Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the Mario series, was surprised that reviews for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie were mostly pretty negative, but in spite of the film’s critical drubbing, he wants future Mario games to reflect parts of the animated sequel. Specifically, he wants the movie’s exploration of Princess Peach’s backstory to become part of her story in the games, despite it potentially retconning decades of established lore.
In an interview with Nintendo Dream (translated by Nintendo Everything), Miyamoto, ever the walking contradiction when it comes to narrative and its supposed restraints, says that he typically doesn’t like being bound by story, which is why he hasn’t established lengthy backstories for Mario characters over the years. Now that Nintendo is being forced by the nature of cinema to actually create plot (though I’m using that term loosely), Miyamoto says it would like to adhere to the continuity it’s created in the movies.
“Because we don’t know what kind of game we’ll make next with our characters, having too many character settings would become a constraint,” Miyamoto said. “I’m fine with being bound by the gameplay, but I don’t want to be bound by having created a story, which has been the reason for not making movies for many years. So, before making this movie, I hadn’t decided on the character’s backstory, but now that I’m making the movie, it’s become fun to expand on the character in various ways. Therefore, I would like to adhere as much as possible to the settings created in the movie in future games.”
He’s specifically referring to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’s reveal that Peach and Rosalina, the magic-wielding guardian of the cosmos, are actually sisters. This isn’t the case in the games, as Rosalina’s backstory was plainly laid out in Super Mario Galaxy back in 2007, but early in the character’s development, Nintendo had entertained linking the two, which would have made some sense considering their strong resemblance.
In some ways, I find Nintendo’s determination to not ge caught up in lore and continuity endearing, as it feels like all media analysis has become a long list of Wikipedia Trivia facts, and having a big company just kinda throw that out the window and do whatever it feels like is a breath of fresh air. However, the way the company is inconsistent with this philosophy and now seems set to anchor a lot of its worldbuilding to bad reference-ridden, logic-defying movies kinda sucks.
Miyamoto seems to have become the “movies and theme parks” guy at Nintendo in recent years, though he still has producer credits on recent games like Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I’m all for someone trying new things, especially with Miyamoto in his 70s now and having essentially paved the way for the whole medium, but I do feel like we’re seeing the limits of a video game savant walking into an inherently story-driven medium when he has historically viewed narrative as a “constraint” rather than a tool. Hopefully the Zelda movie makes this transition a bit more cleanly, as those games have historically been story-driven in a way Mario hasn’t.
