Super Mario Sunshine/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Badass Decay: Bowser had gone from an imposing antagonist in 64 to a goofy dad with an easy final boss fight. Thankfully, Super Mario Galaxy rectified this.
  • Broken Base: Whether fans like or hate the fact that all of Isle Delfino is essentially one giant Palmtree Panic level depends on if they appreciate the subtle ways they incorporate different level themes into each individual world (Such as Sirena Beach serving as a Big Boo's Haunt/Casino Park hybrid, Noki Village being a mountainous Hidden Elf Village) or not.
  • Creator's Pet: FLUDD, both as a character and as a representation of the game's central gimmick. Mario loses his long jump from Super Mario 64, and the way the game is structured, he's basically helpless without having the ability to squirt water at things. And of course, his frequent Stop Helping Me! dialogue doesn't help at all.
    • FLUDD has even been accused of ruining Mario in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, where he replaces Mario's perfectly good Down B attack (Mario Tornado) with a move that's a lot clunkier and way more awkward to use.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Some of the best tropical music in any video game. Also, "Platforms A Plenty!", aka "Warp Zone Theme", AKA "Extremely Kick-Ass A Capella Rendition of the Mario Theme", AKA "The awesome theme that drives gamers mad due to the insanely hard levels they appear on".
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Petey Piranha made his first appearance in this game, and would appear again in many other games since, such as Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, Super Princess Peach, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and most of the Mario Sports titles. Super Mario Galaxy would feature "Dino-Piranha", an Expy of him.
  • Epileptic Trees: What kind of goop tastes like an ice cream flavor? Are we sure we're cleaning off pollution or a little kid's favorite 31 flavors? For reference, when the Pianta statue is submerged, a Toad can be found stuck in the goop; clean him off, and he talks about what the goop tastes like.
    • Because the precise details of the transaction are only cryptically alluded to, the revelation that the Paintbrush was an invention of Professor E. Gadd's has led fans to come up with many an Alternate Character Interpretation for him.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: Despite Bowser admitting that Peach wasn't Jr.'s mother, and Jr. admitting he knew this all along, some fans don't believe this or try to find ways around this.
  • Goddamned Bats: Cataquacks can be a pain if you don't know how to deal with them. You can knock them out temporarily with water, but Gelato Beach is so swarmed with them, you'll spend more time fending them off than actively working toward completing the mission.
    • Swoopin' Stus, the pudding-shaped creatures that spontaneously arise out of any goop that's lying around.
    • The bees, usually because they're always hanging out around narrow paths and tend to knock Mario off of them. In one instance, they're guarding a red coin on the edge of a cliff.
  • Memetic Mutation: "I'm a chuckster!" is often said by the moustached Piantas in the fifth Pianta Village level before throwing Mario, likely to his death. Indie game developer Bread created a Game Mod that turns nearly every character into one! It can be found here.
  • Most Annoying Sound: The "Player Down" jingle. And because of this game's difficulty, expect to hear this a lot!
    • The Big Blooper's raspy breathing is likely to make your skin crawl.
    • Platforms A-Plenty is a great, catchy song, but the fact that it plays in the hair-tearingly irritating FLUDDless stages lead to it being associated with pain, tedium, and frustration.
  • Narm: Bowser's voice acting and dialogue makes him seem less like a giant scary Koopa and more like a goofy sitcom dad.
    • Narm Charm: At the same time, Bowser's voice sounds draconian enough to work, and some people consider it to be just plain awesome.
    • FLUDD's Disney Death at the end is just goofy and pointless, since he comes back repaired literally not even a minute later.
  • Never Live It Down: It's very clear that Peach's confusion to Bowser Jr's claim that she's his mama stems from being baffled by such an untrue statement, not her actually wondering if it could be the case. But a lot of players tend to take it at face value and use it as proof that Peach is a bimbo who is too stupid to remember if she gave birth or not.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The blackened Shine Tower.
    • Eely Mouth. Doesn't help that its main attack is inhaling you.
    • The manta ray.
  • Porting Disaster: The version of the game that was bundled in the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection for the Switch is a minor example, but is still a disappointing port. The game's FMV cutscenes are muddier, there's noticeable lag, the tutorial for FLUDD's controls has button names lazily spliced out, and most damningly, the controls for aiming FLUDD have inexplicably been reversed.
  • Replacement Scrappy: Bowser Jr. Until New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Fans of the Koopalings were not happy about him replacing them, that's for sure.
  • The Scrappy:
    • Despite there being more than a few friendly ones, Piantas as a whole tend to be lumped under the Scrappy umbrella thanks to how rude and hostile a lot of them are towards Mario. And of course, there's the whole "too stupid to realize that the weird shimmery blue-skinned, red-eyed Mario clone causing chaos before Mario actually arrived in Isle Delfino isn't the real Mario" thing. Then if that wasn't bad enough, there are the Chucksters in Pianta Village's fifth level, who can and will frequently fling you to your death when you're just trying to get them to throw you to the Shine Sprites.
    • While she eventually left this trope, this game seems to be where Peach really hit full-blown Scrappy status. Thanks to how spacey her line delivery is and her appearing to be genuinely confused about Bowser Jr. possibly being her son, a lot of fans wrote her off as an annoying Dumb Blonde who only exists to be kidnapped.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: Yoshi in general feels very tacked on at the last minute; the controls are awkward, his powers are very limited, and he has Super Drowning Skills.
    • FLUDD, the central gimmick of the game, is hated itself among Mario purists. Though most of the hate stems not from being hard to control, but for putting the focus away from jumping, replacing the long jump (and making the backflip a minor Guide Dang It), and replacing Mario's punches.
    • Also, if you finish a race with Il Piantissimo after he finishes, Mario dies. Not that you should be losing those races the first run through, though...
    • For a game with so many beautiful water features to swim in, swimming beneath the surface with finesse is a lot more difficult than it was in Super Mario 64.
  • So Okay It's Average: Many fans consider it to be weaker than most Mario games, but a good game nonetheless.
    • Vindicated by History: Recently, there has been a surprising amount of defense for the game, with many fans now considering it better than the latest installments for the Wii and DS. Reminds me of something.
  • Squick: Yeah, Bowser's a big liar, but the mere concept of Peach being Bowser Jr's mother is beyond gross. That is, until it is revealed that Peach really isn't Bowser Jr's mother. Not that all of the fans believe this.
  • That One Boss: The manta ray in the first mission at Sirena Beach. The music, a somewhat darker version of the usual boss theme, doesn't help. At all.
    • Eely Mouth mouth as well, mostly due to bad water controls, and you have to get very close to him to hurt him, and being that close is very dangerous as his attacks are quite tricky to dodge up close.
  • That One Level: Corona Mountain. We're looking at you, annoying boat puzzle.
    • The third mission of Pianta Village. Full stop. The entire village is covered in flaming goop, and worse, Shadow Mario swipes FLUDD as you enter. You do get it back... right before you get the Shine Sprite. There are a number of different ways of dealing with the situation, all of which have their difficulties. The intended solution involves taking a long roundabout route underneath the village; however, it's really easy to lose your bearings trying to navigate through the maze of platforms, and those catwalks are really easy to fall from. A quicker path is to swim up the river into the pond and then repeatedly jump out of it, splashing water out to clean a path to the mayor's house. However, while you're trying to do this, Swoopin' Stus and that bird flying overhead keep trying to splash goop on you, and even if you can clear out enough of a path, you still have to do a perfect spin jump to the right spot to make it count. Finally, you can tiptoe around the left side of the village and climb to the top of the tree and then spin jump to the center of the village. However, this particular route leaves you absolutely no margin for error; slip up just a tiny little bit and you're screwed. (You'll either fall from the tree and plummet to your death, or you'll land smack in the goop and won't have time to extricate yourself before you die.)
    • In "The Watermelon Festival" in Gelato Beach, you have to guide a gigantic watermelon down a cliff and along a beach past a horde of Cataquacks, who, if they get anywhere close, will knock the watermelon into the air, popping it. Oh, and the controls for guiding said watermelon are hellishly awkward. You can squirt the Cataquacks with FLUDD to stun them, but the area is so swarmed with them that for every one you can fend off, there are always two or three more coming at you from the other side.
      • YMMV for me. If you kill the Cataquacks ahead of time using the dune buds, the most difficult part of the whole level is getting the watermelon across the bridge, which isn't that difficult.
    • "Yoshi's Fruit Adventure", where you have to squirt juice onto jumping fish to reach a series of platforms, is so frustrating that one online FAQ simply states, "I dunno, haven't finished this level."
      • YMMV for me, because if you check the tree on the first platform after the main land, they have melons on them and if you get one to Yoshi, it turns him pink and allows the fish that you turn into platforms move up instead of sideways, which is a big help.
    • The poison canal ride thing on the lily pads that requires Yoshi to hop across a whole sequence of boats and reach a far away island in Delfino Plaza. As if getting there wasn't annoying enough, your lily pad boat is rapidly decaying and if you miss any red coins, you don't get another one. You have slowly, carefully walk on the thin edges of the river and carefully use the Hover Nozzle to grab them, and any slip up will lead to you falling off the stage and dying, or falling into the instakill poison water and dying. Oh, and don't take the warp pipe at the end of the stage. It doesn't take you to the beginning of the river, IT TAKES YOU ALL THE WAY BACK TO DELFINO PLAZA.
    • Mario Pachinko, anyone? The stage seems fairly straightforward and simple, if tedious, until you're suddenly flung to your death by the weird pachinko physics.
    • The eighth mission of Pinna Park, where you have to ride the same roller coaster you fought Mecha Bowser in and pop all of the balloons in the course of 2 or 3 laps. Thanks to the poor, clunky aim, the rockets are very difficult to send off properly, so you could end up having two or three stray balloons taunting you towards the end. You can only shoot most of them within one or two 3-second periods during the entire lap, so if you miss your chance, even if you have half a minute of ride left, you're pretty much boned.
    • Any of the FLUDD-less platforming levels, to the point where (as mentioned above in Crowning Music of Awesome) just hearing "Platforms-A-Plenty!" is enough to make players start frothing at the mouth in rage.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: This game has very few enemies and items in common with the other games in the series. Also, many fans dislike the removal of the long jump, one of Mario's best moves.
    • The voice acting was also heavily criticized for its goofiness, to the point that it was mostly removed from Super Mario Galaxy, going back to basic grunts and short sentences.
    • Amusingly, these very same complaints would lessen after time thanks to the Vindicated by History trope being in full effect. It turns out that traits that make the game an oddball in the series gain a lot more love once said series starts to grow stale.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The flood radically alters the layout of the hub town by putting 3/4ths of it underwater. Swimming around town is pretty neat... until you realize that you can't really do anything new with this change, and there are no significant secrets to be found. Plus, the flood inexplicably goes away on its own while you're in the final level.
    • To some, the entire game. Evil, shadowy Mario doppelganger terrorizing Isle Delfino? Awesome! What? It's just Bowser's son who we've never heard of before in disguise? Lame.
  • Villain Decay: This seems to be the only game in the main series that makes Bowser seem silly, instead of the Badass Big Bad he usually is portrayed as in the platformers, if only for the goofy voice acting and the ridiculously easy boss fight.
  • Vindicated by History: At the time it was released, Sunshine was a very controversial game among Mario fans thanks to how wildly different it was from the rest of the series, particularly 64. The control scheme is wildly different, the voice acting is goofy, the level progression is all over the place, and the whole world being themed after a tropical island didn't help. But nowadays, it's gotten a lot of love because it breaks standard Mario conventions, especially in the Wii U and Switch era where Mario's world as a whole has been homogenized with even spinoffs like the Mario and Luigi and Paper Mario series losing their unique sense of identity. It also helps that despite feeling weird compared to traditional Mario platforming, FLUDD is still easy and satisfying to control. Then there's the fact that thanks to the benefit of hindsight, the gameplay and setting make it feel like a proto-Splatoon of sorts which earned it fans in love with that series.
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