HeyListenWatchOut

Flying on the balloon was used to mask some loading times, but that was waaaaay longer than transitions from space into the world in Astro Bot.

It DID outdo Nintendo’s equivalent - the previous mainline Mario entry - Super Mario Odyssey - in every way except maybe 4 :

1. Quantity - Mario had more moons than Astro had Bots to rescue… so more collectibles.
2. replayability - with the Luigi balloon challenges, they extended the game’s longevity with this feature and it is better than Astro Bot’s simpler “speed run challenges” because of Mario’s unique game mechanic of allowing players to create and compete by crafting one-of-a-kind challenges for each other.
3. Nostalgia - Mario’s New Donk City party was absolute peak love letter to the origins of Super Mario and the sequence with the song sung by Mayor Pauline honestly brought me to tears…

…But everything else - the scale of and pure ingenuity of the boss mechanics, the visuals - from both a stylistic and technical standpoint, the Dual-Sense’s controller gimmicks, the complete lack of load times… it brought into stark contrast how far Nintendo has fallen behind - not so much from a game design perspective necessarily - but certainly at least from a hardware power standpoint.