What is the best looking Mario game?

[Andy 28!]

This is hard but HAS to be Luigi's Mansion 3 or Super Mario Odyssey, if I had to pick an older one is Super Mario Galaxy 2, the sky boxes look so good, the textures and the lighting are just peak. What you think?

 

[Dorayaki]

So far it's Odyssey. It literally has its own tourist book series to show how much Nintendo invest on the fictional cultures and lanscape.

Bananza also had many great views and is second behind.

Otherthan that, for nogstalia I'd say TTYD, which also feels like a real sightseeing experience.

 

[ButterCashier]

Umm... Sunshine?

 

[Princess Mint]

I think that Mario Kart World has had the best character animations.

 

[Hint Toad]

Definitely odyssey. Though I think my favorite visual style in a mario game would be SMB3. The colors and pixel art in that game are perfect.

 

[Fawfulthegreat64]

idk about best looking by the usual metrics, but i wanna give a shoutout to Dream Team. I adore its 3D environments and how well the character sprites just naturally fit in them. I didn't know the game used sprites when i first saw footage of it, i thought it was genuinely 3D models. And, the way they achieved lighting and detail on the 3DS was just so satisfying. I also am fascinated by the original environments from the 2010 build of Sticker Star for this reason. It was cartoony Mario 3D but somehow had a charm that even previous console entries didn't quite match, and the HD era hits different still. And Dream Team is my personal favorite showing of those 3DS visuals, with a wonderfully unique world to explore.

 

[Xiahou Ba]

I'm going to vote for Wario Land: Shake It, I think the hand-drawn visuals and animations are very gorgeous

I've been wanting a Mario game in a 2D art style for a very long time. Honestly would think Super Mario Bros. Wonder would look like a much better game had they actually gone that direction.

I also love reading our development section of it on MarioWiki, the task to do it must have been very Heruclean.

After some discussion, Harada and Ebisu decided to make Wario Land: Shake It! "the ultimate 2D game" by having everything hand-drawn, from the characters to the backgrounds. Knowing the massive amount of work this would entail, they considered simply using 3D polygons, but decided to take advantage of the fact that technology had finally advanced enough to support such a lofty undertaking (for example, according to program director Koichi Yagi, "the scenery alone would have filled up the Nintendo GameCube"). A single action taken by a character amounted to about 30 animation frames, resulting in 6000 enemy patterns, with 2000 more for Wario alone, in order to animate the roughly 200 actions he can perform. The backgrounds were non-repeating and hand-drawn, and just as any change to a character's design required all the frames to be adjusted, "even a small change [to the background] meant everything had to be changed", according to design director Tadanori Tsukawaki. The end result was worth the "hard labor", however, as even in the early builds that only had basic line drawings, Tsukawaki could tell that the game "has impact". Knowing that they would benefit from the involvement of more experienced anime companies, Good-Feel brought in Production I.G to help with character animation and the opening and ending cutscenes, while Kusanagi assisted with the background art.[16]​