The Bowser and the Fury
Part 2 of a series on Super Mario 3D World
Bowser’s Fury begins with Mario romping through a dim blue hell in which the screen is blotted with water droplets a la certain levels of Mario 3D World. He runs off of a platform into the water and gargles out an “ohbonobo” as he drowns. Bowser laughs a guttural laugh deeper than usual and not quite like any we’ve heard him laugh before. At this point in the game, my girlfriend, sitting next to me after a few rounds of 3D World’s multiplayer, gasps at me “why is this SO. SCARY?!” Soon after meeting a powered up Bowser that looks like a cross between Gamera and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword’s Demise, we begin an adventure in a beautiful sunny archipelago called “Lake Lapcat” in which everything is a cat.
Everything. Is. A. Cat. The goombas are cats. There are cat ostriches. Enormous cat statues. Actual honest-to-God cats of all colours. Lighthouses made of cats. Fucking cats everywhere, hiding behind other cats, like pedophiles in a Q Anon fever dream.
Someday someone will make a youtube video finding every cat in Bowser’s Fury, and it will quickly amass thousands of views. But I am not a youtuber and this post will be lucky to be seen a few dozen times. The thing that matters about Bowser’s Fury isn’t the creepy fact that everything is some poor cat trapped inside of something else (or is it the other way around?) yelping on the inside. What matters is that Bowser’s Fury is a stunning little game.
In my last post I wrote at length about the Mario spectrum, the grand unifying theory of Mario games in which each title resides somewhere between an open-world sandbox and corridor-like obstacle course. Bowser’s Fury places itself the farthest towards the open-world sandbox of any Mario game. There is no hub world. Mario either swims or rides his dinosaur friend, Plessie, from island area to island area, finding large shiny star-things made out of cat heads or little tokens made out of cat heads that combine to form the larger, shinier cat head things. As far as I can remember, this is the only Mario game ever to completely eschew a hub world or level-select screen.
The craziest thing about all this is that Bowser’s Fury is chock full of design elements from Mario 3D World, the other game on this cartridge, and a game that represents its opposite on the Mario spectrum. There are a few changes that make this possible, including a completely different multiplayer concept that removes the 4-player madness of 3D world and replaces it with asymmetrical multiplayer in which player 2 controls Bowser Jr. Bowser Jr can attack with a brush and float around, but Mario does all of the heavy lifting. This multiplayer is so much better than the silly shit* we’re used to from Mario’s more sandbox-oriented adventures even if it feels completely lacking compared to 3D World’s friendship challenging free-for-all. But Bowser’s Fury, unlike 3D World, isn’t designed around multiplayer madness, it’s designed around single player exploration, and absolutely crushes it. This lack of four player multiplayer also frees up the camera, which allows 360 degree motion in stark contrast to the all-isometric-all-the-time camera of 3D World.
Like Mario’s latest iteration, Super Mario Odyssey, there are collectibles everywhere. 50 shiny red cat heads are required to beat the game, but there are 100 lounging around the isles of Lake Lapcat. They are strewn across numerous islands that are sort of like individual levels and sort of like the different branching pathways through Mario 64’s lava world. For the most part the cat star head things aren’t too difficult to get, and I beat the game in four or five hours. Presuming the rest of the cat heads take about the same amount of effort we can assume that Bowser’s Fury, a random add-on to an eight year old game, packs something like 8-10 hours worth of content. As if there wasn’t enough content in Mario 3D World to entice the dozens of millions of Switch owners who never bothered to jump on the Wii U hype train.
As for a recommendation? It looks great, plays great, sounds great, and is bursting at the seems with creativity. Just like every other mainline 3D Mario game.
*HEY LITTLE BRO, PICK UP A WIIMOTE AND POINT IT AT RANDOM SHINY STUFF ONSCREEN