I feel like I should amend my review a little in light of the back half of Super Mario Galaxy 2. You see, at that time, due to the fact that I'd only had the game since late the prior Monday, I'd only just had time to sample the further 120 stars that unlock after you get the first 120. I proclaimed them, in contrast to the nonstop excitement of the first 120, "serene." Not that being serene was at all a bad thing.
Well, as of now, I'm through those 120. I have the little gold crown marker on my file. And I want to take a little time to talk about Galaxy 2's "back nine"—the challenge after the experience.
Spoiler alert: I'm going to be perfectly frank about it all, so if you want to experience it for yourself, don't click through to the article. Just know that I think it's really cool and—while I enjoyed playing the original Galaxy all over again as Luigi—much better than that original extra content.
You may have heard via the description of Prima's eGuide for Galaxy 2 that after you've collected all the main game proper's 120 Power Stars, you get access to 120 more "hidden" Green Stars, strewn about the normal galaxies. When I finally unlocked these, I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. I headed off to the very first galaxy and there was the first one pretty much right there, behind Yoshi's house. No problem; it was clearly introducing the mechanic. The second one was on the back of a tower that you normally just launch off from; here I just had to swing the camera around and jump off the back. Hmm.
I figured they'd get a little more devious in the hiding as I went along, but what I didn't figure was that the truly "hidden" stars turned out to be a rather small fraction of the total. This hit home for me at first in what's probably still one most memorable set of Green Stars, in the first Bowser Jr. area. Here, while I did need to look around a little to find the first star, it wasn't just "right there" to grab. It was atop a tower that had no beaten path to its summit. I needed to make sure I had a full life bar, leap into the lava, bounce onto the back wall (I needed two bounces, so the 1-hit buzzer is sounding about now), wall-jump off the side of the tower, spin and land into an indentation on the tower, then jump out and spin back up onto the fortress wall. Now the Green Star was within easy reach.
Another star that came quickly afterward was similarly memorable. Boulder Bowl, from world 2, has a ramp that you knock over pretty early on in the game. Well, the Green Star was hovering high over that untipped ramp. Instead of grabbing the Rock Mushroom and proceeding normally, here I needed to use the rails on the sides of the ramp to wall-jump my way up to the end of the ramp. It was fairly wide, so normal wall-jumps didn't work; instead, I would wall-jump and spin to gain a little more height several times in a row. Once scaled, I needed to very carefully walk the edge of the ramp which appeared no wider than Mario's shoe, and finally do a backflip-spin into the star above the ramp.
One more, from markedly later, took me a huge amount of time to snag. In the first area of Shiverburn, there's a large expanse of lava with a couple Cloud Flowers just before the switch that turns the lava to ice. These are the last Cloud Flowers you'll encounter. Skating over to the Launch Star, you'll now need to cross the lava planet with the rotating platforms and myriad Octogoombas without taking a single hit or spinning, and do the same for the ice patches with the meteors landing and making lava pools, because you'll need to both preserve your Cloud Mario status and save your clouds—the Green Star is high above a lone cloud that only Cloud Mario can stand on, and you'll need to spin a few of his saved-up clouds to get high enough to touch it.
It seems to me that Green Stars are Galaxy 2's version of the Star Coins from New Super Mario Bros. and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Some are indeed hidden away, but others are right there in plain sight, challenging you to figure out how you will get to them—and then challenging you to do it. For all the theories that swirled about the nature of the content that added up to 240 stars we had before the release of the game, I like what we got better. I hope this marks a trend in future Mario titles; I may have initially thought it "serene," but it clearly was anything but.
And I haven't even mentioned what you get afterward. Just rest assured of this: it's no Grand Finale Galaxy.
Well, as of now, I'm through those 120. I have the little gold crown marker on my file. And I want to take a little time to talk about Galaxy 2's "back nine"—the challenge after the experience.
Spoiler alert: I'm going to be perfectly frank about it all, so if you want to experience it for yourself, don't click through to the article. Just know that I think it's really cool and—while I enjoyed playing the original Galaxy all over again as Luigi—much better than that original extra content.
You may have heard via the description of Prima's eGuide for Galaxy 2 that after you've collected all the main game proper's 120 Power Stars, you get access to 120 more "hidden" Green Stars, strewn about the normal galaxies. When I finally unlocked these, I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. I headed off to the very first galaxy and there was the first one pretty much right there, behind Yoshi's house. No problem; it was clearly introducing the mechanic. The second one was on the back of a tower that you normally just launch off from; here I just had to swing the camera around and jump off the back. Hmm.
I figured they'd get a little more devious in the hiding as I went along, but what I didn't figure was that the truly "hidden" stars turned out to be a rather small fraction of the total. This hit home for me at first in what's probably still one most memorable set of Green Stars, in the first Bowser Jr. area. Here, while I did need to look around a little to find the first star, it wasn't just "right there" to grab. It was atop a tower that had no beaten path to its summit. I needed to make sure I had a full life bar, leap into the lava, bounce onto the back wall (I needed two bounces, so the 1-hit buzzer is sounding about now), wall-jump off the side of the tower, spin and land into an indentation on the tower, then jump out and spin back up onto the fortress wall. Now the Green Star was within easy reach.
One more, from markedly later, took me a huge amount of time to snag. In the first area of Shiverburn, there's a large expanse of lava with a couple Cloud Flowers just before the switch that turns the lava to ice. These are the last Cloud Flowers you'll encounter. Skating over to the Launch Star, you'll now need to cross the lava planet with the rotating platforms and myriad Octogoombas without taking a single hit or spinning, and do the same for the ice patches with the meteors landing and making lava pools, because you'll need to both preserve your Cloud Mario status and save your clouds—the Green Star is high above a lone cloud that only Cloud Mario can stand on, and you'll need to spin a few of his saved-up clouds to get high enough to touch it.
It seems to me that Green Stars are Galaxy 2's version of the Star Coins from New Super Mario Bros. and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Some are indeed hidden away, but others are right there in plain sight, challenging you to figure out how you will get to them—and then challenging you to do it. For all the theories that swirled about the nature of the content that added up to 240 stars we had before the release of the game, I like what we got better. I hope this marks a trend in future Mario titles; I may have initially thought it "serene," but it clearly was anything but.
And I haven't even mentioned what you get afterward. Just rest assured of this: it's no Grand Finale Galaxy.