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I didn't like the original version of Super Mario Sunshine, it's a great game, but has many little stuff that makes me want to get it over that led me to not finish it.

The ability to get to the end game without the need to catch Shadow Mario on every world is fantastic. That lets you just get the shines you find fun, and having find one and not boot you out of a level is just fantastic to just enjoy the world.

Everyone who didn't like the original should give this mod a try.

I think the game was highly improved by the changes. I enjoyed playing a lot and the long jump made a huge difference, which I really liked. Also not having to go back to the plaza every time you get a sprite.

I would even like to get my hands in the Spanish version of the game with this hack so my kids enjoy it even more.

Thank you for all the effort you made in this hack.

P.S. I played the original missions all along, but the custom one that I found in Sirena Beach has been difficult to overcome, it feels like Super Mario 64, which is nice.

My very best regards to the hack author.

I got the urge to replay Sunshine recently, so getting this mod was a no brainer after all the hype I had heard about it. While the first world was awesome to explore seamlessly to collect stars, the second world was where I decided maybe I should revert to the original game for my replay. The stages where assets aren't fully converted for each star necessitated that I leave and re-enter the world anyway. I think the 8th star in Ricco Harbor had Gooper Blooper hanging out on the helipad instead of the helicopter, which was weird. Also in that level, I had unexpected deaths while riding the bloopers to collect the red coins. Vanilla, you can hit some walls and not die. In Sunburn, it's instant death with most wall hits; especially retrieving the star at the end of the course. The slightest miscalculation in airtime will kill you and would force a complete restart of the level, which is unfortunate.

Maybe down the road when more of the bugs are worked out, I could recommend a future version of this hack. But as it is, I'm fine simply going back through with Dolphin and speeding up cutscenes and whatnot instead of dealing with the extra hassles that come with a few nice improvements (like the extra coins scattered about).

What I like:

• All blue coins in any mission. No idea what the original team was thinking.
• More coins. I always hated hunting for them.
• The *idea* of better win conditions. Read on.
• Cutscene skipping. I've played this game too many times by now.

What I don't like:

• Unfinished, janky new levels. Cool idea, but the levels are super weird and lame.
• Jarring "open world". Sometimes I was messing around and was teleported to another stage because I don't have photographic memory of the stages and decided to snoop around. It also completely destroys continuity.
• Only 70 stars are needed to beat the game. Should be at LEAST 80. Beating the game after only 70 is too easy and doesn't incentivize going after bonus stars.

Who knows, maybe this gets updated and becomes the definitive edition of the game. But for now playing it doesn't feel right.

One thing I would also like to note is, in my opinion, Sunshine's biggest problem is its either buggy or difficult mechanics that weren't properly tested. Ricco Harbor's bonus star is awful. And do I need to say anything about the "Chuckster"? This hack fixes *none* of that. But this doesn't have anything to do with my review or its recommendation status - just a side note.

The good thing about this mod is that the underbaked parts don't get in the way of the base game or this mod's other improvements. Anything negative I say doesn't really detract from the overall mod, so by all counts this is just a straight improvement on vanilla Sunshine.

First things first, the objectively good improvements: Universal blue coins, more coins per mission and the 70 shine win condition. Vanilla blue coins are a nightmare, this mod makes them way better, and some missions not having enough coins for the 100 coin shine is such a bizarre mistake for Nintendo, especially since it's a repeat mistake from 64. Not only are these changes a godsend to have, but they were kinda necessary for the no-boot-out system to work. As for the 70 shine win condition, it's just great. Being able to avoid problem shines and repeated objectives like shadow mario is great. You even have an actual incentive to go after bonus shines now, since they can contribute towards the end condition now (not that you'd want to do some of those rancid stages).

There's some stuff I'm mixed on though. For one, the "Open World" part of the mod adds literally nothing. There's just a spot in each stage that teleports you to a different stage. Doesn't really detract from anything, but there's no real reason to do it either. The new levels also aren't particularly good or bad, they just kinda exist. They give a bit more room for variation within the 70 shine requirement though, and you can just ignore them, so once again they don't really make the game worse.

And now for the most finicky part of the mod: the removal of boot outs after collecting shines. This feels great in modern mario games and can work when retrofitted into the older ones. But modders need to make some drastic changes to account for the fact that these older games were designed with boot outs in mind, and Sunburn doesn't take all the necessary steps. There's also some unavoidable jank because of how sunshine was designed. To explain what I mean, I'll describe how the Super Mario 64 Plus Mod handles boot outs and compare it to Sunburn. For one, SM64 Plus completely skips the mission select screen, and just loads the most up-to-date instance of a stage and lets you go back and choose previous missions later. This makes the "all missions in one" structure feel much more natural, since that screen is useless when you can do any mission anyway. There are, however, stars that either change the stage (like the first whomp's fortress star adding the tower later) or otherwise don't give you a way back to the rest of the stage. In those cases, SM64 Plus gives you the option to automatically load the next mission when those stars are collected, preserving the seamless quality of the new structure. Sunburn has neither of these features. You're forced to go through the mission select screen each time, and some shines necessitate quitting and re-entering the stage to update the level design. It kinda harms the pacing. And of course, there's new jank thanks to Sunshine's design. Having 2 separate, mutually exclusive sets of 6 red coins in a stage is really weird. And having a pipe at the end of fluddless stages, only for them to bring you to the mission select screen and not back to the stage, feels pretty weird. In fairness to the mod author, I have no idea, on both a technical and design level, how feasible it would be to fix these issues, but nevertheless it's a weird quirk of the mod. At the end of the day, this is once again not a deal breaker because the design is mostly the same as the base game. It just means that this feature can't quite live up to its potential. A few shines are pretty seamless to nab and move on, but many are just like vanilla.

Overall, the mod is good, and I can easily recommend it to all players over the vanilla game. The 70 shine win condition is transformative and alleviates many of the worst parts of the game by letting you skip them. The universal blue coins, additional regular coins, and occasionally the removal of boot-outs (when it actually applies) make the game much more seamless and natural to play. But the technical limitations and the more janky additions are pretty much always visible.