Mario's spaceship is shaped like his face... What hubris. (part 1)

I received Super Mario Galaxy 2 for my birthday from my mom a few days early since she likely wouldn't see me on the actual day itself, and I began playing it this evening.

I've got 16 stars so far, and I'm loving it. Most of my complaints about the first game have been addressed, such as the hub world - it's gone! When I want to, you know, play the game, I don't have to walk around this giant boring hub world to get to the room that has the galaxy that I want to go to in it. I just point to the World I want on the main map, then point to the level I want, and I'm there! So that's great.

Also, the levels have less stars in them to begin with. This is a good thing, because now I'm not wandering around the same levels over and over again looking for whatever clue I need to find a hidden star. I hated that in the first game. Although this could change, admittedly - I've only played the first world, and part of the second so far, and certainly haven't gotten all the stars in either.

As an aside, one of the things that amuses me about the way this game is structured is that the clusters of levels are called Worlds, but the individual levels themselves are called galaxies. This means galaxies are contained within worlds. I suppose the reason for that is just that "world" has always been a generic catch-all term within video games to describe a collection of levels. So, because the first Super Mario Galaxy called the levels galaxies, they had to stick with it for this one, causing this weird little idiosyncrasy. But, I digress.

Yoshi is really awesome! Although this is no revelation for anybody who has played the little green dinosaur thing, this is the first time in 3-D where he has actually changed gameplay enough to merit his presence. In Super Mario Sunshine, Yoshi was available to Mario, although his only real benefit was to vomit weird juice all over stuff and float a little bit. Here in Super Mario Galaxy 2, he can not only use the Wiimote pointer to lock onto enemies to eat them, he can use it to flip around sort of like Bionic Commando with his tongue! He also has a bunch of individual powers he can pick up which alter gameplay as well, although I haven't found too many of them yet.

Speaking of powers, the few new powers I've picked up as plain ol' Mario are pretty neat too! The cloud one lets you create three temporary platforms whenever you spin in mid-air, so that's pretty neat for exploring (and as a back-up), and the rock hat lets you turn into, well, basically, the Goron Mask from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, albeit for a limited time. It's pretty fun, although I've only used it once so far. I'm sure I'll use it again.

As for the story, Super Mario Galaxy 2 has stripped most of it away compared to the first game, and I'm thankful for it. Some people really enjoyed the story in Galaxy 1, and I can sort of see the appeal, but I always skipped by it after having viewed it the first time (I've beaten the first Mario Galaxy twice). Bowser has kidnapped the princess, and you have to save her. That's it! Yay! Onto the gameplay! Yes.

I'd also like to mention the music here does not disappoint. The first Galaxy had amazing orchestrated music, and the second does as well, with a slightly more quirky selection this time around (so far). There are some awesome remixes of old Mario music as well, which were amazing - such as the level that takes place on mostly creaky wooden bridges, with a remix of the Butter Bridge music from Super Mario World. It was as if they made that music for me.

So it turns out I like Super Mario Galaxy 2. Wow, what a surprise.