‘Super Mario Odyssey’ Two Player Co-Op Confirmed
It has been a whirlwind of gaming news in the middle of June as 2017’s Electronic Entertainment Expo is coming to a close, but there are still tidbits of interesting information that are trickling out even now. In the wake of further trailer reveals for the much anticipated Super Mario Odyssey, which is set to release on the Nintendo Switch around the holidays, we now know much more about the game, story, and how it will play when we get our hands on it. What we didn’t know until today is that Super Mario Odyssey will also feature two-player co-op play, which will be implemented in the most peculiar of ways.
The news broke on June 15 via the official Nintendo Treehouse live stream. During a Super Mario Odyssey segment of the stream, game designer Kenta Motokura revealed the feature and went briefly into why and how it works. In co-op mode, player one will control Mario while player two takes up the role of Mario’s living hat, Cappy. Cappy has been showcased as a feature that allows Mario to attack enemies, traverse obstacles, and possess certain enemies, but with co-op, another player can control Cappy to better utilize various other features.
Although a demonstration of co-op Super Mario Odyssey wasn’t displayed during the stream, some details were revealed in the single-player about how two players might work together. Cappy has been shown to have a boomerang effect of sorts, allowing Mario to collect distant items with much greater ease than on his own. Cappy can also fly around and launch its own attacks, separate of Mario himself. Just as well, unlike Mario, Cappy cannot be injured, so player two might actually have an easier time with the game, albeit performing very important functions to allow Mario to keep progressing through worlds.
Although previous Mario games have often featured more concrete characters that have similar capabilities as Mario, such as Luigi, Toad, and Peach, Odyssey seems to step furthest from that context with Cappy as a character that controls completely different functions. Kenta Motokura expanded on the reasoning for this during the stream, claiming that co-op functionality was an intended feature from the start of the project. Motokura mentioned that since the Nintendo Switch offers two working controls for all games as a part of the starting package, co-op play simply made sense.
Of all the announcements for E3 in 2017, Super Mario Odyssey has been a favorite among the show. Nintendo had a particularly strong E3 conference, showing off various other new and upcoming games as well. A game featuring Mario and the Rabbids from Ubisoft’s Rayman and Raving Rabbids spinoff series, called Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was announced on Ubisoft’s leg of the show, while new Metroid games garnered huge applause during Nintendo’s conference. Moreover, Nintendo announced the intention to bring a proper Pokemon role-playing game to the Switch, capitalizing on a previous announcement of Pokemon games that included an upcoming port of Pokken Tournament for the Switch.
There have already been situations in single-player demonstrations of Super Mario Odyssey where Mario and Cappy play co-op roles in solving various puzzles. Sometimes Cappy has to fly to an unreachable place and toggle a switch while Mario carries something important for the duo. It will be interesting to see how these features are expanded when two people are handling the separate characters. Moreover, co-op play will make Super Mario Odyssey a more exciting journey to take up with a friend.
[Featured Image by Nintendo]
