Yoshi and the Mysterious Book features a surprising ode to Super Mario Galaxy

Now that the dust has settled and the box office tallies are in, it’s a little strange that Nintendo didn’t have a new 3D Mario game ready to release alongside The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. The sequel was all but assured to be a hit, so you'd think that Nintendo would have been ready to capitalize on that with a well-timed game. Instead, the closest thing we're getting to a tie-in is Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, which coincides with both Yoshi and Bowser Jr.’s big-screen debuts. It felt like a strange bit of synergy, but I got it a little more after actually playing Yoshi’s Switch 2 adventure. Strangely enough, there’s a whole ode to Super Mario Galaxy hidden in it.

In Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, your job is to study creatures scattered around 10 distinct biomes. The final area? The Moon. Yoshi travels to outer space for the game’s climactic world, studying UFOs and goo balls that reproduce like rabbits. It’s a surprising cosmic conclusion for what’s otherwise a grounded game set in scenic forests, and it opens the door for an unexpected nod to the Galaxy series.

Image: Nintendo via Polygon

You can find it in a level built around Raphael the Raven, a somewhat obscure side-villain in the Yoshi series. The premise is that Yoshi can platform between small planets, hopping in and out of each one’s gravitational pull using the bird’s cosmic powers. Though you’re doing that from a 2D perspective, you can run around the surface of a planet just as you can in Super Mario Galaxy. More explicit, though, is that Raphael can gobble up Star Bits, the colorful gems that Mario collects in his 3D games. Aesthetically, it makes you feel like you’re playing a 2D version of Galaxy, as if you’re inside the pages of Rosalina’s storybooks.

Of course, true Nintendo diehards will know that the level I’m describing here isn’t really iterating on Galaxy at all; if anything, Super Mario Galaxy was riffing on Yoshi in 2007. Though the Galaxy games often get credit for creating the gravity-defying gameplay that has you running around a planet’s surface, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island did it first. In World 5, Yoshi has to platform his way between small planets, hopping between their gravitational fields. The gauntlet culminates in a boss fight against Raphael the Raven, in which Yoshi must ground-pound stumps on the side of the planet opposite Raphael to damage him.

You can draw a straight line from Yoshi’s Island to Super Mario Galaxy. The 2D planetary platforming laid the groundwork for Galaxy to pull off its 3D spin on that idea. Even the Digga-Leg boss fight in Super Mario Galaxy 2 is functionally a remake of the Raphael battle. You can thank Yoshi for that.

Image: Nintendo via Polygon

But wait! Even truer Nintendo diehards know that Yoshi’s Island wasn’t really first to the moon either! The first time a platformer in the Mario universe went into outer space was actually 1992’s Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. That game features a level called Space World that messes with gravity by making Mario jump much higher than usual. While Mario wasn’t able to run around planets, Super Mario Land 2 is one of the earliest instances of Nintendo trying to imagine how a platformer would work in space. That domino effect has carried through decades’ worth of games since then, as well as The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

It’s one of the reasons why I love keeping up with Nintendo games. Play them for long enough, and you’ll start to see decades of design fold in on itself. A one-off gimmick from a 15-year-old game might pop up in some totally unrelated series later, like a Splatoon 3 boss fight that takes notes from Super Mario Sunshine. There’s something rewarding about watching that design conversation play out over a lifetime, with old ideas taking on a life of their own when you least expect it. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book itself is a great example of that; you can see a little bit of every Yoshi game reflected in it, and even the ethos of the original Super Mario Bros. When it finally takes you to space, it’s taking you on a tour through over three decades of Nintendo history too. Far out, man.

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