Now that the dust has settled and the box office tallies are in, it’s a little strange that Nintendo didn’t have a new 3D Mario game ready to release alongside The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. The sequel was all but assured to be a hit, so you’d think that Nintendo would have been ready to capitalize on that with a well-timed game. Instead, the closest thing we’re getting to a tie-in is Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, which coincides with both Yoshi and Bowser Jr.’s big-screen debuts. It felt like a strange bit of synergy, but I got it a little more after actually playing Yoshi’s Switch 2 adventure. Strangely enough, there’s a whole ode to Super Mario Galaxy hidden in it.
In Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, your job is to study creatures scattered around 10 distinct biomes. The final area? The Moon. Yoshi travels to outer space for the game’s climactic world, studying UFOs and goo balls that reproduce like rabbits. It’s a surprising cosmic conclusion for what’s otherwise a grounded game set in scenic forests, and it opens the door for an unexpected nod to the Galaxy series.
You can find it in a level built around Raphael the Raven, a somewhat obscure side-villain in the Yoshi series. The premise is that Yoshi can platform between small planets, hopping in and out of each one’s gravitational pull using the bird’s cosmic powers. Though you’re doing that from a 2D perspective, you can run around the surface of a planet just as you can in Super Mario Galaxy. More explicit, though, is that Raphael can gobble up Star Bits, the colorful gems that Mario collects in his 3D games. Aesthetically, it makes you feel like you’re playing a 2D version of Galaxy, as if you’re inside the pages of Rosalina’s storybooks.
Of course, true Nintendo diehards will know that the level I’m describing here isn’t really iterating on Galaxy at all; if anything, Super Mario Galaxy was riffing on Yoshi in 2007. Though the Galaxy games often get credit for creating the gravity-defying gameplay that has you running around a planet’s surface, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island did it first. In World 5, Yoshi has to platform his way between small planets, hopping between their gravitational fields. The gauntlet culminates in a boss fight against Raphael the Raven, in which Yoshi must ground-pound stumps on the side of the planet opposite Raphael to damage him.
