Bowser's Fury Review

It’s hard to enjoy a Mario game that can’t fully commit to what it wants to be.

 The 3D Mario games have slowly (but surely) transformed themselves over the last few console generations, culminating with the release of Mario’s first big open-world adventure on the Nintendo Switch, Super Mario Odyssey. It wasn’t anything crazy on the scale of something like the Grand Theft Auto games, but it did prove that they can adapt and refine to keep the series fresh.

Bowser’s Fury takes the gameplay from Super Mario 3D World and transforms it into a mini open-world expansion, which sounds like a solid move considering how much I enjoyed Odyssey. It makes it that much more disappointing when they don’t execute to that same level.

All of the traditional trappings of recent 3D Mario games are still here. You make your way through several themed sections, stomping out goombas, collecting power-ups, and hunting for this game’s flavor of collectibles: cat shines. Where Bowser’s Fury breaks away from Odyssey is that this expansion is all open-world. In Odyssey, you had big open environments to explore that were still contained within individual worlds that you choose between. It doesn’t sound like a big difference but there are certain expectations that come with ditching levels altogether.

When you remove the traditional level-based structure in favor of an open-world, one of the biggest challenges is making sure travel feels good and convenient. In other franchises that bend toward a more “realistic” slant, you’d have a variety of ways to get around: cars, bikes, planes, boats. Mario isn’t real so none of that exists here. There wouldn’t be much use for those things anyway because you explore Lake Lapcat, a cat-themed set of islands surrounded and separated by water. Your main mode of transportation is Plessie the Dinosaur and Plessie kind of sucks.

I would be 100% okay with Plessie never coming back. Ever.

Plessie acts as a very imprecise jet-ski for navigating the waterways, yet it somehow feels slower than just walking from one end of an island to the other. You never really feel like you’re hitting top speed while on the water and turning becomes an exercise in predictive navigation as you hang wide in whatever direction you’re trying to go. The map isn’t super huge but it’s still big enough to make walking very inconvenient, especially when backtracking to newly unlocked cat shines.

I might be picking on the game a bit here because open-world games usually struggle to keep my attention but there are ways to make this experiment more appealing. One of the ways around the tediousness of bad travel is fast travel. Sometimes I just want to teleport right to the spot I need to get to without any of the in-between garbage. What’s unfortunate about Bowser’s Fury is that fast travel doesn’t exist – not until you roll the first set of credits. Once these credits roll, you unlock access to new areas, shines to collect, and the coveted fast travel feature.

Travel issues aside, when you are on an island looking for cat shines, the game hits its best stride. Even with the smaller islands, it’s crazy the variety of ways that they keep you on the hunt. Mini-boss arenas, collecting cat smaller cat shards to make a whole shine, climbing invisible towers, and reuniting missing kittens are just a few of the ways you’ll be collecting on this adventure. The bigger picture here is you aren’t just collecting to collect; you’ll need those shines to unlock new islands and fend off Fury Bowser.

Fury Bowser is a super-charged version of Mario’s nemesis that shows up every few minutes to wreak havoc on the islands while dropping down fire and brimstone. The only way to get rid of him are to wait it out or collect a shine to light up a lighthouse and drive him away. It’s certainly a unique mechanic to the series but it also introduces its own set of problems. The biggest problem is the inclusion of shines that are only present when Fury Bowser appears. It feels like an artificial way to boost the number of shines for you to collect without really adding to the core gameplay.

The Fury Bowser mechanic is interesting the first few times but ultimately wears out its welcome.

The other problem I have with it is that it can also lock you out of specific shines. Remember that cat family reunion I mentioned above? That was the first time I experienced being locked out of a shine during a Fury Bowser phase. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if I hadn’t just collected all of the other shines in that area. At that point, I had to travel to another island via Plessie all while avoid an onslaught from a very angry and persistent Bowser. That was instantly my least favorite experience with this game. 

There are still several positives to take away. Even with it being based on Super Mario 3D World (which is several years old at this point), this game still manages to be one of the best-looking titles on the Switch. The Lake Lapcat theme came and instantly ingrained itself in my brain as one of the most memorable music tracks in the entire franchise. The ability to continue to collect and bank power-ups you find is one of the most welcome quality of life changes I’ve seen in a Mario game and I hope that it’s a staple going forward. Something as small as the interactions between Bowser Jr. and Mario give this game a bit more personality compared to what you’d normally see in a Mario game.

Should you buy it, wait for a sale, or skip it?

This is where it gets tough. If you’ve never played the core Super Mario 3D World game (which is a fantastic game in its own right), then it’s an absolute must buy. That game is still worth that $60 price of admission and this expansion would be an added bonus on top.

However, if you’re buying it strictly to play Bowser’s Fury, I have serious reservations at full price. Someday if they offered this expansion as a standalone, I would possibly recommend it, but as it stands, I wouldn’t buy this at this price.