Recently I’ve been playing Mario Odyssey with my son. That means that I have to wait for us both to have time to continue playing. In between I’m playing other games, but I wanted to play more Mario also. Therefore I remembered that I’d never finished Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U. I always thought it was a bit of a weird game. It’s not fully 3D, like Mario Galaxy or Mario 64 and not 2D either. It falls somewhere in between. For me, that didn’t work very well. I always thought it to be a bit of a weird game. But now that I’m playing it again, I can certainly see that it has its merits.

One thing i think it does better than Odyssey is gatekeeping. I already had to turn back once because I needed a minimum number of stars to progress and now that I have reached to final level, I need to do that again. Of course, it feels like bit of an annoyance, because you want to progress and see what’s next. But it actually helps to enjoy the game more, because you’re forced to see more of what the game has to offer.
In Odyssey there are simply too many moons (why not stars?) that are too easy to get. Every once in a while you spot a difficult to reach one and then you are actually excited. I wish there were more of those moments.
And I know that some people will say that there’s so much more to do in Odyssey, but for me that’s not enough. I’m not a completionist and when there’s no need for me to get all the stars (sorry “moons”) in a level, than I’m not going to bother. I already did that when I was young, when I had almost no other games lying around.

So, for now I need to go back and enjoy/grind some more in 3D World. That probably means that we’ll finish Odyssey before that. But there we’ll probably also need to go back a little bit, because my Joy-Cons won’t connect to my Switch 2 and I’ll probably need to run an upgrade or something bothersome. And we left of right at the second phase of the final battle. We’ll probably need to do the first part all over again. Groan!