I posted my "Super Mario 3D All-Stars" review earlier today, and found it to be an enjoyable collection overall: I'm glad I'd pre-ordered a physical copy as well, as I can see myself revisiting it many times in the future.
In two ways-- one good, one bad-- the game which surprised me the most was "Super Mario Sunshine". The positive impression was how beautiful and modern it looks, especially on the Switch's screen in handheld mode: if Nintendo added shaders to a few wall surfaces, they could have sold it as a brand new 3D Mario game in 2020. The water effects in particular are wonderful: the way the waves undulate, while simultaneously reflecting their surrounds and still appearing transparent, is pleasing by modern standards, much less in 2002.
Unfortunately, now the negative: everything else about the game reminds me of why I was unable to get "into it" back when it was initially released. The problems start with the grating soundtrack-- especially that ukulele hub song, but even the more innocuous entries such as the "Super Mario Bros." underground remix are stylistically unappealing.
On the gameplay front, the title does not live up to the usual sky-high Nintendo standards. Here is one such episode which summarizes the game in a nutshell:
Ordinarily, the bosses in 3D Nintendo games-- from the 3D "Marios" to "Zeldas" to even the "Splatoon" single player campaign-- have tight designs-- sometimes too tight in fact, to the point of feeling stale: the camera is well positioned, they take place in a constrained area, it's obvious what the player is supposed to do, the difficulty gradually ramps up as the fight progresses, and so forth.
The first time the player fights the boss in the first stage of "Sunshine", it more or less follows that pattern: it's in one room, the player can visually see the boss, and while the camera is a little fussy, the formula more or less works.
The second time the player fights the boss however, the boss is randomly flying over the level, so high that absent locking the camera into "free look" mode-- which is suicide, since the player will then get hit-- the camera quite literally can't pull the boss into view. The only way to know where the boss is, is by following its circular stencil buffered shadow around, while randomly "spraying and praying" the virtual firehose towards spots in the sky, hoping to make the contact necessary to bring the boss to the ground. The action feels "janky" and unrefined.
All while this is going on, Koji Kondo is hammering chords away on his sixty dollar Casio keyboard at lightning speed, like some kind of hyper-caffeinated Bach on his seventh Monster Drink: "Dee-dee-dee-dee dum-dee-dee-dum dee-dee-dee-dee dum-dee-dee-dum", over and over again.
Meanwhile, the level is filled with goop, with those somewhat irritating enemies constantly jumping out, as the boss is firing projectiles from its position off screen. Especially odd is the fact that, in bizarrely un-Nintendo like fashion, the whole stage is open to the player-- the player can in fact wander off someplace else, moving far away from the boss and ignoring it completely!
It's interesting in retrospect that while play testing during the early implementation stages of that battle, someone in the room didn't say, "You know what, this isn't really working... let's try a little different spin." The shame too is that it's not just that one boss, as stated above: rather, the boss is a microcosm of more or less the whole game.
If one swapped out the Mario cast for generic characters, many would think "Sunshine" was just another 3rd party genre entry like "Croc", or the 3D "Gex" titles. In other words, "Sunshine" isn't a terrible game-- rather, it's merely serviceable, which is an adjective not normally applied to Nintendo's 3D "Mario" releases.