Wrapping up on Sunshine, only Corona Mountain left. Every other stage is complete.
What a mess of a game. I was always lukewarm at best about Sunshine, and time hasn't changed my mind one bit. It's just completely broken at times (very few, to be honest, but still) and it's frustrating most of the times for all the wrong reasons. Nintendo and quality of life were almost opposites in the GC era, it's almost like they later announced that Quality of Life project to make up for it, haha. Zelda TWW had that slow-as-molasses sailing and clumsy inventory management, and Sunshine has unskippable cutscenes, a camera that very much likes to do its own thing, lots of redundancy, and just completely broken physics in some crucial instances.
There's so much I blazingly hate in Sunshine, it ends up staining whatever good there is in the game. Sunshine's lows are definitely more and more memorable than its highs for me. The challenge is all over the place - you have easy-as-pie races with Il Piantissimo that barely last a minute in later stages, and immediately after that the same stage will give you some tedious task or an infuriatingly frustrating one. It's a mess. We all know the game is somewhat unfinished, and the filler stands out like a sore thumb. Sunshine feels like a checklist game to me, it's all about checking boxes without getting much enjoyment from it.
The checklist feeling is all too obvious when it comes to those goddamn blue coins. In 2002 I made a FAQ in Italian for this game. It's still there on GameFAQs. Replaying the game today, I downloaded that FAQ and used it as an actual checklist for the blue coins. There's some I'd never have the energy to look out for these days, and they were never fun anyway.
I'm probably never going to bother 100%ing Sunshine ever again after this run. There's reasons why this game was neglected for so long while we had multiple reissues of 64 and Galaxy was a downloadable title on WiiU: those games are simply better. When all is said and done, I prefer 64's clunkiness to Sunshine's lack of polish. Mario 64 was arguably the best that could be done in 1996, while Sunshine is far from the best it could have been, and far from Nintendo's usual standards for Mario. I hope the All Stars version knocked the nostalgia goggles off a lot of people's faces for good
YES! This is the best way to sum up Sunshine I've ever seen. Kudos to you for this, sir.