Articles Mario Sports Mix

Published on February 11th, 2011 | by Jasmine

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Leave Luck to Heaven #5: Mario Sports Mix Doesn’t Add Much to the Mix

This week’s big game on the Wii was Mario Sports Mix.  In the same vein as older Mario Sports games. The four sports are made more lively and colourful with the addition of Mario characters, weapons, and special moves. The four sports this time around are basketball, dodgeball, hockey, and volleyball.

Story wise, there is one but it’s weak and really just superfluous.  This game is clearly all about playing with some friends at a party.  The games are easy to pick up for this reason and somewhat addictive. Now on the flip side, the one player game is just as easy to pick up but super repetitive.  You just play through the same tournament, same games, over-and-over with minimal difficulty increase.  The only reward to doing this is unlocking additional characters.  The most of these characters are colour variations of Toad or Yoshi.  However, the gems among these unlocks are characters from Square Enix games including the ninja, white mage, black mage, and moogle from the Final Fantasy series.

The levels are probably what add the most to the game.  Each level has its quirks and fun but once you get use to them they only add so much.  The areas are rather compact so there is only so much to add in this way.  Like the characters, more of these locales are added as you play through the one player game.

Unfortunately, these unlockable characters are barely enough to hold out for.  Once you’ve played the games once, there really isn’t a huge reason to go back.  Now to avoid this lack of change there is an online mode, for those lacking local friends. The good news is that simply by playing enough games you can also unlock the extra characters.  So really just let the good times roll and just play with friends.

Now the controls are incredibly simple.  For the most part you could play the entire game just flicking your wrist.  Now there are two options, which is to either hold the remote like a classic controller or use the nunchuk.  I suggest the nunchuk as at this point it seems more natural but that’s up to the player.  The nunchuk style lends itself to a lot more variety but the weird thing is there isn’t much.  In fact, once you learn to play one you pretty much know how to play them all.  In fact this really only adds to the redundancy that is already there.

In the end, this is a really weak Mario offshoot. I guess till one of the classic sports games comes out then we’re stuck with this one, but it is probably better to skip this one.

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