There’s a reason Mario is such a beloved character, having brought gaming to the mainstream long before Grand Theft Auto and Halo got credit for accomplishing the same feat. At their worst, Mario titles are polished triumphs of game design that greatly refine platforming mechanics, and at their best, they push video gaming itself forward in huge, revolutionary leaps. Super Mario Sunshine, however, doesn’t quite fit in either category. An excellent game by any standard other than Mario’s, Sunshine is the black sheep of the franchise. While it introduces a water-spewing backpack named FLUDD – the Crank to Mario’s Ratchet, the Kazooie to his Banjo – and further refines the 3D control concepts introduced in Super Mario 64, Mario’s second 3D outing also features unwelcome backpedaling. The game ignores many of the elements that made Super Mario 64 so appealing, abandoning exploration-heavy, non-linear gameplay in favor of a much more focused progression with an emphasis on story. In fact, Super Mario Sunshine disregards many of the lessons learned from the plump plumber’s prolific career, incorporating the worst of the series’ widget and doodad collection and suffering from crippling camera and pacing issues.

These pacing problems appear from the onset. The game opens with an FMV sequence – a series first – and immediately follows it with two more, broken up with only a tiny taste of gameplay. Mario and Princess Peach, exhausted from constantly battling Bowser, are on their way to the tropical Isle Delfino for a much-deserved vacation. When they arrive, however, they find the airport’s runway dominated by a toxic-paint-spewing piranha plant left behind by an evil shadow Mario. The real Mario quickly takes the rap for the graffiti now covering the island, and is sentenced to recover the 120 missing Shine Sprites and remove the pollution from the once-pristine tropical paradise. These unskippable cinematics set up the story, but take far too long to do so.

The saccharine-sweet dialogue and cartoony voice acting are decent in small doses, but are positively grating in these extended cutscenes. And while the characters around him have plenty to say, Mario himself remains strangely silent, despite joyfully issuing cries of “yahoo!” and “yippee!” as he jumps around the world under your control. His mouth still moves as though he should be speaking, however, suggesting that at one point he actually had something to say. Every Mario title has had some sort of narrative grounding to provide additional motivation to reach that next level – Donkey Kong was the first video game to tell a story, after all – but shoehorning expositional cutscenes into a Mario game is annoying and unnecessary. Thankfully, these poorly directed cinematics dry up a couple hours into the game and don’t return until its end.

Besides frontloading the experience with exposition, Nintendo also saturates the first few hours with unnecessary tutorial segments. When you first meet FLUDD, the sentient backpack explains his capabilities – press Y to fire the water cannon or jetpack-like jets, press X to switch between the two functions. While this initial (and still unskippable) tutorial only lasts all of 30 seconds, it’s indicative of the game’s larger problems. The first hours play out like an extended tutorial, with Mario spending most of his time cleaning up paint and graffiti and battling several more piranha plants that are no different than the one he fights upon first arriving on the island. The concept of “squirt water, clean paint” is hardly complicated, but the game checks, double-checks, and then triple-checks that you understand it, as each of the game’s first three levels require battling one of these painted piranha plants to gain entry. Mario titles have always had intuitive controls that allow you to perform impressive maneuvers within minutes of picking up a controller, and Super Mario Sunshine is no different. Unfortunately, rather than allowing you to experiment and discover Mario’s capabilities on your own, the game’s early challenges all revolve around using FLUDD to clean up paint, quickly becoming tiresome as Sunshine spends too much time easing you into mechanics that are too simple and intuitive to require so much tutorial.

After these lackluster first few hours, the game does eventually pick up, but serious pacing issues prevent Sunshine from measuring up to the high watermark set by previous Mario titles. Within the tutorial and cutscene-heavy first stages of the game, you’ll battle five of the game’s nine bosses, leaving few exciting surprises for later. Super Mario 64’s Power Stars have been replaced with Shine Sprites, which function identically, coming as rewards for completing various objectives, and just like Super Mario 64, there are 120 of them to track down. Unfortunately, the game has less than half the levels of its predecessor (seven vs. fifteen), and only one extra Shine per level. To make up for the 24 additional Shines, you’ll need to track down 240 blue coins, ten of which you can trade in for a single Shine. Blue coins are hidden throughout the gameworld, but finding them mostly comes down to dumb luck – randomly blasting the correct piece of the environment with water or searching the correct corner of a massive area. Sunshine’s endgame involves locating the last of these blue coins, a frustrating activity that you’ll most likely ignore. There is little logic behind the blues coins’ placement throughout the levels, and as they continue to evade your grasp, you’ll find yourself less and less interested in the new splash screen that comes as reward for earning all 120 Shines. Yoshi also returns, and the game also has two additional nozzles for FLUDD – a water rocket that blasts you high into the air and a propeller that allows you to run at speeds comparable to Sonic the Hedgehog – but all three of these powerups go criminally underutilized and are only required for a handful of Shines.

Super Mario Sunshine is also far more linear than Super Mario 64. Just like in its predecessor, you begin a level by choosing which Shine you want to hunt down, but unlike in Super Mario 64, the Shine you choose is the only Shine you can possibly find. You’re forced to unlock Shines 1-8 for each level in order, and though Nintendo makes up for it by using this forced progression to tell stories within the game’s levels – one level has you tracking down a source of local pollution and eventually righting it over the course of four or five Shines – the freeform exploration of Super Mario 64 is sorely missed. Upon entering a level from Delfino Plaza – the game’s hub – the camera zooms in to your destination and the location of the Shine, further limiting your need to explore and discover the game’s secrets on your own terms. Like the game’s early, tutorial-heavy segments, Sunshine holds your hand and completely abolishes the joy of exploration and discovery. The objectives you need to complete in order to earn the Shines are also far less varied than in Mario’s 64-bit outing. Besides the aforementioned blue coin hunting, each level features three red coin hunts, an identical battle with Shadow Mario, and one or two “secret” old school challenges you must overcome without the aid of FLUDD. These throwbacks to the pure platforming days of Mario’s 2D youth, however, are a real highlight, and are brutally difficult with their multitude of moving platforms and bottomless pits.

To make matters worse, the game’s camera is also a step backwards from Super Mario 64. It functions well enough in large, open environments, which is what most of the levels in Sunshine are. However, the camera’s spastic refusal to cooperate in tight quarters or indoor levels renders playing in such areas painfully frustrating. Mechanics that transform Mario into a shadowy silhouette or create blue-tented portholes when the camera winds up behind an obstacle rarely trigger correctly, and often activate while the camera isn’t obstructed in the least. As such, you’ll spend just as much time fighting the camera as the game’s challenges, especially in a level that takes place entirely within the walls of a hotel or during a particularly poorly designed climb beneath a spinning Ferris wheel. Even at its best, you still need to babysit the camera constantly, using the C-stick to line up jumps and keep Mario centered.

Rest assured, however, that behind these many problems lurks a fun game. As a platformer, Super Mario Sunshine stands toe-to-toe with most of the generation’s best, but measured against Mario’s own platforming heritage, Sunshine falls drastically short. Still, there’s a lot here to like. Sunshine milks FLUDD for all its worth, allowing for some clever physics-based challenges such as using the water cannon to transform a tightrope into a slingshot or using it as a propulsion device for a small canoe on a sea of molten lava. The game’s controls are tight and responsive, managing to one-up even Super Mario 64’s precision handling. The game also looks fantastic, with draw distances so vast, it’s possible to see other levels from a high enough vantage point. All of the levels are tied together with a similar tropical theme, and the game really pushes the boundaries of its setting, giving you a bustling seaport, a waterlogged village, and a dizzying amusement park to play around in. Because water and Shadow Mario’s goopy paint play such a large role in the game, both are animated beautifully and dynamically splash, drip, and run along surfaces.

While the gameplay may not measure up to the high standard of the Mario series, the exceptional soundtrack certainly does. An a capella version of the original Super Mario Bros. theme will keep you pleasantly sedated during the game’s most brutal, FLUDD-less platforming challenges, and an updated underground theme is a welcome throwback and a personal favorite. New, equally memorable songs, all with a distinct tropical flair, round out the track listing and will remain stuck in your head for days. Delfino Plaza’s simple, catchy tune is reason enough to idly sit on the beach and watch the waves come rolling in.

Super Mario Sunshine is a case of taking one step forward at the cost of two steps back. It’s certainly a fun game that further refines Super Mario 64’s innovative analog control scheme, but there’s a great deal of gratuitous garbage weighing down the experience. Sunshine is a game that would have worked much better as a smaller, more focused game. In many ways, it already is; it certainly has fewer levels and a greater emphasis on narrative than its 3D predecessor does. However, tracking down the many blue coins is a tiresome chore that shamelessly reeks of the trinket collectathons present in so many of the Mario imitators. The many tutorials and FMVs, neither of which have appeared in a main series entry in the Mario franchise before, are similarly unnecessary. Though, at times, the game’s successes can be difficult to see through the superficial muck, keep in mind that as a platformer, Super Mario Sunshine is a great game that’s easily worth playing, but as a Mario title, it’s little more than a disappointment.