I just really wish that joie de vivre had carried over to the gameplay of Mario Strikers, which at its core is an average football arcade game with a few Nintendo-brand bells and whistles resting on it.

When Peach sees the enemy team score, it's charming watching her take deep breaths and try to cool her temper before she does something to disgrace the monarchy. When Donkey Kong wins a game, he swings about the field on jungle vines, whooping and dancing. When Rosalina does a Hyper Strike, the ball orbits around the moon before coming back to her for the follow-up kick, frozen in crystalline ice.

They're colourful, dynamic, full of personality and excess, and have a flourish that gives the characters energy and identity. I also really liked the animations, at least until they started repeating themselves. In certain moments the meatier football mechanics come together with some energy, and there's always something satisfying about the one-two-three ricochet of passing the ball between players, finally leading to a weighty kick that coils in the air around the goalie's reaching fingers and stretches the net behind him. Bend it like Bob-ombĪll of which is not to say there's nothing fun about Battle League. But in Mario Strikers, it's the opposite - the footballing is central, and the Mario elements limply hang off it like party streamers off Jürgen Klopp's spectacles. In sibling games like Mario Kart and Smash Bros, the zany, arcadey elements are the whole point, the twist on the formula that brings them to life and makes them memorable. It's a fundamental shift in design philosophies that feels at odds with its madcap, excitable tone.

If I was missing something, I never found it. I kept checking through the tutorials and in-game guide, convinced I'd missed some essential element about this or the other gameplay elements that seemed to be lacking substance. That's a cool idea, and in fact, the first thing that happens every time a match begins is the grand, dramatic merging of these two landscapes…īut it doesn't do anything! The game mechanics don't change, it doesn't alter how you play, and 95% of the time you can't even see the Stadium you've chosen because you're looking solely at the pitch via a top-down perspective. The one that really threw me is that there's a cool feature that allows you to choose and customize your half of the Stadium around the pitch - Bowser's Castle, Mushroom Kingdom, etc - and watch it fuse together with your opponent's choice.

Mario strikers 2