Super Mario Galaxy 1+2 Is A New Template For HD Remasters

By Madeline Blondeau | October 17, 2025 | 12:00pm

Video Games Features game remasters

Super Mario Galaxy 1+2 Is A New Template For HD Remasters

In 2012, local authorities in Borja, Spain were stumped.

A local fresco of Jesus in the Santuario de la Misericordia church—done by 19th century painter Elias Garcia Martinez—had become something eldritch. The chipped, fading visage of the Holy Savior was now subsumed by a black-eyed abomination. It no longer resembled Christ, but a possessed Monchhichi doll. At first, the police suspected vandalism. But upon further investigation, they made an unlikely discovery—this desecration was, in reality, a labor of love.

Local widow and parishioner Cecilia Gimenez—in her 80s at the time—came forward on national television. The fresco was Gimenez’s favorite regional depiction of Christ. She’d grown discontent as moisture built up along the church’s walls, which flaked off and eroded the fresco. With the approval of the church’s priest, the amateur painter had attempted to restore the work herself. But her efforts backfired—mistaken as desecration, destined for internet meme infamy.

Gimenez’s story is a cautionary one—and one that applies to more than religious frescos. For every bespoke 4K restoration of a classic film done on European art grants, for instance, there are at least five other saturated, smudgy “remasters” of bankable Hollywood hits. Aliens and Star Wars are both much worse films to watch now than they were in their heyday, thanks to ceaseless tinkering in the name of “improvement.” The advent of AI “remasters”—which now clutter streaming platforms and store shelves alike—has only worsened matters, as evidenced by the 4K degradation of seminal sitcom Friends.

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Video games have been prone to this tinkering since their inception. The nature of the medium is that it is built on computing technology—an industry prone to rapid growth and one-upsmanship. As easy as it is to chide Sony and Konami for enterprises like The Last of Us Part I and the latter’s pair of high-profile remakes, it’s nothing new. Super Mario All-Stars, released in 1993, were total re-imaginings of four games all less than a decade old. By 2015, it had sold 10.55 million copies across just two platforms—the SNES and Wii. In a 2005 retrospective, Famitsu referred to All-Stars as the role model for all other game remakes. There’s always been money in remakes.

But Nintendo is a curious case, as far as remakes are concerned. It’s fair to characterize the company as reverent of their past, yet never beholden to it. Each successive generation of Nintendo home console is built to look forward, not backward—to bring new dimension and depth to their franchises’ horizons. Mario’s first jump out of the pipe in Super Mario 64, for example, or Link leaving the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild. These are moments that contextualize established players within new parameters, and invite the player to reevaluate what they think their respective series are capable of.

Their handhelds are a different story, but only just. True, they host a spate of arcade remakes and console ports—from the classic Game Boy Donkey Kong to tremendous 3DS remakes like Star Fox 64. But some of these are entirely different games from their predecessors—massive leaps, bounds, and handstands over what their previous versions accomplished. And while others—such as their 3DS N64 remakes or GBA SNES ports—are more literal interpretations of their source material, this too is innovation. These were games bound to home consoles less than 10 years prior, now portable and (in some cases) much prettier. They are better games, in many respects. Looking forward, not backward.

Nintendo’s pair of Super Mario Galaxy titles embody this ethos in every aspect. Released for the Wii in 2007 and 2010, respectively, the games take Mario and propel him far, far away from the safety of the Mushroom Kingdom. In both games, perennial pest Bowser yanks Princess Peach out into the vastness of the cosmos. With the energy of the Power Stars and Grand Stars, he takes the universe under siege and cedes various galaxies to his underlings as they terrorize the Luma—a race of celestial star infants, and friends to the Power Stars. Mario must ally himself with spacefarer Princess Rosalina in the first game and Luma Lubba in the second to knock Bowser down a peg, save Peach, and restore peace to the universe.

If the synopsis of both titles sound familiar, it’s because—for a period—they were the same game. Super Mario Galaxy 2 began development as Super Mario Galaxy More, pitched to producer Yoshiaki Koizumi by series creator Shigeru Miyamoto as a sort-of “Mario Galaxy 1.5.” Initial conversations focused on what worked, but soon shifted to what the team couldn’t include because of time constraints. These included elements like riding Yoshi, originally planned to be part of the base release.

“Despite the early worries about a lack of ideas, it turns out that pretty much everyone on the staff ended up having stage ideas,” wrote Anoop Gantayat in a 2010 summary of Nintendo’s developer roundtable on the game. “This included not just planners, but the visual and sound designers.”

That explosion of creativity is what fueled the birth of Super Mario Galaxy 2 under three years later. When played in conjunction on this year’s Switch remaster—simply titled Super Mario Galaxy 1+2—both games feel in conversation with each other. Not just in terms of narrative contrivance, but both in mechanical and aesthetic terms. Galaxy 2 spends less time explaining mechanics to players than the first, as the game assumes players have already figured their way around a Nunchuck and Wii remote. As a result, the sequel almost feels like the more difficult back half of Galaxy as opposed to a full-scale sequel. This is by design.

“The game has been developed and designed so that those who have conquered the prequel, Super Mario Galaxy 1, can feel as if it’s a continuation from the ending of that first game,” Miyamoto told Game Informer in 2010. “In other words, the difficulty level is set in that kind of sense, so that it’s more difficult for the beginner, and especially more difficult for the beginner who has never played the first game. I believe that there are a lot of things that they have to learn in the first one.”

But in 2025, most new players will not begin either game as originally designed. A modern majority will likely begin with the Switch release, released at $70 USD. These titles were originally made for the Wii, which itself is built upon an overclocked GameCube CPU. Their control schemes made liberal use of the infrared Wii Remote, from collecting and shooting Star Bits to steering Mario through various mini-games. Further, they were 480p games designed for non-HD hardware. This meant their art directions made extensive use of bold, loud colors to compensate for things like aliasing and fuzzy images. It’s also worth noting that this is another classic Nintendo approach: art direction over raw horsepower.

However, the Switch 2 (which I played these remasters on) is a 4K console. It’s capable of running titles that its predecessor struggled with—such as the platform’s Zelda titles or Pokemon’s 9th generation—faster, smoother, and at higher resolutions. Much of the intentional simplicity and muddiness inherent to some Galaxy assets would look worse at this fidelity. What was a soft, colorful, interactive cartoon on a 2008 Trinitron may look jagged and unfinished on a 54” OLED. This is not how Nintendo would want Galaxy to be remembered—not before the Galaxy movie next year, especially.

The tact the company has taken, then, can be likened to the work of Gianluigi Colalucci—the chief restorer of the Sistine Chapel, acting under direction of Vatican preservation director Carlo Pietrangeli. While the 1980-1999 restoration remains controversial to this day, the changes kept a vital but degraded work alive for a new millennium. Like this restoration, Galaxy is a mixture of old and new—the same work on a structural level, but rife with dramatic overhauls to areas which have aged or grown illegible over time. While the techniques used to get there are vastly different, the end result is a sharper, more colorful work that’s more accessible to a wider audience. Whether or not this is artistic sacrilege is up for debate, but the undeniable net positive of these changes—to both Sistine and Galaxy—is that more people will be able to experience the work as a whole.

Galaxy’s changes boil down to two major categories: new textures and refined gameplay. While Mario handles much in the same way as the original title, the player now supports him with either the JoyCon gyroscope or the Switch’s touchscreen. The constant Star Bit cursor can be reset by tapping L+R at any point, with none of the responsiveness or flutter issues hallmark to the initial releases. Motion control gimmick levels feel better as a result—Bubble Breeze Galaxy, for instance, can be navigated by tapping Mario in handheld mode or the player gently curving their wrist. Rolling Green Galaxy, which tasks players to tilt a sphere into a hole, is much more manageable now. I also find myself missing far fewer Star Bits in every galaxy regardless of how I play. These tweaks make both games more enjoyable, and eradicate distracting aspects of the original.

The more obtrusive changes are the asset swaps—some of which have been detailed by benchmark stalwarts Digital Foundry. Mario himself is the most immediate difference, with more detailed overalls that replace the opaque blue texture of the original. Princess Peach also gets a noticeable bump, with new eyeballs that finally shed their compressed murkiness. Bowser also receives a face lift, as his softer scales avoid the bumpiness of his character model in the original. All this being said, these are still functionally the same models. There are no new animations or the like, and certainly nothing that brings the level of expression to par with Super Mario Odyssey or Donkey Kong Bananza.

This is also true of the worlds themselves. An opaque brown smudge in Good Egg Galaxy is now a tidy bed of straw; water in the Loopdeeloop Galaxy is clearer and shinier. These are not dramatic overhauls, but instead, intuitive changes built off the original vision. They serve to make the original titles appear more finished, as opposed to being re-imagined outright. Rough dirt textures have been replaced with smoother ground, and wood has a more defined grain. But what really dazzles about these remasters, to me, is how these minor changes work in concert with the resolution bump. Camera angles and level layouts are the exact same, but with more of the action pulled back and given life by the HD presentation.

The consequence of this is that the scale and scope of Mario’s interplanetary adventures finally feel realized. It is dizzying, sometimes, to navigate the squat plumber against the background of an orbiting planet. With details like asteroid belts and planetary atmosphere more legible than ever, the game’s penchant for bending gravity can be downright nauseating at times. Watching Mario slip into the vastness of space and float off forever evokes a kid-friendly Gravity now. Moments like this could not exist had either game been remade outright—they quite literally would not have been the same game. Instead, the fresh coat of paint serves to highlight what were always good artistic choices regardless of hardware.

Bluntly, I do not want either Super Mario Galaxy installment remade, the same way I would not want a “remake” of the Sistine Chapel. I do not want Nintendo to allocate company resources towards trotting out their recent past with a fresh coat of paint, then calling it a new game. This practice is not modern, and in fact, Nintendo even kick-started it with works like All-Stars. But as the turn of the millennium came and went, they generally moved away from these projects; instead, the company wisely stuck to innovation versus iteration. Preservation and adaptation, as opposed to the reinvention and futurist jargon of the competition. It paid dividends over the next quarter-century, where its numbers and cultural repute are in a much more desirable position than Sony or Microsoft’s gaming divisions.

From this standpoint, Super Mario Galaxy 1+2 is a template for how publishers and developers can choose to preserve their work—new tools, different techniques used to enhance (not surpass) the original vision. This approach respects the initial work, while making vital changes so that newer generations might see and appreciate it with fresh eyes. It’s the difference between colorizing Casablanca versus teasing out the sumptuous black-and-gray of its chiaroscuro lighting. One highlights a visual element that’s hallmark to the film’s style; the other is a geek show aberration done in the name of profit alone.

For artists, it’s tempting to look at previous efforts, then fantasize about another chance at them. But this temptation can amount to overpriced navel-gazing—three games called The Last of Us, with the first two practically stricken from company record. Attempts and efforts to recapture and heighten what worked less than 10 years ago, but just those: attempts and efforts. More layers of paint dumped on by underpaid contract laborers whose only prompt seems to be “make it more realistic.”

Eventually, though, they may just arrive at the same place as Cecilia Gimenez—a facsimile of the original which captures none of the beauty, driven only by a compulsion to “improve” that which may not need to be touched.

Madeline Blondeau has been writing about games since 2010. She’s written for Paste, Anime Herald, Anime News Network, CGM, and Lock-On, among others. In addition, she has written, hosted, and recorded film criticism podcast Cinema Cauldron. Her published fiction debut is due out between 2026 and 2027. You can support her work on Patreon, and find her on BlueSky @mads.haus.