Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has revealed that Super Mario Galaxy 2 is being designed primarily with core gamers in mind.
While Nintendo no doubt wants the title to be appealing to a broad spectrum of players, the game will be more challenging than its predecessor, which “was maybe more inviting in terms of all the audiences,” the exec told IGN.
“What Galaxy 2 is going to be is maybe a little more Nintendo fan / harder gamer focused, a little tougher,” he said. “The use of Yoshi makes it a little more challenging. We showed some of the snippets of some of the activities - it's a bit more challenging. It's going to be, if you will, for more of that passionate Mario fan who grew up getting challenged with Super Mario World. It's going to be much more in that area.”
Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto also offered our sister site CVG further details on the game.
"When we finished Galaxy we realised there were a ton of ideas that we hadn't been able to use because we couldn't fit them all in. We were a little disappointed that we weren't able to use all of it. So we were discussing what to do with those ideas and what we weren't able to use and we thought what the heck - let's go ahead and make Super Mario Galaxy 1.5," he said.
"Once we started looking at what we hadn't used, we got excited and started making all this new stuff. Really what we ended up with is more than 90 percent of what you'll see in Galaxy 2 is brand new. I'd say closer to 95, maybe even 99 percent. One of the new things was the inclusion of Yoshi, and also the use of the drill to open up and drill through stages.
"This game contains roughly the same amount of content as Super Mario Galaxy did,” he added. “It is really, really far along, but as we're releasing New Super Mario Bros Wii this year we are going to do some more work on this one and finish it next year.”
The release of Super Mario Galaxy 2 will mark the first time a second 3D Mario title has arrived in the same console generation.