I owned five games on Nintendo Wii, for the entire life cycle of the console. I loved my Wii, of course. It was an incredibly fun, cool console with a raft of brilliant games on board. But times being different, no expendable incoming and relying on gifts meant I had to pick my games wisely. Even at such a young age (I was 11 when the console first launched), I did have some taste, and I made a very good pick in Super Mario Galaxy 2 as one of my very first Wii games.
Revisiting the adventure on Nintendo Switch 2 made clear just how well I chose – because after all these years, I can now deeply appreciate just how innovative, creative, and mind-blowing the entire Super Mario Galaxy series was, and remains.
Playing through Super Mario Galaxy 2, I was woefully nostalgic for simpler times, but even through this rosy haze, I could see just how brightly this game’s ideas shine. The Super Mario Galaxy franchise is premised simply: you are Mario, heading across planets on a quest to, once again, stop Bowser from ruining the world. This planet-faring concept is aided by a wonderful play on gravity – each world you visit is an orb with its own creative implementation of atmosphere.
You have to readjust your expectations as you encounter each new planet, as running off an edge doesn’t always send you careening into space. Instead, you can hop, skip, and jump within a planet’s orbit, playing around with its field of gravity. Your movements are bouncy and big in these spaces, and the game provides a platform for you to enjoy this freedom to its fullest extent.
Puzzles in orbit
It’s not only that gravity is a powerful, playful force in Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel. Developers use it in a range of creative ways to form puzzles which require finesse and deep thinking. Sometimes, there’s an element of luck involved – but mostly, these puzzles are tightly-designed, and rely on some head-scratching (however brief) to complete them. Grasping at a sense of play and experimentation, these puzzles are a nifty challenge, no matter your age.
Some of my favourite puzzles open Super Mario Galaxy 2. There’s block puzzles, where you must get around a wooden cube and slam your way to discovering an image on one side. There’s jump and flip puzzles, where every shake of your controller (or press of Y, if you’re in handheld mode) will flip new pathways open. It forces a different sort of thinking. You must hop and flip and jump, all while ensuring you’re avoiding obstacles, and that you’ll have solid ground beneath your feet, wherever you land.
What’s most surprising about revisiting Super Mario Galaxy is just how many cool ideas there are. In each world, you’ve always got new, bigger, and more complex challenges, each inspired by the nugget of one particularly novel idea. What if gravity suddenly switched? What if a single world had four gravities? What if you wandered through a watery world, and then flicked a switch to turn the whole world to ice? What if you suddenly gained the powers of a cloud being, and could form clouds to reach high up locations?
Facing off against bosses, you’ll discover a real creativity in each design, with combat being a puzzle to solve as enemies hop and swirl around a planet’s gravity.
The Super Mario Galaxy franchise excels in this variety, with so many bright ideas awaiting in new galaxies. You’ll want to push on not only to defeat Bowser, but to see what’s next, and to see what quirky planets await. In each star quest, you’ll also find worlds transformed, so even when you’re revisiting planets, there’s always some new twist or discovery to encounter. Simply, it’s fantastic.
The legacy of Super Mario Galaxy
To date, the discourse around Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 has largely been dominated by the collection’s price point. Purchasing each game individually on the Nintendo eShop (if, for example, you already own Super Mario Galaxy from the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection) costs AUD $59.95. You can also grab them in a collection for AUD $89.95, which does feel a bit more reasonable.
While concerns about the price point are valid, it’s worth noting just how brilliant both of these games are, and how much they’ve stood the test of time. It’s generally expected that age should devalue games (something Nintendo has always resisted), but there’s really no reason for that.
Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 exist as brilliant, timeless platformers in their own right. While the games have been lightly remastered for Nintendo Switch 2, with enhancements to bring them both to a dazzling and crisp 4K, their bones remain as-was, and ageless. (It’s worth noting there are a few minor extra features, too.)
Nintendo could re-release these games without any tweaks, pretending they’re entirely new, and barring a few wide-eyed character models and some odd shading, you’d believe these were more modern 3D platformers. They have an effervescence that lasts beyond their age.
They brim with ideas that have scarcely been revisited, and remain bright-eyed, bouncy, and engaging in 2025. Arguably, games like Super Mario Odyssey and Donkey Kong Bananza have carried on the legacy of Super Mario Galaxy well, but even then, these games don’t feel as free and creatively-minded as their predecessors.
With the release of Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 on Nintendo Switch 2, what is most clear is how badly these ideas do need revisiting. Whether in new, legacy games, or in a long-awaited legacy sequel. One that carries on the creativity and imagination that overflows here. With hype gearing up around the Galaxy games, particularly in this re-release, and with the arrival of an animated film inspired by them, it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Should this franchise return in future, there’s high hopes any new game would build on the legacy of what’s come before, to be as surprising, charming, and delightful as its predecessors. What a gift these games are – and what a gift that they’ll soon be available on Nintendo Switch 2, for an entirely new generation to discover their timeless magic.
Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 launch for Nintendo Switch 2 on 2 October 2025.
A review code for Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 was provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review.
