Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo Wii & Nintendo Switch Review)

Super Mario Galaxy
Platform: Nintendo Wii, Nintendo Switch
Released November 1, 2007 (Wii) October 2, 2025 (Switch)
Directed by Yoshiaki Koizumi
Developed by Nintendo
Included in Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 or Sold Separately
$59.99 caught a falling star and put it in her locket in the making of this review.

“I’m going to be excited and nostalgic for this any second now. Annnnnnnnnnnny second now.”

Back in 2012, I said that Super Mario Galaxy was one of my ten favorite games ever and that, quote, “It will be special to me forever.” Of course, I answered the question “would I ever play it again” with a firm “no.” Well, wasn’t I just wrong in every way a person can be wrong? I did replay it again over the last couple weeks, and it wasn’t special at all. Oh, I wasn’t bored or anything, either. Mario Galaxy was a lot of fun. But the game I remembered as a milestone never showed up. There were no highlights and honestly I thought the level design was uniformly forgettable. I’ll never forget the gravity, but what they did with it? (shrug) So what happened?

I realized that my brain mostly remembered the gravity and not necessarily the layouts they built around the gravity.

The above screenshot sums up the primary gimmick of Mario Galaxy: gravity is your bitch. You’re not just hopping around platforms, but under them. Screwing with gravity is a time honored tradition in games, but the way Super Mario Galaxy did it felt fresh in 2007. It even still feels kind of fresh in 2026 because it’s tinkered with in pretty much every way it can be. I won’t deny that I experienced a childlike glee in the whole thing that made me overlook that this was basic level design with the twist being simply the angle you’re walking. Like, how many times can you run around a tiny round planet? A lot, apparently.

Even the big final battle against Bowser takes place on a series of tiny round planets and feels nearly identical to previous battles you’ve already done.

But while the levels are just basic platforming levels with a twist in the angle, it never comes across like a facade. Even if it kind of is. Hell, this is even taking into account that sometimes the gravity screws up and makes you run around in a circle. It happened to me a lot, and I died a few times from it (and I wasn’t alone). So it turns out my Wii controller wasn’t on the fritz in 2007.

“Walk across every button” has been done to death. “Walk across every button and, oh yes, the buttons appear to be a vertical wall you’ll bind to when logically you should fall” is the twist.

If the gravity works and aged (mostly) well, why didn’t the game I loved at the age of 18 ever come close to showing up at the age of 37? I just don’t think the level design is what I’m looking for in a platformer anymore. It starts with the fact that Galaxy has one of the worst hub worlds in the franchise. There’s minimal sense of exploration to it, and the layout is so unmemorable that it’s kind of easy to lose track of which main port has which level. There’s forty total levels, and since levels offer a lot less missions and overall content than both Mario 64 and Sunshine, a drop down list for those who don’t give a f*ck about the hub would have been appreciated.

By the way, calling levels “galaxies” is kind of insane given the fact that none of the levels in Mario Galaxy are very big and a few can even be beaten in a minute or two and then offer no other content. Seriously, if it took me two minutes to finish “Boo’s Boneyard” on my first attempt, I’d be surprised.

This isn’t Peach’s castle from Mario 64 or Delfino Plaza from Mario Sunshine, where there’s a joy in the exploration and discovery of new rooms or new nooks and crannies. Rosalina’s Comet Observatory f*cking sucks as a hub world. Nothing is really “hidden” except a couple extra lives. The sense of exploration that was so rewarding in the previous two 3D Mario games? That’s gone, and I mean GONE-gone. And that tracks with the rest of the game.

Not that bite sized chunks of gaming can’t be awesome. You’re reading a review by someone who once had WarioWare Inc. as her favorite video game ever made.

Whereas I feel Mario 64 and Sunshine were about exploration and triggering a sense of vertigo, Mario Galaxy is more like a series of quick, narrow-in-scope bite-sized linear, point-A to point-B segments that are glued together to create the missions, making it feel closer to the 2D games. Actual wide-open levels like you saw in the previous 3D Mario games? That doesn’t really happen here with only a couple small exceptions early in the game.

Most of the time, there’s only one path to take, so your enjoyment will be based on how exciting you find that path. Again, I had fun. Lots of fun. But I look for other things in 3D platform games now. I don’t want a 2D experience in three dimensions. I want to explore.

When the levels are more open, they’re still certainly nowhere near as big as the levels in previous games were. The overwhelming majority of the individual segments are pretty small and funnel you directly to the warp star that shoots you off to the next planet. It’s not like these segments are directly connected. Usually they’re separated in a way that makes them unreachable unless you do the linear activating sequence.

Even when levels look like they might be a little more “open” they’re typically walled-off in a way where there’s not much to explore and there’s strict transition spots between chunks.

As a result, I didn’t enjoy the sense of discovery as much even in limited instances where it was there. Take the first level where you can become Bee Mario. It LOOKS like it’s going to be a Mario 64/Sunshine like-map. It’s not. It’s segmented into three distinct areas that present only a few, if any, chances to go off the beaten path and f*ck around.

And one of the only times you can, what’s hidden? A star? A hidden level? Nope, just a pipe with a cube-maze that pays off star bits. Once you realize how many of these things they hid in the game, they start becoming kind of downer every time you find one.

The game just needed more stuff to collect, in my opinion.

So despite the crazy physics, there’s something about the levels that feels too limiting and rigid. You feel like you’re being queued through the experience in a way you never felt in Mario 64 or Sunshine.  That probably makes it sound like I hated the experience. Just so I’m clear, I actually did have a lot of fun replaying Mario Galaxy. It’s seriously a very fun game with a few nice set pieces and bosses. But nothing about my 2026 experience made me wonder if I was playing one of the ten best games I’ll ever play.

Hell, there’s bosses that feel like they took direct inspiration from Mario Clash. Galaxy feels like it pays tribute to every Mario game EXCEPT 64 and Sunshine.

While I can’t believe I’m saying this, the truth is I had a lot more fun replaying Sunshine. For all the problems of that game, I felt it offered a much bigger variety of stuff to do. I might even think Mario 64 is better just on variety alone. Mario Galaxy is like all the boilerplate Mario challenges, only wrapped around a cylinder or sphere. Once you get over the idea that you’ll do some areas upside-down and some areas vertically and some will require a full circumference of a sphere, the actual meat and potatoes of the game is old school 2D.

How basic are we talking? I thought the ice levels were the best in the game. THE ICE LEVELS! That never happens!

I guess the structure of the game didn’t excite me as much as it once did. Finding an alternate transport star off the path sometimes felt like a downer because I didn’t want to go through the process of playing the level again at all. Some levels, really glorified side-levels, only have one or maybe two stars total. Primary levels only have three main stars, aka the missions. That’s it. Three. There’s also “prankster comet” levels that add extra challenges, but they’re mega-sized pains in the ass since you can’t just activate them willy-nilly. The comet has to be orbiting that “galaxy.” A dumb idea in 2007 that aged badly. So did the life count. Every time you turn off the game, you lose your entire stockpile of lives.

Spring Mario is the worst power-up in the history of the franchise. In an already gimmicky game, it’s SO gimmicky. It feels like an alternate bonus challenge and not something that’s a primary mechanic for a level.

In fairness, I didn’t exactly just play Mario Galaxy in optimal conditions. I’ve been unwell for a couple weeks and played Mario Galaxy two or three stars at a time, then napped, then played some more. So maybe that’s why nothing really stood out. Except, how I played should have worked for the game. It didn’t, and I’m hard pressed to remember any non-boss fight that made me sit up and think “that was actually incredible.” The vibe is incredible. But what it does with the vibe? Not so much.

Okay, I didn’t really like the one-off or two-off gimmicky levels like “blow the bubbles through the maze” as seen here. I would have rather had a large platforming maze to find my way through.

The game is just always really, really good but without any true highlights. The power-ups kind of suck. Bee Mario is underwhelming. Spring Mario sucks. Fire Mario and Ice Mario wear out too quickly and are too limited in usage. Boo Mario sees even less usage than either flower does. This type of “nothing sticks around long enough to bore” rapid-fire style platformer works for 2D Mario games. Both Super Mario 3 and Super Mario Wonder utilized it to great success. Mario Galaxy’s levels are technically bigger, but despite the space setting, they never felt large to me. I just never really thought the level themes or set-pieces were all that amazing.

It doesn’t help that Rosalina looks almost identical to Peach in her character model AND she’s a bore. Like, the story is that she laughed all the stars into existence. So let me get this straight: this emotionally vacant, dead-behind-the-eyes husk of a woman allegedly went into a laughing seizure and created the cosmos. Bullsh*t. I don’t believe this person has ever laughed once in their entire existence. I assume it’s a coping mechanism to make up for being abandoned by her parents, who presumably left her for dead, or possibly mistook her for being actually dead. I mean, how would you tell with her?

If it isn’t the bite-sized chunks and lack of exploration, I think Mario Galaxy’s standing plummeted with me based on how generic so much of the design is. It’s not just that this game’s princess is a different character who looks nearly identical to the already established princess, but like, for whatever reason this Mario feels like it’s one of the least experimental or bold in the franchise. As if the designers burned through all their courage with the gravity and played it safe from there. Imagine if Mario 64 had that attitude with 3D. Who knows where we would be?

Meanwhile, the new characters besides Rosalina look like they could be from any platform game BUT a Mario game. Look at three of the new bosses pictured above. All three are really fun boss fights, don’t get me wrong, but something about their design makes them feel detached from the Mario franchise, and not in a good way. They don’t feel like new Mario characters. They feel like generic cartoony bosses. The one in the middle looks like what the last boss would look like in a video game based on the board game Fireball Island, for God’s sake, and the other two could be Spyro or Banjo bosses for all I know. Galaxy somehow feels like every Mario game, and yet the least Mario-like game in the series.

Even the tacked-on Wii pointer with the starbits I found to be not as fun or useful as I remembered it. I only really used it in top down sections, like the annoying race against the Boo, where I used the pointer to get rid of the bombs that I was just trying to plow through like a moron. This is probably the star that took me the most attempts to get.

I finished with 76 stars and I didn’t even come close to the 240 total in the game, and I’m fine with that, as honestly I’m ready to be done with Galaxy and jump to Mario 3D World or Super Mario Odyssey. The magic from my youth was gone, and I really only kept playing long enough to beat Bowser so I could do this review. Maybe Galaxy 2 will be where I find the more bold design. In 2012, I paired 2 with 1, and that’s how it’s sold now. But I need a break from weird gravity before doing that one. I guess the best thing I could say about Mario Galaxy is that, besides the comets or Spring Mario, there’s no low points. (checks notes) Christ, there’s a lot of comets though, isn’t there? Okay, so that’s not actually the complement I thought it was. What I’m trying to say is I had a LOT of fun, and yet, it was nowhere near as much as I thought I would. Now I know why they made Galaxy the sequel to the movie, because that’s what watching it was like.
Verdict: YES!