MFGG - Mario Fan Games Galaxy

Review Information

Game Reviewed	N/A, by N/A
Review Author	Proking235
Created	May 9 2021, 11:57 AM

General Commentary and Game Overview

I don't know what to say. I'm speechless, truly. Is Hello clinically insane? That's the only conclusion I can come to. First, some background. For those who don't know, this is the 4th installment in the Super Mario Prism franchise. Don't worry, if you haven't beaten those games, this game has nothing to do with them. It just uses the same engine, "graphical style", and music of the rest of the series. That said DON'T PLAY THIS GAME. DON'T PLAY ANY OF THESE GAMES! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T!!!
These games are infamous for how god-awful they are. Each new installment brings in some new abominable changes. These games have gotten worse and worse since Prism, and Prism is one of the worst video games of all time (it makes E.T. look like a masterclass in game design). I am a veteran of these games, but only because I seem to hate myself. I have a hankering to play terrible games and these games fit that bill to a tee. That said, I like bad games that are bad for a variety of reasons. These games have been god-awful since prism, and the core issues that make them suck still haven't been fixed 4 games in so even I am getting tired of this.
For those wondering what my record with these games is, I have completed Super Mario Prism 100% twice and am building speedrun strategies for the game, I have beaten Toadette's Sweet Gallery 100% one time and am currently doing my second playthrough, I have completed Super Crown Land 100% once and am almost complete my second 100% run through the game, and I have completed this game (that includes all 15 stars in its remake of Taodette's Sweet Gallery, all 2 stars in the Isekai Trial, and all 60 Stars in the main Isekai Mario story) 100% (though I have not yet gotten all the characters for reasons I will explain below). Needless to say, I am more than qualified to review this game.

Pros

I'll say that it theoretically has a lot of content. 3 games may seem like a lot, but again as I'll explain later that isn't really the case. It certainly does have a lot of neat level design ideas, and some that I might even consider theoretically fun if it wasn't this game. I also like that you aren't Bowsette in disguise when you play other characters and that you can mix and match voices and models. I can certainly say it was nice to play as Luigi with DIO's voice. But that's about all the good I can say about this game.

Cons

Alright, so why is it so terrible. Well, the game is just bad. Like, everything is bad, even more so than the other games (as has come to be the norm now). Like I did with the other reviews, I will split this into sections: Physics and Control of the Character, Physics and Control of the Environment, The Physics Themself, The Music, The Camera, and then I will move into the actual build of the game and its other nonfundamental issues.

Physics and Control of the Character: The physics and control have been tweaked again. This time the game uses the Super Crown Land physics, though long jumping is much easier than in SCL. That said, the main problems of the physics are still there. The character is much too floaty and hard to control, inputs don't come out as you want them, it's still hard to gauge what you can and can't do because the abilities are so inconsistent, and some abilities (like the wall jump and backflip) feel extremely janky and uncontrollable. I find it extremely easy to play with the controls, but I am a veteran of these games. For people who are new to these games, it still feels awful to play, and I know this for a fact because while I was playing it, I was on a voice call with 2 other people who had never played before and they could barely get past the first few stages.

Physics and Control of the Environment: Once again the physics of objects you interact with (such as switches and boxes) have been changed again. Boxes now slide around and go up slopes much easier than they did in, say, Toadette's Sweet Gallery, but now boxes do not collide with each other properly. They get partially fused to one another, which causes one particular star in Toadette's Sweet Gallery to be almost impossible to get. I only got it because I got lucky and the boxes decided to disconnect from one another for seemingly no reason. Switches, on the other hand, have not been changed much. They are still awkward as all get-out to ground pound, and the flat switches now have an issue that wasn't present in SCL where they will sometimes just not register entities (such as enemies) to be pressing them. This can cause "some" frustration in levels that require you to use enemies to press these switches.

The Physics Themself: Same old problems that haven't been fixed 4 games in. Objects still collide and rotate around breaking massive portions of the game. If you jump onto a solid block that a spike throws your momentum will still affect it and send it reeling off course, thereby sending you to an early grave. Objects thrown by hammer bros are still not custom objects, instead being physics objects with a hitbox. This continues to be infuriating, especially now as they have the added bonus of being able to bounce around for seemingly no reason. Then there are other, more minor issues, like the collision detection still being janky as heck with you sometimes getting shoved off of the ground like it was a wall or being able to jump off of a wall like it was ground (though this one is new). One time I also managed to wall jump off the ground somehow. Needless to say, the game's physics are broken almost beyond repair. The engine needs to be completely remade if this game is to be any good at all.

The Music: The music is a mixed bag. This is the first game to re-use music from older entries, almost like it's trying to nostalgia bait, but it doesn't give me nostalgia, it just gives me some strange form of PTSD and reminds me of how annoying the songs in those games were. There are some stand-out good tracks, but there are also some tracks that sound like some eldritch abomination trying to scream in some manner that it believes to be music. Overall it's a mixed bag, with it being more bad than good.

The Camera: Dear god the camera. Why. Why would you do this? This series went from having one of my favorite 3D game cameras to having one of the absolute worst cameras in any serious game ever. It's like a satire of Mario 64. The camera constantly tries to be behind the player, and I mean constantly. If you aren't touching the right stick it will always be slowly turning back to directly behind the player. This can be problematic as the game still doesn't lock shadows below the player so there is no depth perception, and it makes observing your surroundings even harder than in previous games. The game also still lacks a first-person view, something I have been asking for since THE FIRST GAME because this game can sometimes be extremely cryptic with where it wants you to go (especially in the Isekai Trial levels).

General Problems with the game: This game makes a grand return to the Super Mario Prism level format of having the levels be open 3D spaces. Something to note though is that, unlike Super Mario Prism, the game is EXTREMELY EASY. It is far and away the easiest Mario Prism game. That doesn't make it a game for casual players though, as the game physics will still keep any casual player from playing this game for longer than 5 minutes. The game is easy for more experienced players, who are the only ones who are really going to give this game a chance. That's what I meant by "It has a lot of content in theory". The main story, all 60 stars, can be beaten in under an hour casually. When you know where the stars are and how to get them you could probably beat it even faster. The Isekai Trials game mode doesn't have much content either, as it's only 2 levels which can be beaten in about an hour between the 2. Then you just have the Toadette's Sweet Gallery remaster, which is A) Even worse than the original because the levels weren't designed for the new physics changes causing new softlocks and some objectives that are nearly impossible to complete and B) Only about 1 hour long even if you complete it 100%. This means the game only has 3 hours of content which is less than SCL. The only reason to play the game after you've cleared it is the theoretical content that will be added through updates and the GACHA GAME MECHANICS!!!! That's right, of all the things hello though this game needed, he thought the best thing to add would be A %#!& GACHA SYSTEM!!?!?!? WHAT??!!?!? Words cannot express my sheer confusion and anger at this decision. First of all, this is a Fan Game, and a terrible one. No one is going to keep playing your MARIO FAN GAME to see what ANIME CHARACTERS they can get. But if that wasn't bad enough, the actual characters you get suck! Like, actually they are straight-up WORSE than your bog-standard Mario and Luigi. This is because the Anime characters are MUCH LARGER than Mario and Luigi, and not only are they VISUALLY much larger, they are also ACTUALLY MUCH LARGER HITBOX WISE. This makes some stars actually impossible to get with any character that isn't Mario or Luigi because the other characters literally can't fit into the space you need to get into the progress through the game. This means the only reason to keep playing the game is to have A CHANCE of getting (because yes, you can get duplicate characters for some incomprehensible reason) characters that are FACTUALLY WORSE than your base characters. Not a very compelling reason to play the game. Also, unless you want to spend 100 years grinding money because each character roll is a minimum of 100 coins (maximum of 300 (the price goes down as you level up (yes, I know, I struggle to comprehend it too))), you have to wait for the week to go by so you can play the daily challenges. This is why I don't have every character. There is something like over 100 and it would cost hundreds of thousands of coins to get them all and I could be spending the tens or hundreds of hours getting those coins playing better games.

Impressions

Gameplay 1 / 10	In my cons section, I didn't get to talk about the level design so I'll discuss it here. The levels in the Isekai Mario game have some very interesting ideas, but again some of the objectives can be less than transparent on what you're actually supposed to do, and even if the ideas are interesting and seem fun, actually controlling your character isn't fun... at all. As for the other games, the first Isekai Trial is the closest thing to genuine fun I've ever had playing this game, and the second trial is the most disappointing thing I've ever played. The second level is full of cheap traps that you have no possible way to see coming, and at the end of the level it seems like hello just gave up and you are forced to do 4 identical blind jumps in a row. With the game's physics and the nature of these jumps, it feels like complete luck if you beat it or not. Finally, for Toadette's Sweet Gallery the level design is exactly the same as it was before, just with the added bonus of a camera the game wasn't designed for, physics the game wasn't designed for, and an all-new softlock in world 2-1 because the hitbox of talking to NPCs was increased. The hitbox was changed to be made larger and a property was added that forces you to turn toward them, so if you ground pound the blocks above the Toad without breaking an escape route, you are softlocked because the only way to get out of the block pile is to jump, and jumping is the same button as interact.
Graphics 1 / 10	The graphics are abysmal. The "anime" art style looks nothing but hideous and bland, the levels ARE STILL made of squares with SM3DW textures slapped on them with no love or care, there STILL aren't any particle effects or other basic gameplay visual effects (like flashing to indicate invincibility frames), and this time we have some atrocious animations to boot. Most of the enemies use animations ripped straight from the source game of the model, but all the anime characters share the same set of custom-made "anime" animations which look like complete garbage. They are so abhorrently awful that it's almost funny because on many characters it looks like they've crapped themselves. Something else that's almost comedic at this point is that the shadows STILL, 4 GAMES IN, aren't locked to your character so precise jumps and depth perception aren't a thing. This time though, there's the added bonus of some object not even being able to have a shadow cast on them (such as large springs, which are precisely platformed on during one part of the game). Easily a 1/10.
Sound 1 / 10	The sound design is awful. Many things that need sound effects still don't have them such as spikes throwing objects, object rolling, landing on the ground after a jump, sliding on the wall, piranha plants rearing up for attack, etc. and, of course, the music is bad. On most stages, I'd say it can be inoffensive, but much of it has been made in a way that gets extremely grating after you have heard it for the 10th loop, and some songs are extremely annoying or straight-up bad. There is 1 song that is actually pretty good, but 1 song does not a good ost make.

Final Words

It's exactly what you all expected. Abysmal garbage. It's the same abysmal garbage we've seen before, and it's looking like we're going to be seeing the same abysmal garbage for years yet to come. May the 1/10's keep would-be players away, even those who like bad games. If you want to play a bad game, you can play literally any other game in the series because they are all bad for the exact same reasons and you'd probably have a better time with any one of the others. If you want to play a good game, stay far, far away.

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Comments

	Hedgemaster Jun 27 2021, 5:00 AM
imagine still caring about hello fangaming in 2021

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