Even all these years after the 1996 release of Super Mario 64, no 3D platformer has managed to feel as good or precise to control as these games. Still, I love Super Mario Sunshine.Ī large part of that is because the fundamentals of all 3D Mario games are so good. Look, I’m not going to say that it’s better than those games. It’s also not the whirlwind of creativity of the Galaxy games. Sunshine is not the revolutionary masterpiece that Mario 64 is. But if you partake in a decent amount of gaming social media, you’ll quickly see that Super Mario Sunshine has a lot of detractors.Īnd before I mount my defense, I want to say that many complaints are valid.

So it’s not like critics or GameCube owners rejected Super Mario Sunshine. Odyssey’s ratio is better, but not insanely so. That’s a pretty similar ratio to what Super Mario Sunshine and GameCube share. Nintendo has moved over 61.44 million Switch systems so far. So while Super Mario Odyssey sold much better at 18.06 million copies, the Switch itself is a much more successful console than the GameCube ever was. Nintendo sold about 21.74 million GameCubes, so more than 1-out-of-4 GameCube owners also bought Sunshine. Melee and Mario Kart: Double Dash as far as best-selling GameCube games go. That only puts it behind Super Smash Bros. Super Mario Sunshine, which debuted in 2002, sold over 6.28 million copies. It’s also a sales success, at least for a system that sold as few consoles as the GameCube did. That’s still lower on both sides than just about every other 3D Mario game, but these are still strong numbers. The average user score, which is often much harsher, sits at 8.6. On Metacritic, it has an average review score of 92. Why does Super Mario Sunshine even need defending? When you look at the numbers, you’d think that it doesn’t.

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