Super Mario Galaxy 2

It is baffling to me that a sequel to maybe the greatest game I've ever played makes me feel absolutely nothing. The decision to streamline the Mario Galaxy experience for the sequel is probably in the bottom five of Miyamoto design choices for me. The first Mario Galaxy thrives in its quiet moments between platforming challenges where the player gets to take in the atmosphere of the world around them. This is done either in the middle of exploration-based levels or through the Comet Observatory letting the player explore at their own pace. Everything the player does in the first game is done to ensure that this world feels real. You travel physically from level to level, interact with recurring characters, and have to deal with real stakes in the story - it all serves to immerse the player in the action. You revisit the same locations often, but in new ways - ensuring that the player remembers and grows attached to the world similar to how the player does in Mario 64. Super Mario Galaxy 2 saw all of these choices as "bad design" - but its even simpler than that. The streamlined design was the result of Miyamoto winning a power struggle between him and Koizumi, the creative director of the first game. Koizumi also directed Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, and when you compare the first Galaxy game to the other Mario games it kinda makes sense that he was involved. They clashed over stylistic and thematic choices during the development of Galaxy 1, and Miyamoto ultimately took a prototype of Galaxy 1 to Nintendo's senior directors where they made sure that a Mario game never ended up with a story or atmosphere like that ever again. And it's a shame, because Super Mario Galaxy 2 replaced all of the first game's organic worldbuilding with the precursor to mobile game design in its level structure. Everything is done from the steering wheel in the hub world, so there is no need to explore it anymore. The story is nonexistent in this one. There are no interesting new characters. There are more levels, but within the same amount of content... so basically you just spend less time getting attached to each level and it's less memorable. And the levels themselves are more often than not structured as platforming challenges, not exploration-based like the first game. It all comes together to make this game feel like a level pack for Mario Galaxy - which is still a good game. But when the first game was more than that, and THIS was the game that ended up influencing the series for the next five years (3D Land and 3D World took a lot of inspiration from Galaxy 2), I can't help but be a bit disappointed.