How Super Mario Sunshine still delights (and frustrates) to this day

I first played Super Mario Sunshine many years ago as a kid via the Wii’s backward compatibility. I was so young, actually, that I didn’t even know I needed a memory card to be able to save! As you might expect, Super Mario Sunshine humbled past me beyond belief. The game is well-known for its difficulty relative to other 3D Mario titles, but that difficulty doesn’t stop it from setting itself apart as one of the GameCube’s best platformers.

In 2020, Super Mario Sunshine was re-released for the very first time on Nintendo Switch as part of Super Mario 3D All-Stars, including widescreen support and clearer visuals. And now it’s finally made its way to Nintendo Switch Online on Switch 2, where it’s more accessible than ever despite lacking 3D All-Stars’ improvements. Here’s why this classic platformer is still worth your time.

Right off the bat, you can tell that Super Mario Sunshine absolutely nails the early-2000s summer vibes it was going for. It makes a lot of sense, given that it quite literally released in summer during the early 2000s. In all seriousness, though, considering the 2002 release date, its graphics are quite good. Though the cutscenes do look pretty blurry nowadays – and of a shockingly lower quality than in Super Mario 3D All-Stars – you have to remember that these were designed for CRT screens, so they look crusty on modern displays. Still, though, Super Mario Sunshine’s graphics are colorful, vibrant, and memorable. It also helps a lot that the water is especially detailed – a very good thing considering just how much water is in this game.

Also, while there aren’t as many different levels as in Super Mario 64, the ones that are there have become iconic over the years. Bianco Hills and Ricco Harbor’s respective themes are still stuck in my head after my recent playthrough, and Delfino Plaza’s theme is undoubtedly one of the most iconic in the entire Mario franchise. And for the most part, all of the levels are designed well too – things start out easy enough for the first few hours, but progressively get more and more challenging. The game features a huge assortment of secret areas where you can’t use F.L.U.D.D., and some of the later ones contain some of the series’ most challenging platforming.

Speaking of F.L.U.D.D., though, part of what makes Super Mario Sunshine good is its movement. While many people like Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 better (myself included), it’s pretty much inarguable that Mario’s movement in those titles took a step back compared to Sunshine. In Sunshine, Mario is fast and can pick from a huge selection of moves. There are triple jumps, side flips, spin jumps, and ground slides that can be chained into each other. Before you know it, you’ll have Mario zipping around all over the place. F.L.U.D.D. adds even more options, including spin sprays, water slides, hovering, and eventually rocket jumps and super-fast sprints. There’s definitely a learning curve to the movement, but not a huge one – it won’t take more than a few hours for you to know everything you have in your arsenal, and many of the game’s objectives actually do require or at least strongly encourage that you use these moves. Overall, at the time of writing, Super Mario Sunshine has at minimum the second-best movement in any 3D Mario game – I think Super Mario Odyssey has a leg up, but putting Sunshine in first place is a very reasonable take as well.

Super Mario Sunshine also has plenty of content, which should take you somewhere around 20 hours if you’re going for 100 percent completion. There are 120 Shine Sprites to collect in the game, but a whole bunch of them are locked behind the dreaded Blue Coins. And yes, even all these years later, these are almost certainly the worst collectible in the entire Mario series. Now, there’s nothing wrong with well-hidden collectibles – it keeps you playing the game longer and rewards exploration – but Blue Coins take it a step too far. Each stage has 30 Blue Coins, and Delfino Plaza has 20. A lot of these coins are actually not in sight at all; for some, you have to spray random windows or doorways to spawn them in. In Pianta Village, one of the Blue Coins randomly requires that you look up at and spray the moon. The big problem with Blue Coins, then, is that you’re essentially forced to use a guide or at least keep a checklist. The game tells you how many Blue Coins you’ve obtained in a stage, but not which ones, so if you find yourself missing one or two you’re in for a long search. Not to mention, in stages like Noki Bay, several Blue Coins get bunched up near each other in close proximity, making it difficult to remember which ones you already collected and still need. Some might enjoy how tough certain Blue Coins are to find, but for me, they always felt like a slog.

Furthermore, Super Mario Sunshine has a problem that’s not too common among 3D Mario games: it’s very much unpolished. For one, it’s one of three Mario titles that run at 30 frames per second, the others being Super Mario 64 and Super Mario 3D Land (and Bowser’s Fury in handheld mode on Switch 1 only, but that’s a big asterisk). 30 frames per second doesn’t mean a game is unpolished in the slightest – we’ll get to that in a moment – but Mario’s movement alongside F.L.U.D.D. would have felt even better if the developers could have managed to hit 60.

Sunshine is home to a ton of gimmicks that task the player with completing unique objectives – kicking durians around, rolling a giant watermelon, spraying rotating panels in the casino, riding a lily pad, getting thrown by Chucksters – and nearly all of these feel like they’re intended to frustrate the player. “That’s a skill issue”, you might be thinking. Kind of? My Nintendo Switch Online playthrough of Super Mario Sunshine was my second time 100 percent completing the game, and my first time was on Super Mario 3D All-Stars, which doesn’t support save states. I’ve done all of these levels legitimately a few times before, and some of my game overs were pretty funny – but after a few deaths, you start to want to complete the objective and get it over with, and the game isn’t always cooperative. It doesn’t help much that the camera often works against you, especially indoors where it gets caught behind walls and obscures the player from view.

The infamous Pachinko level is kind of a perfect embodiment of Super Mario Sunshine’s weaknesses – it’s notoriously difficult to clear without save states, the camera gets caught on the wall and makes it hard to see, and you lose a life and have to restart if you mess up even the slightest bit. But for as much of a problem as the difficulty is, I don’t think it completely ruins the game – Super Mario Sunshine is particularly fun to stream with friends on GameChat if you happen to use that, as every time you unfairly lose a life creates a fun moment for someone else to watch. Sure, that makes the game pretty frustrating sometimes, so it isn’t for everyone, and that’s okay.

In any case, I can see why this game is so polarizing – but with save states on Nintendo Switch Online, Super Mario Sunshine is more accessible than ever. If you want a taste of the game’s difficulty, you can play a clean run without abusing save states. But on the other hand, using them to make tough platforming challenges easier is completely okay too! If it helps you play a game that otherwise seems like it’d be too intimidating (and some of the later levels definitely are), it’s a great way to give it a go for the first time.