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As you know, Super Mario Odyssey went into detail about Mario’s appearance and the environment surrounding the adventure. Thanks to the official art book, we’ve been able to learn more about the process of creating the character in this installment of Mario 3D.

In one page of the book, art director Rikuto Yoshida shared a few words about it. “When considering Mario’s design for this game, we decided from the beginning to give the physical materials a more realistic look than before,” he shares in the message published in the artbook.

“To welcome players with the sense of surprise mentioned above, we made the individual strands of Mario’s mustache and hair visible.

“We also designed his clothes to show a fine fabric,” he continues. “The configuration and illustrations of the game influenced each other, and we were amazed at the impact of this new Mario coming to life before our eyes. Despite the significant alterations, we made sure that when the design was finished, it would maintain the visual aspects that people around the world associate with Mario.

With a more realistic representation of Nintendo’s mascot, they were faced with problems that hadn’t been encountered in previous releases. During development, they had to answer questions that hadn’t been asked before: What material are Mario’s gloves made of? What are his shoes made of? Is there any denim in the color Mario wears? Yoshida also said that while Mario’s image had been retained, it was still a bit “cooler” overall. So a lot of attention and effort has gone into the representation of Mario’s eyes to give them more depth and life, so that they can better reflect the feelings of the plumber.

In the book, we were also able to read a message from the game’s artistic character director, Sho Murata, who focused on the textures we can see in Super Mario Odyssey.

“While we made sure not to deviate from the existing image of Mario in general, we made his face a little ‘cooler’ than in previous games so that it would look good when he got moving,” he concludes. “You might not be able to see it with the naked eye, but it was given a lot of attention. They were made to look like real eyes with a tangible sense of depth. Their expressions are much more vivid, more impressive than before.

Did you like the design of Mario in Super Mario Odyssey?