Super Mario Sunshine: Not What We Expected, But It Still Shines

The first time I sprayed a Pianta in the face with pressurized water, I just stared at the screen for a second. That's not a Mario thing. Mario doesn't hurt civilians. Mario solves problems with his feet and his head and his jump. But Super Mario Sunshine wanted me to hose down the town, and the moment I turned the nozzle on the wrong direction, I knew this wasn't the Mario I grew up with.

Super Mario Sunshine is the black sheep of 3D Mario, and it earned that reputation fair and square. But it's also the one I keep coming back to, because beneath its flawed design, there's a Nintendo willing to fail in public. That's rare. That's worth remembering.

Set on the sun-soaked Isle Delfino, the premise is absurd even by Nintendo standards. Mario is falsely accused of covering the island in graffiti, and his only defense is a water-powered backpack called FLUDD. You spend the game spraying away slime, tracking down special golden coins, and rescuing the island's captured residents, who inexplicably warp inside a spiky monster's tongue. The whole thing is nonsense, and absolutely delightful.

The controls are the steepest part of the climb. FLUDD gives Mario two main modes: a high-pressure jet that sprays enemies and cleans grime, and a hover nozzle that lets you hang in the air for a few precious seconds. Both of them change the physics of a character you thought you understood. Your timing goes off. You overshoot ledges. You curse at the camera. But after a few hours, the hover becomes an extension of your hand. That's when Sunshine clicks — not as a pure platformer, but as a physics playground.

The interesting thing about Sunshine is how much of it predicts Splatoon, Nintendo's later ink-splattering shooter. The core fantasy of Splatoon is painting turf with a fluid that has weight and momentum; FLUDD is that same fantasy on a smaller scale. You're not just collecting shines, you're working with a fluid system that can be sloppy but also feels alive. If you ever used the Squiffer at deep range, you've touched the same joy of mastering a stream that doesn't strictly obey your hands. Sunshine is where Nintendo first started playing with fluid as a gameplay element, and while it took them a decade and a half to nail it, the roots are here.

It's also a genuinely tough game. The Hotel Delfino secret shines, the infamous lily pad level, the blue coin hunt that will knock your completion percentage down to 99% and laugh at you — Sunshine doesn't hold your hand. That difficulty spike was a shock in 2002, when people expected Mario to be approachable for everyone. But it allowed a kind of mastery that more polished sequels later smoothed away.

Now it's available on Nintendo Switch Online's GameCube library, and I'm glad it's getting a second life. The frame rate stutters a little. The camera still does that thing where it jams behind a palm tree. And the commentary from Toadsworth is exactly as annoying as I remember. But none of that matters when you're surfing across a sloped plaza with a perfect hover kick, or when you hear the strings kick in during the main theme and remember how much this world wanted to be something more than a castle or a kingdom.

Sunshine is not the best 3D Mario. It's not even the second best. But it's the one that took the biggest risk. After the silence of that opening flight into Isle Delfino, after the accusation and the spray and the chaos, you realize Nintendo looked at their perfect formula and said: "Let's break it and see what happens." That's an attitude that doesn't appear in corporate sequels very often. I'll take the mess over polish any day if it means someone tried something new.