!!THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!! I really wish itch had spoiler tags…
This was a very enjoyable mod! I really like the stories you came up with for this and your previous mod, Sacred Trio. There’s fun characters, pretty visuals and some interesting battles as well.
I really liked your use of colors in every aspect of the mod. From the slightly tinted dialogue boxes to the recolored hud to the eerie hues of the maps, it’s clear a lot of thought was put into it and it resulted in a very atmospheric experience.
I do have some complaints, mainly the music. If you weren’t aware, significant progress has been made in the tooling for PM64 music imports in the past several years, allowing songs to actually sound good without hitting any pitch limits, without notes playing way longer than they should, and with fitting instrumentation as well (including percussion! which I found especially lacking here). Many mods have demonstrated this ever since 2022, but it seems the community at large still believes imports are just fated to sound bad. Heck, I’ve heard some eerily source-accurate ports of that boss theme in the music channel.
I absolutely loved that Jr Troopa was a partner, it was a very pleasant surprise and I think putting him over Parakarry was a great choice. He’s well animated and just overall very fun to lug around with you. I do think you got his character a little wrong in the writing, though. Idk, his dialogue just didn’t seem like things he’d say in vanilla. But who knows, maybe I’m just missing some context from the full game.
Then here’s some technical problems I encountered:
- The game crashed any time a Dry Bones enemy threw a bone in battle, eventually I just decided to avoid starting any battles with Dry Bones because it was that consistent.
- The mushroom platforms in the Flame Stomp map have some very weird collision, Mario is clearly just walking on air.
- There’s a blind drop in a map very early on. Worse yet, it’s at an edge that has collision on one side but not another, and there’s zero visual indication of where you can/can’t jump off.
- Some of the bushes in the right side room with the dry bones on it use the wrong marker, so if you interact with them a coin or item will pop out in a completely different spot on the map.
- Several maps started to lag as soon as even one item or coin was spawned on them. There’s ways to optimize maps, I think mov made a video about it at one point.
Overall though, I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to Star Nova even more than I was after I played Sacred Trio! (And if you’d like help with importing music, feel free to ask me 👀)