“Why have all the bloat? We just need a fade out, and we should be good to go. Don’t need all this camera angle BS or Mario ‘entrances into the level’.”
Because the alternative is a loading screen. Which I realize 2D Mario does not have, but 2D Mario also has levels that require much, much less memory. Metroid Prime had similar transition scenes. In Metroid Prime 3, you could skip them if you wished. This would often result in a loading screen. Nintendo has been extremely dedicated to making sure that we do not have to stare at a blank screen for longer than we have to.
OK, then explain Mario 64 on the N64 then:
There is that star screen that makes a fast appearance (since you must select which star), but other than that the player gets in very fast. Obviously, the text box isn’t really needed.
What you do not see is huge animations of Mario entering the painting (because the player is still in control of Mario as he jumps through the painting). You don’t see ridiculous camera angles and pan shots of the stage. You do not have a ‘mario entrance’ animation. The game just starts pretty seamlessly.
What I’m trying to get across is not some dislike to 3d Mario, but that Nintendo has not been using the tool of 3d well. It is like a movie director who discovered cgi and then began overusing it, placing cgi in places where it shouldn’t be, and forget the point is to make a movie. All the 3d bloat in something as simple as just starting a level in Galaxy 2 is illustrative because I believe that motivation is what is steering Nintendo’s direction into the 3DS.
I do not believe the 3DS direction was an honest assessment of what excites customers or what leads to the mass market. Instead, I think a ‘3d obsession’ has captivated Nintendo’s developers. Look at the Wii. There should have been much more first person Nintendo games using the Wii controller extensively. Instead, we got more and more 3d Mario. And with Skyward Sword, it’s going to be Gamecube-esque Zelda with the motion control to serve no other role but as fodder for puzzle solving (like Zack and Wiki).
There has only been one break in Nintendo’s relentless obsession with 3d: the disaster of the Gamecube. Then, and only then, did Nintendo start making games that weren’t about ‘more 3d’. But this lasted only for a short while. A couple years of this, despite massive success, Nintendo developers got bored and we are now back to the 3d obsession that has characterized Nintendo’s direction since the Virtual Boy and N64.