At this point, the Mario franchise is about as monolithic and well-known as Star Wars or James Bond. The big difference here: Its caretakers haven't managed to screw it up yet. Small wonder, as Mario's done pretty much the same damn thing for at least a good dozen games now, with the lens pulled back a little further for each go-round. Here, for the second time, we're dealing with an entire Mario galaxy... and if that's not enough to give a guy a big head, the plucky plumber's Mario-noggin-shaped spaceship makes it literally so.

Spoiler alert (as if you didn't know): Mario's fair mushroom maiden gets kidnapped by the Koopa King, and spirited off to the far reaches of the universe. It seems that abduction is Princess Peach's lot in life; if her subjects had any sense, an all-out revolt would have deposed her about nine nabbings ago, in favor of a monarch who actually sticks around for more than 15 minutes at a time (and doesn't deplete the royal coffers with what effectively amounts to an ongoing war fund). My suggestion: Just hand the crown to Mario, already -- he's the only guy who seems to get anything done anyway.


But I digress. After all, if Peach were a responsible ruler, we wouldn't get to tromp through a series of space-age settings where fun is the only law of physics. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is probably the most imaginative Mario adventure since Super Mario 64 -- and if you ask me, it's about as close to a 3D Super Mario Bros. 3 as we're likely to get. The laser-precise level design recalls more from that beloved game than it does the sandboxy Super Mario Sunshine or the aforementioned SM64, and to great effect. You're effectively on rails as you gather most of Mario's magical MacGuffins (a whopping 242 shiny stars this time out), but the game provides just enough illusory freedom to make the multitude of worlds within galaxies (yeah, that makes no sense to me, either) seem endlessly expansive.

In more definitive terms, SMG2 builds on its predecessor's concepts, and it's a much better game as a result. Mario's world is, as ever, a colorful collection of coins, bricks, pipes, and planetoids. The onslaught of environmental puzzles forces you to think both spatially and laterally, with worlds constantly flip-flopping from top to bottom, 2D to 3D, traditional to twisted. For a series that's explored every conceivable angle of its genre, the Mario games keep coming up with ways to challenge our notions of what a platformer can and should do.


And SMG2 executes this with no apologies and no mercy. If you can't adapt to the rigors of Mario's reality, your ass is going into the wild black yonder. Slippery jungle-slides suddenly become reflex-demanding deathtraps; perspective-shifting 2D rooms drop you from the safe sidewalk onto a ceiling of electrical misery; pillars of fire and seas of lava threaten to scorch you into oblivion if your long-jumping skills aren't up to snuff; innocent pools of water become critical detriments to Mario's cloud-suited self; bottomless pits in haunted houses act as constant moving targets during mad dashes across scrolling floors (and away from ghostly pursuers). If I tallied the lives lost to poor reflexes, I'd look like something out of The Human Centipede.

Sometimes, it makes me want to put my controller though the screen. And maybe I'm just getting old -- and I recognize this as being largely a Ryan problem and not a Mario problem -- but the minimum star requirements to press onward often feel a bit exorbitant. Yeah, it's been one of Mario's sacred cows since the Nintendo 64 days, but it sure feels punishing sometimes... and once you get to the last couple of worlds, the game really makes you earn that passage. I like extreme challenge for its own sake (that's what slick-shoed, bicycle-legged Luigi's here for, right?), not as a barrier to basic progress. Nintendo fans have been calling for a serious challenge for some time now, so I suppose I have them to blame; regardless, this is one difficult game, but at least the flood of stars affords you the freedom to pick your tormentor.

I can't remember exactly where I left the first Super Mario Galaxy -- relatively early on, at any rate -- but I never felt compelled to go back to it. I have a feeling that SMG2, on the other hand, will keep me enthralled until I've collected every last one of those stars, tough or not. For the detractors out there: This amounts to way more than the Super Mario Galaxy 1.5 you expected.