maybe Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to teach kids the value of investing in CDs? Japan's fiscal conservatism is YOUR superfluous gaming innovation!

The Marioverse, for the most part, has already been fully defined. You've got your pastoral worlds, your space worlds, your lava, your water, your ice, your beach, your flipswitches, etc. If it wasn't around in the pre-3D days, than Mario 64 and SMG brought it into being. So the fact that this one manages to bring something new to the table at all is a testament to the power of Nintendo's institutional imagination. This time around, the power-ups—along with the usual suspects like the bee suit, the, and the sometimes-infuriating spring suit—include a drill suit that allows Mario to drill through small surfaces (or planets!) and come out the other side, a cloud suit that lets him form floating cloud platforms, and a rock suit that lets him ball up and roll through obstacles. Oh, and Yoshi's here! Which isn't innovative per se, but at least gives you a companion who can eat pretty much anything, word to Joey Chestnut (including a chili pepper that drives him up walls).

No, seriously. Well, maybe "multiplayer" is overstating it a bit—it's the Wii, after all, birthplace of the hopelessly byzantine "friend codes"—but this time around "co-op play" isn't a total farce. Just like the original SMG, it's confined to a second player waving a lone Wiimote, but now the 2P can pick up coins, stun enemies, freeze Chompers, even grab 1-ups that are dangling tantalizingly near a precipice. It's actually a...what's the phrase...*scans internal Nintendo documents*...no...*looks at Xbox 360 games*...ENJOYABLE TWO-PLAYER EXPERIENCE!

Going to awe-inspiring environments that invoke childlike glee is awesome. It almost never gets old. That being said, though, the boss levels are a hair's breadth away from feeling rote. Sure, it's new bosses—this dragon guy, or the robot who shoots Bullet Bills at you—but the mechanic doesn't change. 1) Find weakness, 2) Exploit twice, 3) Dodge accelerated attack, 4) Deliver third fatal blow. We realize that's the time-tested mechanic, but with the few moving parts the Mario games have, for one of them to begin to grate is a bad sign. MOAR BOSSEZ PLEASE.

You're 9 years old. So are we. And we have been, all of us, ever since we first saw World 1-1 all those years ago. That first question mark block, that first green turtle shell. No matter how many high-def FPSes we've powered through, how many headshots we've racked up on Xbox Live, no matter how much level-grinding we've done in RPGs or how many zombies and Horde we've fended off, we will never be as enthralled with a video game like we are when we're Mario. It's been like this for more than 20 years, and it's never going to change—at least we hope so. Thankfully, as long Nintendo keeps accessing its own inner 9-year-old like it has with Super Mario Galaxy 2, that won't be something we have to cope with.