Miyamoto’s Casa Brutus comments point to Super Mario World and Super Mario 64, while Sunshine’s beloved footsteps show how Mario design lives in feel, sound, and motion.
Image: IGDB
Miyamoto’s rare Mario self-assessment starts with a split in the record
Shigeru Miyamoto has reportedly singled out Super Mario World and Super Mario 64 as the Mario games that especially impressed him, according to Nintendo Everything’s report on a Casa Brutus interview for a Super Mario Bros. special issue. That is the strongest confirmed detail in the supplied material, and it immediately creates an interesting tension: another outlet, Shane the Gamer, reports that Miyamoto named Super Mario World and Super Mario Odyssey as the series’ defining peaks.
Those are not small differences. Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Odyssey represent very different moments in Nintendo’s 3D Mario history. Nintendo Everything’s article includes a direct translated response in which Miyamoto discusses Super Mario World and Super Mario 64 by name. Shane the Gamer, by contrast, frames World and Odyssey as the answer and cites other reporting. Based on the provided source text, the direct quote supports World and 64 as the answer to the “titles that have impressed him especially” question. The Odyssey claim should be treated as a separate reported interpretation or a conflicting account unless the original Casa Brutus interview is consulted directly.
That uncertainty is worth keeping visible because the core of the story is not a clean ranking. It is a rare look at what Shigeru Miyamoto values in Mario game design: a sense of having pushed a form as far as it could go, followed by a leap into a new kind of physical expression.
Super Mario World reads like Miyamoto closing the book on 2D mastery
In the response quoted by Nintendo Everything, Miyamoto says he has “a deep emotional connection” to all of his works, but that by the completion of Super Mario World he felt he had, “to a degree, mastered the two-dimensional Mario world.” That is a precise and revealing phrase. He is not simply praising the game’s popularity or treating it as a nostalgic favorite. He is describing the feeling of a craftsperson recognizing that a design language had become fluent.
Super Mario World makes sense in that frame because Miyamoto contrasts two-dimensional Mario with “drawing manga.” The comparison suggests composition, timing, panel-to-panel rhythm, and readable action. In a 2D Mario stage, the player reads danger and opportunity from a side-on arrangement of platforms, enemies, gaps, and secrets. The pleasure comes from clarity under pressure. A jump works because the player can see its arc before committing. A level works because the screen teaches a small grammar and then bends it.
That is the useful lesson for anyone searching for Miyamoto favorite Mario games as a list of “best” titles. The quoted answer points less toward personal ranking and more toward design completion. World impressed him because it represented a point where 2D Mario’s visual language had been refined enough to feel mastered.
Super Mario 64 impressed him for a stranger, more personal reason
The same quoted response moves from Super Mario World to Super Mario 64, but Miyamoto’s reasoning changes. With Mario going 3D, he says he was reminded of childhood interests that came before his junior high school manga drawing days. He mentions NHK puppet shows including “Chirorin Village and the Walnut Tree” and “Hyokkori Hyotan Island,” and says he once wanted to become a puppet maker.
That gives Super Mario 64 a different role in the Mario design Miyamoto describes. If 2D Mario felt like drawing manga, 3D Mario “brought me back to puppet theater,” he says in the Nintendo Everything translation. The distinction matters. A puppet is not read in the same way as a drawing. It is manipulated. It has weight, posture, staging, and a body that changes meaning through motion.
Super Mario 64’s importance, in this telling, is not only that it put Mario into 3D space. It reconnected the character to hands-on performance. Mario became a figure the player could angle, spin, launch, recover, and pose inside a toy-like world. Miyamoto’s childhood memory of building “monster dioramas” and shooting them with a camera makes the jump to 3D sound less like an engineering milestone than a return to tabletop staging. The camera, the body, and the set all become part of play.
Sunshine was not named, but its footsteps show the same design values in miniature
Super Mario Sunshine does not appear in Nintendo Everything’s quoted list of the games Miyamoto said especially impressed him. It should not be inserted into that answer. Still, Sunshine is useful here because a separate Kotaku piece published one day earlier fixates on one of the smallest, easiest-to-miss parts of Mario craft: the sound of his footsteps.
Kotaku’s writer praises the “click-clack” of Mario’s shoes on Delfino Plaza’s white stone paths, while also calling out the different feel of wooden blocks, beach sand, Bianco Hill pavement, grass, and the toy blocks of FLUDD-less stages. That is a fan-facing observation rather than a Miyamoto quote, but it lines up with the design priorities implied by his 2D-manga and 3D-puppet-theater comparison. In 3D Mario, movement is not only input and animation. It is feedback. The player learns the world through tiny confirmations: shoe on stone, water on surface, FLUDD shifting modes, Mario’s body changing speed and height.
MarioWiki identifies Super Mario Sunshine as a 3D action-adventure platform game for Nintendo GameCube and describes FLUDD as a rechargeable water-based tool used to spray enemies and goop, hover or launch through the air, and dash at high speeds. That mechanic made Sunshine a particularly tactile Mario game. It attached a watery, mechanical layer to Mario’s body, then asked players to understand space through sprays, bursts, hover corrections, and surface contact.
That is why the Super Mario Sunshine footsteps discussion lands as more than nostalgia. The footsteps are part of how the game sells motion. They help make Delfino Plaza feel like a place Mario physically crosses, rather than a menu of objectives. If Super Mario 64 is puppet theater in Miyamoto’s language, Sunshine is puppet theater with shoes loud enough to tell you what the stage is made of.
The Odyssey conflict points to Nintendo’s next Mario problem
Shane the Gamer’s report says Miyamoto named Super Mario World and Super Mario Odyssey as defining peaks, and also attributes to Miyamoto the idea that Nintendo had gotten everything it wanted out of the Switch system with Odyssey. Nintendo Everything’s supplied article does not present Odyssey as one of the two titles named in the Casa Brutus answer. It instead says Miyamoto had previously spoken “in vague terms” about what comes next for Mario, saying he felt Nintendo had done just about everything it could with the series on Nintendo Switch and wondering how the team would approach a new game for Switch 2.
That distinction changes the story. If Odyssey was named in the original interview, then Miyamoto’s answer would frame modern 3D Mario as having reached another peak on Switch. If the direct quoted answer is the accurate one, then World and 64 remain the emotional and structural anchors, while Odyssey belongs to a separate discussion about hardware transition and the future of the series.
Either way, the pressure on the next major Mario project is clear from the supplied reporting. Miyamoto is described as looking at Switch 2 as a new challenge for the Mario team. The known facts in these sources do not include a new 3D Mario announcement, release date, price, platform list, or technical target. Readers should treat any claim beyond that as expectation rather than confirmation.
For players revisiting Mario, listen to the craft rather than chasing a ranking
The practical takeaway is simple: if Miyamoto’s comments send you back into Mario history, start with the design question each game answers. Super Mario World is the clearest reference point for 2D Mario as readable, authored stage craft. Super Mario 64 is the pivot into embodied 3D play, where Mario’s movement becomes a performance inside a navigable set. Super Mario Sunshine, while not named in Miyamoto’s quoted answer, is worth revisiting for how sound and movement bind that performance to place.
Kotaku points readers toward full playthrough footage to hear Sunshine’s terrain audio, especially around Bianco Hill and FLUDD-less sections. MarioWiki lists Sunshine’s original release as a 2002 Nintendo GameCube game, with Nintendo GameCube - Nintendo Classics for Nintendo Switch 2 marked TBA in its entry. Since that listing in the supplied material is not a Nintendo storefront announcement, there is no confirmed release timing, price, or access requirement here to report.
For now, the safest reading of the Shigeru Miyamoto Mario games story is also the most interesting one. Miyamoto’s answer, as quoted by Nintendo Everything, does not behave like a fan poll. It reveals a designer thinking in media forms: manga for 2D precision, puppet theater for 3D presence, and, through Sunshine’s enduring appeal, the small sensory details that make Mario’s body feel alive under your thumb.