There are two things that have been really irking me since the announcement of the game: the music with lyrics, and the regular people.
I always understood that Mario is a regular human who travelled to a magical place (the Mushroom Kingdom), but now when he travels to Not-New-York-City in Odyssey the entire city is filled with normal looking people and Mario stands out like a CGI smurf.
It would be one thing if all the people were cartoony like Mario, but that’s not the case. At least in the awful Smurfs movie the human character Gargamel was played by an actual human.
The other thing is the soundtrack with lyrics. It’s hard to put my finger on why it is, but having lyrics in a video game sound track is just wrong. The only time having voices work for me is when the voices are used in an a capella way, i.e. in place of instruments like in The Witcher, but not when the lyrics were meant to be complete sentences to be listened to. Watching the ending really made me double-cringe.
Both of those things remind me of the 3D Sonic games, they too have both lyrics in their soundtrack and cartoony animals interacting with what are meant to be real people. It’s just wrong.
It is interesting if game makers, such as Nintendo, develop games such as Mario Odyssey based on the direction they see movies going. We know that Mario developers have been heavily influenced by popular shows that kids watch. If it weren’t for Minecraft’s popularity with kids, Nintendo would likely never have dared to have such camera control to players in Zelda BoW “Wow!”.
All I know is that Mario games are not made for me. I actually wonder who they are made for. With the exception of Sunshine, every Mario game is lauded as ‘incredible’ and ‘amazing’, yet the hardware sometimes sells or sometimes doesn’t sell.
I do think the heritage of old school Mario inoculates modern 3d Mario from serious criticism.