I'm probably going to get stoned to death for saying this, but here goes...
I enjoyed
Super Mario Galaxy, but clearly not as much as everybody else. I'm sorry, but after playing through some brilliantly non-linear platformers like
Super Mario World and
Banjo-Tooie,
Galaxy just felt a bit underwhelming and I didn't see what was so innovative. Sure, you can walk upside-down on spheres for a cute visual effect, but essentially you're still confined to grabbing one star at a time, only this time on a set, unbreakable path. You just grab star number one. Good, now grab star number two. Okay, now grab star number three. Etc. and so forth.
SMW and
Tooie provided much more exploration, and I consider
Tooie to be the
SMW of 3D platformers. You’d explore world two, discover
in world two secret pathways to worlds four and six, and then complete several interrelated tasks over the course of several different worlds to solve a single puzzle! In comparison, once I got a star in
Galaxy, I had no real motivation or reason to revisit the old levels. I was hoping for the next game the developers would reevaluate Mario's 3D platformers and evolve it to point of Mario's 2D platformers, so I was initially a bit disappointed with the announcement of
Galaxy 2 since it looked like just a new set of levels (note, I said
looked like—I’m still going to buy the game and give it a chance).
Sometimes, wonder if I'm too hard on
Galaxy. Looking at some of the best platformers on SNES, like
Yoshi's Island and
DKC2, I realize that they didn't have secret exits. So yeah, not every platformer needs secret branching pathways, and if
Galaxy wants to be more like a one-way 2D sidescroller with a z-axis, then apples to oranges. Then again,
Yoshi’s Island and
DKC2 still had something, a bit of non-linearity that made me go back to old levels and find something new. In
Yoshi’s Island, I constantly replayed levels to get perfect scores, and in
DKC2 I went back to complete all the Bonus Levels and find the DK Coin. But I was just looking at
Galaxy 2’s
second trailer the other day, and noticed that shiny thing at around 0:17. Could that be…a Star Coin?! Maybe that’s all that
Galaxy 2 needs, a few well-hidden Star Coins per star mission that could propel me to backtrack and provide that depth that the first
Galaxy was missing.
End of rant. You can send your death threats now.