GAME CLEAR No. 136 -- Bowser's Fury

2023-07-19 00:15:46 video games game clear mario nintendo switch

Bowser’s Fury (2021, Switch)

Developer: Nintendo EPD
Publisher: Nintendo
Clear Date: 6/18/23

Here comes the son

An interesting guy to be is a guy like me who actually owned and enjoyed the Wii U. The console sucked in most of the 21st century Nintendo ways (bad OS, horrible online experience, weak hardware), but its dual-screen setup did offer unique and compelling gameplay experiences. Unfortunately, they were underexplored as the console sold horribly and Nintendo had to move on.

But in the same way the smash-hit Wii succeeded the disappointing GameCube, the Switch has become one of the very best-selling game consoles of all time. To date, it has sold nearly ten times as many units as its ill-fated predecessor and will likely comfortably cruise past that mark. It’s kind of a shame because, again, the Wii U had some good games! Fortunately, knowing this, Nintendo did what any shrewd company would do and ported nearly everything worth a damn to the new system. When you necessarily need less than a 10% attach rate to double the sales of a game with minimal additional investment and/or R&D, it’s a pretty easy call to make!

However, likely in an attempt to encourage some double dipping among those of us who did already play them, Nintendo has tended to include some kind of bonus in most of these ports. In most cases, this has not been enough to get me to buy again (especially since Nintendo never puts anything on sale), but Mario is different. Super Mario is my favorite video game series. When I saw there was a new, discrete Mario game packed in with this thing, I knew I had to get it eventually. When I did, what I found was a game that did take a little effort, and a game that I’m hoping serves as the template for Super Mario games to come.

Bowser’s Fury starts out simply enough. In an alternate version of the intro cutscene of 3D World, Mario find himself sucked into an area called Lake Lapcat, a large body of water with several islands that is seemingly experiencing a Super Mario Sunshine-esque slime situation. Fittingly, Bowser Jr. arrives on the scene in short order to inform Mario that his dad is lost in the sauce and begs him to help. The ever-forgiving Mario leaps into action with Junior at his side, and the game begins in earnest.

What follows is good platforming fun with the same fundamental mechanics as 3D World. Mario moves around and jumps with the same feel, and his catsuit powerup (and cat hybrid enemies) remains. However, instead of the fixed-perspective, traditional levels of 3D World, the same engine drives an open world more akin to Mario 64 or Odyssey. But then only sort of! While Lake Lapcat is open and explorable, many of its islands and archipelagos contain platforming stages that do function rather like the ones found in 3D World.

Mario’s job is to negotiate these platforming challenges to find Cat Shines that fix up the various lighthouses located throughout Lake Lapcat. See, Bowser got covered in the black slime that’s all over the place, and now he’s big and pissed off. Usually he’s dormant, but every now and then he’ll awaken and try to kill Mario. When this happens, Mario either needs to find another cat shine to illuminate a lighthouse and scare Bowser off for a bit, or he needs to find a Giga Bell to become a huge cat and beat Bowser’s ass (Giga Bells require a prescribed number of Cat Shines to unlock). After winning a fight with Bowser, a significant swath of the slime will clear up on Lake Lapcat and reveal more islands and levels to explore. Do this a few times, and you’ll save Bowser and the game will be over.

This loop works pretty well! Bowser’s interruptions can be annoying, but generally the Mario stuff you’re doing is well-contained enough that you can either quickly reach a Cat Shine or aren’t so far into something that an interruption is all that devastating in the first place.

But setting that aside, the exciting thing is the cohesiveness of Lake Lapcat and how easy it is to traverse. To help you over the vast watery expanse of the lake, the Lapras-like Plessie returns from 3D World to assist with her swimming prowess. She’s great fun to control and – not content to merely be transportation – has some of her own racing/navigational challenges to earn some Cat Shines as well. If you’re stumped or frustrated by a Cat Shine challenge, it’s a breeze to go somewhere else and look for others. Importantly, it always feels like you’re doing Mario stuff, not just trying to get some place where you can.

It’s a bona fide Mario World, and it should be the foundation of a great game made of a series of such worlds. The prosody and level design of the game is unique enough to distinguish it from the Odyssey-likes, and I think it’d be a real shame to leave its ideas to a little side game included with a port that many likely overlooked. 3D Mario platformers have assumed a number of identities over the years, with none of 64, Galaxy, or 3D World feeling like quite the same sort of platforming experience. In my eyes, Bowser’s Fury is the natural evolution of the 3D World concept. Hopefully Nintendo doesn’t feel that the field is too crowded to revisit it.

This is a bit of a side note, but it’s interesting to come to Bowser’s Fury after Sonic Frontiers. That’s a game that I didn’t think was so bad at the time, but Bowser’s Fury really puts into perspective how sloppy it is comparatively. Frontiers, with its “Open Zones,” attempts more or less the same idea: put small platforming challenges all over an open level. But it just pulls it off way worse? I think part of it is that putting grind rails all over the fucking place just isn’t as “Sonic” as SEGA has desperately wanted it to be since Sonic Adventure 2. The game also doesn’t have the faith in the classic Sonic aesthetic that Mario does in its look, so instead of vibrant, colorful Open Zones, we get weird, muddy Death Stranding lookin’ ass places. Ugh.

I’m not gonna spend another several hundred words bemoaning this, so on a positive note, at least Sonic Superstars and Super Mario Bros. Wonder both look pretty fun? I would love to play both with my friends. Let’s look forward to that.

One last thing: I got emotional whenever Bowser Jr. would despair about his dad. Fun how that sort of loss (or fear thereof), no matter how innocuously presented, can still get to me.

Miss you, Old Man.