The Super Mario Galaxy games are widely considered to be among the crown jewels of 3D Mario platforming. Fans may differ on which Galaxy game is better or if Odyssey is the new apex of the form, but the fact that they’re even in the conversation makes them some of the best Nintendo games of the last two decades. That makes it all the more strange that it has consistently been so difficult to play them. You could play on Wii or Wii U, but otherwise the only way to play Galaxy on modern hardware was with the Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection, a bizarrely time-limited collection that was still missing Galaxy 2. So the remastered Galaxy and Galaxy 2 on Switch and Switch 2 is a treat simply for making these great games available and easy to access–but a handful of improvements make them better than ever.
If you already own the All-Stars release, the remastered version of Galaxy is largely the same, but the new remaster-package version does look noticeably better. It’s sharper and the UI elements have been moved ever-so-slightly toward the edges to give you more screen real estate. A new Assist Mode makes the game a bit easier, with more generous lives and the ability to bounce back onto terra firma if you fall off an edge–which is not uncommon in the Galaxy games, since they’re centered around small planetoids. Menus have also mostly been revised to allow button-based selection, so you don’t need to point the cursor at the screen to proceed to a stage or respond to a dialogue prompt.
The cursor functionality is still present, however, for picking up star bits, the little confection-colored pieces that pop up in Galaxy games and largely substitute for coins, which are made more rare than usual. You’ll still need to wave the cursor over the screen to grab star bits, or have a second player do it for you, and that element of the Galaxy games has maybe aged the most poorly. I wished there were some way to turn on auto-gathering, maybe at a trade-off of not accurately collecting 100% of the ones that appear, just so I wouldn’t have to mess with the cursor at all.