So here are my final thoughts on the game, now that I've completed it 100%.
UNMARKED SPOILERS FOR THE GAME. DO NOT READ IF YOU DON'T WANT THE GAME SPOILED IN ANY WAY FOR YOU
ALSO, WORD VOMIT lol
I have to admit, I'm not the biggest fan of 3D Mario. At least, not anymore. I was amazed, as were a lot of people, by SM64 back when it came out partly because 3D was new. Sunshine hit, but it by being a buddy platformer like Banjo-Kazooie, Ratchet & Clank, or Jak and Daxter, it didn't feel like a "real" Mario game. Galaxy got it right for the most part. I say for the most part because it still had its problems. The game was pretty easy, especially at the start, the hub world might've been interesting, but it was a pain to just go from level to level, and it seemed to me like the developers were more amazed at showing us that there were shifts in perspective and gravity than doing anything amazing with them. I still enjoyed the game. It wouldn't have been my choice for game of the year 2007, but it was probably the runner-up.
Super Mario Galaxy 2 feels like a do-over. It's like everyone acknowledged what went wrong with SMG and decided to do their best to fix it. And everything is better. The hub world is smaller, but you still have a lot to do. The pacing is better thanks to the game adopting the classic 2D world progression system. The levels are more varied and exciting than before. There's one level where you have to avoid being pushed off an edge by a wall. Then when you get all the way to the right side of the screen, you have to jump on top of that wall before it recedes into the background. That would have been enough in any normally great game, but there's another twist where you flip a switch, and the gravity changes so you are standing on the background, and that wall that was once pushing you outside the level is now a rising platform. It's amazing. And that's nothing to say of the flip levels. There were unfortunately only two or three instances of it, when there could have been twice as many while still being fresh.
The controller shake motion stuff is really good, and they make you use it this time. The cloud suit might be my favorite Mario suit ever now, just because how helpful it can be, but how vulnerable it can make you. There's a green star in Shiverburn that does this very well. You basically have to travel in the suit, across two checkpoints to get the star. In that time, you can't use the shake/spin unless you really need it, and it also means you can't get hit or damaged on your way there. Once you reach the destination, it's gratifying to be able to longjump over the lava puddles onto a cloud platform you created, and finally get that star.
And this is nothing to say of Yoshi, who doesn't even need to be in this game for it to be better than its predecessor, but he is and it's better for it. Like with the flip levels, I wish there were more fire-running Yoshi or glimmer bulb Yoshi.
SMG2 messes with 3D space the way NSMBW messes with 2D space. There are so many things just thrown at you and so much clever level design in almost every thing you see, it's astounding. However, there were still a lot of distractions. Most notably, Fluzzard and some of the Chimp. Fluzzard shouldn't have been in the game, and the Chimp's role should have been scaled back to just the platforming jump challenges, and not anything else. If it means the game "only" has 100-110 stars instead of 120 because some fat needed trimming, then go ahead and do it. I also think the weakest levels were the throwback ones. Whomp's Fortress, Starshine Beach, and Throwback Throwdown just felt like they looked. Old.
Another problem I had with this game were the fact that whenever a prankster comet showed up, you had to watch the "prankster comet!!!" thing for a sec before you could choose a level. And I also didn't like being shown the level every single time without the option of skipping the cutscene, especially for the post-game stuff. 9999 starbits was a stupid requirement for the last star, too, but more on that later.
Still, my complaints for this game are few. It's been a day or two of playing for green stars that I've forgotten a bit about the main game. The final Bowser level was pretty damn awesome. I am definitely not one for stories in a Mario game, but I loved the little detail like the Lumas rooting for you and especially Yoshi waving good luck up to Mario as he climbs the flagpole at the end. It's a small moment, but it made an impression, and I have a hunch that it might've been something Koizumi tossed in there.
Comet medals unlocking prankster comets was a great idea. I never liked them randomly appearing in SMG, so this at least made sense. There's a lot of that in SMG2. It really is a do-over. Even the post-game stuff is great. I never got the appeal of playing SMG again with just a different character and slightly increased difficulty, but doing so to hunt down sometimes cleverly-hidden stars was a much better idea. Those stars actually locking a true final galaxy was an even better idea. Needing 9999 starbits to unlock the very final challenge was a dumb idea. Okay, I had 8200 starbits just because I had been playing the game for that long, but really Nintendo? Grinding in a platformer? I didn't mind so much because the levels are great to just play through again, but it seems like something straight out of Gamecube Era "oh crap rush it to the release date" EAD instead of EAD Tokyo.
So I have 242 stars. That's all of them, including The Ultimate Test and The Perfect Run. The latter is probably the most brutal level I have ever played in a video game. It's even "worse" than NSMBW's 9-7. I wasted over 100 Mario and Luigi lives to finally get there.
Last year, I was pretty doubtful that NSMBW would be beaten as my favorite 2D platformer, and favorite Mario game. I didn't expect SMG2 to blow me away like it did (although nearing release, looking at those videos, I had my suspicions). It's not just better than NSMBW, it's the best platformer ever.