How Super Mario Galaxy shows coming to terms with separation anxiety
The Super Mario series of games is well known for how joyful it is usually portrayed. On most installments, an Italian plumber from Brooklyn goes to the rescue of a princess from the hands of a huge turtle. And it does this by jumping and running and wa-hooing along his way. Even on situations that seem dramatic, scary or hopeless, Mario remains persistent and joyful through his quest.
But Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii is a notorious exception to this. Even though Super Mario Sunshine was the first game of the series with a clear theme around the game world, Galaxy and Galaxy 2 are the games that fully embraced this concept, particularly the first game.
The stories of both of these two games is very similar: They tell the story of becoming separated from a loved one. However, the first one portrays this in a much more somber and straight to the point than the second, and in my opinion, in a better way.
Rosalina’s story
At the beginning of Galaxy, you meet a space lady called Rosalina, the central figure behind a massive spaceship, the Comet Observatory, which can soar space like a comet. As you progress through the game, you can enter the observatory’s library and listen to Rosalina reading a storybook to her “children”, some star shaped fellows called Luma.
In actuality, this storybook is a telling of her past. One night, she encountered a small Baby Luma, who was waiting for his mama to come for him. He tells the child Rosalina that she would come on a comet. This will become an important detail later.
Rosalina suggest him to go on his search, and so they soared through the stars in search for comets. Eventually, they reached several comets, but they couldn’t find her mama. When the pair began to think that the Baby Luma wouldn’t see her mother ever again, Rosalina promised to take care of him as if it was his mother, and decided to settle in on a comet.
But the story continues: Eventually, they found many other Luma and built a home on the comet. But they still waited for the little Luma’s mother. After seeing the 100th comet pass, she thought about checking up on home from the telescope, only to grow homesick, wishing to go back.
You see, prior to the beginning of the story, Rosalina’s mother passed away, and she once dreamt that should she leave, she would turn herself into a star to watch over her. But Rosalina was fully aware that she was being delusional. She knew that she was buried under the tree of a hill close to her home. She was dreaming that as a way to cope with the grief.
The next chapter after this can be quite confusing to some. The Baby Luma gets an idea, that he’d transform into a comet so that he could carry her to go back to her planet.
Galaxy’s storytelling and Mario’s quest
