6. Corona Mountain (Super Mario Sunshine)

(originally posted on July 14, 2023)

A collection of simple thoughts on last levels, final dungeons, and endgame zones.
Spoilers for Super Mario Sunshine.
Table of Contents

Context: Princess Peach has been kidnapped (again). After collecting the necessary number of Shine Sprites, Shadow Mario floods the hub world, allowing access to the volcanic Corona Mountain where Bowser awaits.

It's popular to hate on Sunshine these days, and I definitely get it, but here's my spicy take:
The movement mechanics in Super Mario Sunshine are some of the best they've ever been in a mainline Mario game; the level design is what actually causes problems.

Now, certainly the two feed into each other - like how the hover nozzle means every other jump has to be super far and require its use, and the way it automatically pulls the camera, et cetera - but on the whole it's still fun to run and jump and flip and spin and dive and do all those Mario things. The basic controls are smooth.

You know how everybody says the bits where they take FLUDD away and just have weird levels floating in space are the best parts of Sunshine? Smoking gun. Controlling Mario feels good! The platforming is fun when the levels support it! Spreading everything out so you have to sluggishly hover everywhere isn't, and that's where it all sort of falls apart.

Corona Mountain is a prime example of this and a pretty miserable final level. It took me hours when I was a kid because it's just a series of tedious jumps that punish you with instant death by lava. Everything being slightly too far apart not bad enough? There's the timed spikes that punish you for trying to line up your jumps, the flaming platforms that you need to make sure you hover over for an extra half-second, and the lava fish that are a complete non-issue 99.9% of the time and will make you scream the one time they knock you out of the sky.

The second half of the level is the boat ride, which you do probably fewer than five times across the entire game. Steering with FLUDD is already pretty finicky and fiddly, but the way the boat sinks if it makes contact with anything just feels cruel. If you want 100% completion, you have to ride it in a dumb circle around the final platform to get all the blue coins and it sucks.

As for the rocket nozzle segment, I dunno. It exists, I guess. It's a welcome reprieve from the rest of the level being absurdly difficult, but I don't think it's very fun. That sort of continues into the Bowser battle, but part of the idea behind this series is that I'm talking about the final dungeon, not the final boss. Suffice to say that it's just another red mark on Corona Mountain's report card.

All this said, I genuinely appreciate the ways in which the Sunshine levels feel like contiguous, real (grading on a Mario curve) locations on Isle Delfino rather than being strange platforming bubbles suspended in the foam of existence (which, to be clear, I have zero problem with; Galaxy is amazing). Sunshine bumped its head on the invisible ?-block so that Odyssey could triple jump to the flagpole.