Thanks for saving me the trouble of making this thread myself! It'll help with me going to sleep on time before work, lol.
As I've stated in the "Favorite 1st Party Switch Games" thread, Super Mario Odyssey is my favorite game on the Switch. On a system with some incredible games both exclusive and not exclusive, Odyssey is the one to beat for me, with only 3D World + Bowser's Fury competing for that top spot. And this is a system with games like Breath of the Wild, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Metroid Dread, Splatoon 3, Smash Ultimate, Super Mario Maker 2, Luigi's Mansion 3, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Sonic Mania, Celeste, Hades, and a bunch more that I spend dozens and dozens of hours with.
I remember watching E3 2017, waiting eagerly to see more of the game after that first January trailer. We had a great taste of the wild open worlds you would be going to, and Mario's hat being used as essentially a portable platform was a novel enough mechanic. But that trailer...from the dinosaur making me think it was a Monster Hunter trailer to the reveal of the brilliant capture mechanic to the return of Pauline of all characters to the earlier than expected October release date...I was, no pun intended, over the moon with what I saw. I happened to be going to Nintendo NY to meet up with some friends, and I realized that I was able to play the E3 demo there, and I was so excited. Waiting on that line to try out New Donk City was absolutely worth it.
Super Mario Odyssey is the only game I went to an in-person midnight release for. At the time I was taking night classes, so I could afford to go and wake up late the next morning. That's exactly what I did - I got the game, I rushed home, and played for like two or three hours straight. It was love at first play. I remember the distinct excitement I had watching the opening cutscene and hearing the airship lietmotif from Super Mario Maker's SMB mode, what a great reuse of that song. The Cap Kingdom made an instant impression with its more mysterious, monochrome look, a very different first stage for a Mario title even as a tutorial. I got to control Mario again, remembering certain things from the demo, and he felt practically perfect - the right speed with lots of ways to get going, all the acrobatic jumps I could ask for, and plenty of advanced techniques as I would soon discover over my time playing. And that first frog capture set the tone perfectly - it was wacky and weird and gave me a whole new way to move around, a delightful new take on the 3D Mario temporary/level specific power up system. I kept playing until I reached the Sand Kingdom, and I had to pull away so I could get some rest.
At the time, I decided to go for every Power Moon you could possibly collect on the first visit, so I got a lot of time to learn and explore each new Kingdom. For many years (and to an extent still to this day), the core Super Mario brand was very focused on the New Super Mario Bros. style, one that was more focused on game-y levels and repeated world aesthetics. I love the games that the 3D Mario team worked on at the time, and I do enjoy NSMB, but with most spinoffs barring Mario Kart 8 leaning so hard on that one identity, the Mario world felt like it was growing smaller. Odyssey goes in the complete opposite direction - each world has something to it that makes it stand out radically from the rest, giving us completely unique worlds (Cap, Wooded, Metro, Bowser's Kingdom) or excellent spins on classic world ideas (Cascade, Sand, Lost, Seaside, Luncheon, Moon). You are consistently given new aesthetics and sounds, new NPC species to interact with, and of course a myriad of new captures to mix up your combat and traversal mechanics; and this made each new kingdom exciting to explore, as even the weaker levels had some unique or charming element to stand out. The Metro Kingdom might be my favorite platforming world in any game. As a New Yorker, I'm a sucker for seeing NYC or NYC-inspired areas in fiction, and they managed to take the concept of a Manhattan level and turn it into such an incredible platforming experience - scaling up and around skyscrapers, swinging on poles, bouncing off taxis, so many little nooks and crannies to explore while still keeping the area compact and navigable, and all this without even relying on enemies or any of the game's wilder captures.
Of course, good play mechanics and good world building can fall apart in a game with a weak structure. That's the major flaw of Super Mario Sunshine - the game is ostensibly built like Super Mario 64, but the open progression (get 70/120 main collectibles to get to the final boss) is replaced by having the player do specific missions, with all other missions only mattering for 100% completion. Odyssey splits the difference there well. You still have to visit every kingdom, but instead your goal is to collect a specific number of moons from that world, and the numbers are kept relatively low. Thus, players of lower skill levels can go for the simple moons while skilled players can go for them all, and players in between still have enough room to reach the 500/880 moon threshold to access all of the post game content. This has led to criticisms of "too many moons" or "too many easy filler moons," but that never particularly bothered me when I played the game back in 2017. It was instead, "Ooh, another moon, I'm making more progress!" The Regional Coins, perhaps the closest the game has to a Blue Coin mechanic, instead get to serve as currency for the shop alongside the standard yellow Coin, and the cosmetics greatly celebrated Mario's history and the eclectic cultures of each kingdom. On every level - structure, mechanics, world design, aesthetics & sound - Super Mario Odyssey nails it, and any complaints I do have - the wall jump is perhaps not as strong as it could be, some of the worlds are a touch awkward as floating voids, maxing out Luigi's Balloon World is a bit of a grind, a couple of the mini game missions are annoying - are ultimately nitpicks.
In a time when the Super Mario brand was becoming increasingly safe and almost a bit sterile, Super Mario Odyssey showed that the franchise still had it - and it didn't need to sacrifice the lessons learned from the previous decade of 3D Mario games to get back there. Mario could bounce between linear games and open games, and the devs at EPD Tokyo could handle it all. While Bowser's Fury was a fantastic appetizer, I'm eager to see a new 3D Mario game as the big headline title for the next Nintendo system. If Odyssey is anything to go by, I am confident that they'll blow me away once again.
The last time I played through Super Mario Odyssey was in 2017 into 2018. As of writing this post, it'll soon cross the exact five year mark. While I cannot play the game at midnight anymore - gotta consider work and all that - I am eager to dive back into the game once I get home and see if my feelings have changed on it after all these years. I'll post updates in this thread as I go!