Never let it be said that Nintendo doesn’t know its own worth, or that of its work. The pricing of its latest pair of reissues has raised eyebrows. The new Switch remasters of the Wii classics Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2, out on Oct. 2, are not exactly laden with enhancements or new features for these respectively 18- and 15-year-old games. Yet they cost $39.99 apiece for digital downloads, or $69.99 for a double-pack physical edition. That’s a lot of money for old games.
But what games! I reviewed both on release — Galaxy in Edge magazine, and Galaxy 2 at Eurogamer — and gave them both 10/10. I regret nothing. Taking Mario into space, they are perhaps the most inventive and spectacular platforming games ever made, bending, stretching, and twisting the genre into stunning new forms with almost every level. If nothing else, it’s important that these new editions keep them playable on modern hardware. Galaxy 2 hasn’t been made available since a no-frills Wii U download a decade ago; Galaxy was republished on Switch, but only in the limited-edition (artificially so, since it was available digitally) and the rather half-baked Super Mario 3D All-Stars compilation in 2020.
Playing both new editions now, Nintendo’s pricing strikes me as ungenerous, but fair. The remastering work is subtle, yes, but note-perfect, preserving two games that have minimal need for embellishment exactly as they were meant to be played. (For games like these with a major motion-control component, this necessitates some compromises, but we’ll come back to that.) And the games themselves hold up incredibly well, outclassing Nintendo’s own recent work in the same genre as well as rival titles like Astro Bot, which they so obviously inspired. In that context, Nintendo has pushed the pricing exactly as far as it can, knowing that the games will make their own case — and win.
For one thing, both games look beautiful. Galaxy is a considerable upgrade over the basic, up-rezzed version included in 3D All-Stars; textures are smoother and sharper, models retain all their detail at distance, cutscenes are less muddy and no longer letterboxed, colors are somehow more vibrant. The image quality is pristine. Galaxy 2 looks even better; you could mistake it for a brand-new game. (There are free Switch 2 patches for both games, upgrading them with support for 4K resolution.)
But the real credit for the remasters’ visual impact goes to the vibrant art direction and exquisitely crafted assets of the original releases. These games are gorgeous now because they always were: bustling with life and personality, built from tactile textures, sparkling effects, and delectably plump models. The engine is faultlessly smooth, the camera almost always perfectly positioned, despite the gravity-bending topographical paradoxes it is required to track Mario through. Slingshotting out of a Launch Star and looping through the velvety cosmos from one chunky planetoid to the next never gets old.
Nintendo’s tinkering with the games has been pretty discreet. The interface is improved; you can play the marvelous orchestral soundtrack albums from the title screen; there’s a new, easier Assist Mode that grants Mario more health and bounces him back from falls. The latter will be welcome to many — these are pretty hard games. Galaxy’s touching picture book, which tells the story of space princess Rosalina, has been expanded, and now appears in Galaxy 2 as well.
It’s not much, but given the scrupulous care that’s been taken with the games’ presentation, there’s a genuine sense here that Nintendo was reluctant to mess with two games that are so near perfection, rather than stinting on these reissues. What this means for the games’ controls is more complicated.
Both were designed to be played with the Wii’s unique controllers: nunchuck in one hand controlling Mario’s movement, and remote in the other, serving as a pointer that can collect Star Bits, shoot them at enemies, and reach into the world and manipulate it in other ways. Key interactions — Mario’s spin attack, and engaging Launch and Sling Stars — are triggered with a shake of the remote, too.
It’s one of the Wii’s more restrained control schemes, but it can still only be perfectly replicated when the Switch is in TV or tabletop mode, with the Joy-cons detached. Played like this, especially on a TV, Galaxy and Galaxy 2 are gloriously fluid. They essentially allow you to be in two places on the screen at once: a unique and powerful sensation. Arguably, the scheme is now improved over the originals with the option to press a button in place of a shake of the pointer.
But in handheld mode or on a Switch Lite, the only option for pointer controls is to tap the touchscreen, which means darting your right hand back and forth between the buttons and the screen frequently during play. This was the solution used in 3D All-Stars too, and it works well enough, but it’s not ideal — especially in Galaxy 2, where the pointer is used much more extensively when mounted on Yoshi, to control the green dino’s tongue.
Still, it’s probably the best solution that doesn’t involve design changes that would do much more than just take a lot of work. They would fundamentally alter the feel and fabric of the games, and neuter players’ physical interaction with them. Faced with the risk of bastardizing two masterpieces, Nintendo made the right sacrifice.
And it really can’t be stressed enough how brilliant these two games are. Super Mario 64 exploded Mario’s world by adding a third dimension to it. Not having any further spatial dimensions to add for Galaxy, Nintendo found it necessary to invent new ones. Gravity, previously the one immutable force in Mario’s anarchic world — he jumps up, he falls down — is made malleable. In Galaxy’s pocket universes, planetoids become platforms, and each exerts its own gravitational pull. Mario runs around and underneath them, through them and inside them. He jumps down, he falls up. Sometimes he doesn’t fall at all. Miraculously, the game is still intuitive to control, even though it is constantly playing games with your perception and with the laws of physics.
This foundational gimmick is just the start, though. Having taken this leap, it’s as if the designers, led by director Yoshiaki Koizumi, felt they had permission to start changing or challenging all the other rules as well. The riot of invention this unleashed is especially evident in Galaxy 2. In fact, it’s the reason for the game’s existence. It’s rare for Nintendo to make a direct sequel to a Mario game, but Galaxy had generated more ideas than the team could use, so an expanded edition was proposed. But the new ideas just kept coming, and the expansion mutated into a full sequel.
Galaxy 2 is more trim and focused than Galaxy, exchanging the earlier game’s elaborate hub world, Rosalina’s spacebound observatory, for a simple Mario Bros.-style world map and a spaceship shaped like Mario’s head. It loses some of the first game’s poignancy and grandeur as a result. But it also removes all barriers between the player and the astonishing fusillade of invention pouring forth from the designers. One moment it’s a rhythm game, the next it’s a pop-up book, the next Mario is swimming through cubes of water suspended in space, or hounded by dozens of deadly, dark clones of what he’s just done. The deviousness of the ideas is only matched by their sheer number.
Between them, Galaxy and Galaxy 2 push the platform-game genre to the outer limits of possibility, and then past them. They redefine our relationship with video game space over and over again, in a spirit that is both joyful and wicked. These impeccable, no-nonsense remasters bring them back in precisely all their glory: no more, as if that were possible, and certainly no less. You can’t put a price tag on that.
