Super Mario Sunshine (Nintendo GameCube on Switch 2 Review)
September 3, 2026 Leave a comment
Super Mario Sunshine
Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Released on July 19, 2002 (JPN) August 26, 2002 (US)
Directed by Yoshiaki Koizumi & Kenta Usui
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack EXCLUSIVELY on Switch 2
This type of thing is the good stuff, in a game that’s overstuffed with plenty of bad stuff.
Believe it or not, Super Mario Sunshine was my first day one console Mario game. Well, my first mainline Mario game that wasn’t part of the Mario Advance series. That means, even though I became a full-time gamer at the age of 9, I didn’t get my first day one Mario game until right after I turned 13, and it’s the Mario game that most people would probably call “the weird one.” Despite being promised for Switch Online around the Switch 2 launch, it took a while for Mario Sunshine to arrive, but I finally replayed for the first time in nearly a quarter-century (well, I did start a game in Mario 3-D Collection but didn’t keep playing long), and had a lot of fun. And also nearly threw my controller about two dozen times, give or take.
You certainly fight too many of these sludge plants early on, and it gets old fast.
The funny part is, even I remembered Sunshine as the Mario game where you had to spray gunk off various playfields and walls, but the reality of the game doesn’t quite match that. The overwhelming majority of Mario Sunshine isn’t about cleaning up levels. Oh, those are there, and there’s a learning curve to using the sprayer, but most of the game is an exploration-focused platformer. There’s seven primary levels, each of which has eight chapters that end with you nabbing a star or “Shine.”
“Shine, come back!”
Despite being only the second 3D Mario game and the direct sequel to Mario 64, Sunshine is a massive improvement over that game, at least mechanically. The camera is a LOT better, among other things. In fact, the camera works so well 95% of the time that the 5% of the time it completely sh*ts the bed and simply does not work, it’ll have you inventing brand new swears.
“YA GROGFROCK’N WHORE!”
Thankfully the controls were adjusted to make the game work on the Switch. On the original GameCube, you had to lightly press one of the shoulder buttons to move and squirt. BUT, on Switch, they mapped “run and squirt” to its own button. So if you were worried about winning the battles against Shadow Mario, hey, all you have to worry about is how tedious, repetitive, and boring those segments are.
Every 7th chapter (out of eight) in each of the seven levels is entirely based around chasing and squirting Shadow Mario, along with another pair of “chase and squirt” missions in the game’s hub world, and they ALL suck. Just the most samey, dull mission. Sunshine feels like the Mario game where the people in charge were told “no” the least because when it’s bad, it’s really bad.
For the most part, the water pack named FLUDD is a platforming tool that allows you to hover and, eventually, blast high into the air. The “rocket nozzle” feels like a big deal when you locate it in most levels, as it opens up (and often quickens) exploration.There’s also a “turbo nozzle” that I used less than a handful of times and honestly they could have removed it from the game and lost nothing. Meanwhile, the primary starting nozzle, the hover nozzle, is just about the most genius and intuitive platforming enhancement in 3D gaming. It was fun and intuitive to use in 2002, and it holds up in 2026.
For all the crap the water pack gets, I had basically no adjustment period for using it to hop around. It was like the last twenty-four years never happened. I wish that was the case since I enjoyed being 13 a lot more than I enjoyed being 37.
Unlike my experience replaying Zelda: Wind Waker, where my brain deleted the majority of things I disliked about the game in the decades since I first played it, I remembered everything that I hated about Mario Sunshine, specifically the maddening challenge of some of the missions. Each level has eight primary chapters, though you only need to beat the first seven on each to face off with Bowser. Even with modern emulation tomfoolery that Switch 2 includes, IE save states, the challenge was still insane. So insane that I decided it wasn’t worth the effort to go for a 100%. I finished the game with 89 Shines 90 shines and that’s fine by me.
I remember HATING the red coin challenges as a child, but this go around, they were almost certainly a highlight every time they showed up. Well, except when they’re bonus missions, where I found the time limits too strict. Attempting the first one was such a miserable experience that I immediately decided to skip all of them.
I think it’s safe to say they went a little overboard with some aspects of Sunshine. There’s far too many timing based challenges where I wonder who exactly play tested the thing. The worst chapter was one where you have to ride a Yoshi and squirt Cheep-Cheeps with fruit juice because it turns them into platforms. I assure you that I didn’t have a stroke and just type out gibberish there. That’s literally what you do, but the platforms you create aren’t on set paths. They are, however, moving platforms. EVEN USING SAVE STATES, I think it took me an hour to finish the chapter, and the entire time I was thinking “they intended people to start this mission over from the beginning if they screwed up even one jump?! Are they sadists?” The answer is, yes, they might actually be sadists.
I breathed out a sigh of relief when it was over, though I just barely made it before the Yoshi vanished.
That’s the thing that bothered me about Sunshine: the game’s hub world and the seven primary levels are all well constructed and lend themselves well to exploration, but there’s so many BORING chapters where the boredom is based almost entirely on bloated difficulty. Back in 2002, a single mistimed jump in the Yoshi sequence would have you starting over, which means climbing out of the water, returning to the dock, retrieving the fruit to wake the Yoshi from its egg and beginning the massive journey to the star all over. It’s a long way to the goal and the timing gets more and more fickle as you go along. F*ck that. Seriously, WHAT THE F*CK?! WHO TESTED THIS?!
And on top of all that, Yoshi has a time limit, limited ammo, and the platforms you make move, so it’s not like you can pace yourself.
When time limits are involved, Mario Sunshine tends to suck. It’s not universal, but it’s close enough. Personally, I think Mario Sunshine is at its best when it’s you, the water pack, a whole lot of climbing and looking for things. Chapters based around making you explore high into the sky are exhilarating. The game sets off an even more satisfying sense of vertigo than something like Shadow of the Colossus. It’s an incredible experience when it’s based around the sky.
Yes, more of this. (taps wrists) Put it in my veins.
These segments work out so well that I’m left completely astonished that the people who created them didn’t recognize when something was f*cking boring, like chasing Shadow Mario down for the eighth time or having to roll a watermelon without touching a single tree or one of the two billion enemies between the start and the goal. I’m always kind of baffled when good games become boring, but it’s especially jarring in Sunshine because they seem to have grasped that the vertigo was the game’s bread and butter. MOST of the game builds around this idea.
Sometimes the blue coins are fun to nab, especially when, again, they’re built around vertical exploration. Blue coins like this one are a hoot. Blue coins where you have ten seconds to cross a continent and the camera f*cks up so badly that you’re not even sure where it’s at? Not so much.
And those segments work so well that, when you move away from them, the game immediately suffers. It’s not just the primary levels, either. Of course, there’s the segments where you lose the water pack. Every chapter has one or two such segments, which play a remix of the original NES Super Mario theme to let you know these are the “pure” platforming parts of the game. Sometimes they involve spinning platforms. Sometimes they involve a lot of wall jumping. Hell, one is shaped like a giant Pachinko machine.
Usually the “pure platforming” stuff still has some kind of gimmick. Like this entire segment is fashioned like a slide and is probably one of the easier ones.
Personally, I thought these got really old, really fast. I didn’t care so much about losing the FLUDD. It was the fact that the sense of exploration was off the table, as these are (mostly) straight forward “go from point A to point B” moments. Mario Sunshine is so much better than Mario 64 when it focuses on looking around. I sincerely enjoyed looking for the blue coins (you can cash in ten of them for a Shine), and hell, I even enjoyed gathering 100 normal coins for a bonus star. Okay, sussing out which chapter is the one to go for 100 is annoying (some have more coins than others), so I didn’t do it for every level. But it’s not a deal breaker. What is nearly a deal breaker is the fact that grabbing the 100 coin star ends the level and sends you back to the hub world, so you can’t really do anything else. Why’d they design it like that? It makes no sense.
Usually the 100 coin Shine is then placed on the other side of the globe from you. You know, it wouldn’t have killed them to just hand you it.
I don’t think it’s just the FLUDD and the toxic waste that makes Mario Sunshine the weird one. Sunshine is haphazardly paced and lacks memorable bosses. My brain had completely deleted memories of the giant Wiggler, the manta-ray that divides into smaller ones, or the King Boo that you defeat by feeding it peppers. Actually, the only boss that I did remember from 2002, the giant Blooper, is repeated two more times when the original fight would have been enough. So really, even the good bosses are run into the ground. And hell, even the final encounter with Bowser (set in a giant hot tub) feels like it happens out of nowhere and is completely forgettable.
And I beat it on my first attempt too, so all the save states I laid down with the intent to cheat were a waste of time.
Actually, the whole ending sequence made me wonder if they had no clue how to end it in a satisfying way, so they just didn’t bother and phoned it in. After you defeat the final Shadow Mario chapter, the hub world floods and you follow Shadow Mario into a volcano that’s a relatively short final level. Some of the chapters where FLUDD is taken from you are longer than Sunshine’s entire ending sequence. When I say I was startled that the game was wrapping up, I mean it. The entire finale takes place in a long corridor with a few instakill spikes and fire traps and then an extended boat sequence where colliding with any rock is an instakill. And after that, you get the rocket nozzle and launch yourself up a handful of cloud platforms that have no enemies or other obstacles, and then you reach the final boss. Talk about going out on a whimper.
The kicker? It’s a BORING final level, especially compared to the excellent Bowser stages in Mario 64.
Having just spent a few days with Mario Sunshine, I get why it’s not among the most popular Mario games. Even though it was the #3 best-selling GameCube release (behind only Smash Bros. Melee and Mario Kart: Double Dash), a lot of people didn’t like the FLUDD, and I’m not really going to argue passionately that they’re wrong. I liked the hover aspect and the rocket, but the sludge cleaning and the combat? Well, I could do without, because it’s completely lacking in elegance. Sometimes, the combat with the FLUDD feels like it barely works at all.
Even the first big boss (and its rematch, seen here), there’s an inelegance to the combat. It doesn’t really feel like I’m drowning it with water. It feels like I’m hitting a solid target and the boss is growing fatter, but the two things feel disconnected. I just didn’t “buy it.”
I’ll also credit much of the dislike to the settings. Even though levels have gimmicks (IE one has a theme park, another a hotel), every level is still in a tropical, seaside setting with the same generic villagers. Compare this to the massive variety of themes that Mario 64 had and it feels like a major step backward. You would think a theme park setting is a great idea for a Mario game, but half the level is a completely separate tropical beach, IE that thing half the levels and the hub world itself have.
This screenshot was actually taken in the theme park level. What, can’t you tell?
Once you enter the theme park section of this stage, regardless of which chapter you’re in, I’m pretty sure you can’t return to the beach. As for the rides themselves, they’re not really all that interactive. The highlight isn’t the roller coaster, which sucks, or the Ferris Wheel, which you can’t even get in the carriages. No, in an entire theme park setting, only the two swinging ships feel truly “interactive” in the way you’d expect a Mario theme park level to be. What a letdown.
The best idea they could come up with for a roller coaster was not one but two target shooting segments, and neither of them is particularly fun.
So Mario Sunshine is plagued with samey levels, a lack of a balanced challenge, and an ending that’s given the bum’s rush more than the final couple seasons of Game of Thrones. But, I still had more fun than not, and really, it’s not even close. Oh, I’m not going to argue it’s an unsung masterpiece. I’d even say that the lack of variety (real or imagined) paired with the inelegant combat makes Mario Sunshine feel like it’s a third party game that somehow scored the Mario license. “Well, we were HOPING for the SpongeBob license but hey, we’ll settle for making a Mario game. I guess.” Like, the required-by-law level themed around the Boos is a hotel that’s not even outright themed like a haunted hotel.
“What if there was a hotel with a casino that was haunted by boos?” “As long as there’s a beach in front of the hotel and sludge to clean up.” “We’ve got, like, a dozen other beaches in the game. There’s other places people go on vacation besides beaches, you know?” (shakes fist) “I SAID PUT A BEACH IN FRONT OF IT!” “Fine, then I’ll, like, add a ghost manta ray on the beach that poops electric slime and splits into smaller manta ray ghosts when you squirt it or something.” “As long as it happens on a beach.” “Sigh.”
And I had an incredible time exploring the hotel. It really feels like they squeezed it for everything they could. There’s all kinds of hidden rooms, secret pathways, trapdoors, etc. But then there’s a casino section inside the hotel where just some guy blocks your entrance to it because it’s not supposed to be part of the chapter you’re playing right now. Then the actual casino is very limited and not really anywhere near as fun as exploring the hotel had been. There’s nothing clever about it at all, really. You just spray the reels on not one but two oversized slot machines with the FLUDD, then spray panels of a not-puzzle puzzle until they’re flipped the right way. Yawn.
Part of the unlock method is just spraying the reels until they match up. Nothing clever about it at all.
Then the King Boo fight is a slog as well. Even though it takes place on a giant roulette table and he has a slot machine that decides his attack pattern, none of it feels like it meshes well. Again, I just get this weird vibe that no idea was ever said “no, let’s try something else” to. So one of the best levels in the game has an entire section that sucks and a boss fight that didn’t really work for me at all. That’s the Mario Sunshine experience in a nutshell. Two-thirds of it is really fun, sloppiness and all, and one third of it ranges from boring to misery.
In theory you can just grind on this boss, deliberately avoid attacking him and score 100 coins via his slot machine. Again, haphazard.
Oh, there’s more than enough good game here for me to give it a YES! I think I fell just short of outright loving Mario Sunshine. Of the GameCube’s “big three” it was the weakest of the three for me and I’m guessing most GameCube owners. As a child, I loved Metroid Prime and Zelda: Wind Waker, but I’m fairly sure that I never even finished Mario Sunshine and walked away from it without regrets. Had I not been able to cheat, I would have likely done the same thing in 2026. I fully admit I used save states during this play session, mostly to eliminate the agony of falling and having to re-climb large sections of the game. I turned what could have been a months-long play experience into one that lasted just a few days.
Hell, I probably saved several hours on just the “you died. Return to the hub world, re-enter the level entrance, re-select the chapter, re-watch the opening spiel, and then start playing again” downtime. Like this, the only main course chapter where you lose the FLUDD, saw me die plenty during my childhood. That’s a LOT of resetting and restarting that you no longer have to deal with.
Sunshine is one of those games that’s actually better with emulation cheating because it can be used to eliminate so many tedious restarts and downtime. I used it to create my own checkpoints, not eliminating the difficulty entirely (I still had to, you know, make my jumps) but taking the edge off. That Yoshi segment I whined about? Setting my own checkpoints sure as hell didn’t make it any less challenging. What it did do was eliminate the time climbing out of the ocean and starting over from the beginning. You know, the part that would have been so boring that I never would have finished it at all, otherwise. Save states assured that most of my playtime with Mario Sunshine was fun and not frustration. So like when I died dragging this f*cking thing around:
How I hated this level as a child.
I didn’t need several minutes of downtime to start over and try again. I laid down the save state as I approached it, so that I could make a good faith effort at actually completing the full challenge. If I felt they went overboard, I would heel-toe it through a chapter. So what? I still had fun! Now that Sunshine is a game that can be played on your own terms, I can finally appreciate it on gameplay merits besides how damn weird it is for a Mario game.
Another example of “eliminating downtime.” This chapter took me days as a child. Through the magic of save states, I beat it in maybe an hour or so. The challenge was still there. I had to navigate it correctly and, thanks to a problematic camera, it’s still a pain in the ass. But if I fell, the misery of starting over from the beginning was gone. I wish I could play every game this way, even new games. I’m in favor of fun by any means a game can be fun.
I can’t stress enough that there were many, many chapters I loathed as a 13 year old that I enjoyed the hell out of as a 37 year old playing this with save states. For that reason, this might actually be the true killer app for the GameCube lineup on Switch Online. So, if you weren’t excited to play Super Mario Sunshine, my pitch is that, with save states, it feels different now in the best way possible. A game where the good parts are still good, but you might discover the bad parts are now, in fact, also good as well. Of course, it also makes the bad parts feel worse than ever when you realize not even save states can make the act of playing them fun. Ahem.
By the way, literally as I was finishing writing this review, I was going to be fine with that mission being the one and only main chapter I didn’t finish. But then I realized I had no screenshots of it, so I went to get them and about three minutes later I had the Shine. I’m not entirely sure what I did differently. The things that had been aggressively swarming me suddenly felt like they couldn’t care less that I was rolling the watermelon right past them.
Thus I finished with 90 Shines and, hey, I’m totally satisfied with that experience. So if Mario Sunshine left a bad taste in your mouth back in the 2000s, or you felt it was too challenging, give it a second chance on Switch 2. It’s not necessarily a whole new experience, but an optimized version of a flawed game. Imagine if you could remove just the frustration out of the most frustrating game experiences. That’s sort of what Sunshine is like now, and I’m all for it.
Verdict: YES!
Okay, so I missed two 100 coin challenges. (shrug)
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