Fans figure out how to complete Super Mario Odyssey without jumping
Sort of.
Super Mario Odyssey fans have figured out that it's possible to complete the game without jumping. Going by Odyssey's own strict definition of jumping, that is.
For those unaware, once Mario Odyssey is completed for the first time, players gain access to an NPC that records various statistics - including the number of times Mario has jumped during the game. Enter YouTuber Gamechamp3000, who wondered: would it be possible to do a full Mario Odyssey run without that meter ever climbing above zero?
After a little experimentation, Gamechamp3000 and his VG Myths community made an interesting discovery: the game has very specific ideas about what does, and does not, constitute a jump. As far as Super Mario Odyssey is concerned, a jump is only a jump when Mario is on the ground and the A button is used to propel him into the air. If Mario becomes airborne through other methods, the jump counter won't advance.
Further experimentation revealed that Odyssey doesn't count jumps made while possessing a creature, nor those when Mario bounces off a spinning Cappy. By stringing all these individual non-jumps together, it seemed like a full no-jump run would be entirely doable.
Unfortunately, Gamechamp3000's first attempt quickly ran into trouble. Certain sequences in Odyssey - notably, the side-scrolling, 8-bit Mario segments - are impossible to complete without jumping. But could they be avoided?
As it turned out, the speed-running community already had an answer. Its meticulously researched, often obscure shortcuts (firing a possessed T. rex into the air, for instance) could be used to bypass huge swathes of a level, including those tricksy 8-bit sections.
Gamechamp3000 soon hit another snag though; due to a quirk of design, Odyssey increased the jump meter whenever Mario was forced to start a conversation with a character to progress the game. Brilliantly, however, fans quickly discovered that initiating a conversation while ground-pounding would bypass the game's jump checks.
And that almost did the trick. Almost. Armed with Mario's alternative no-jump moves and a way to bypass Odyssey's conversation quirks, Gamechamp completed another run. Infuriatingly though, the end-game NPC still insisted that a single jump had been made.
Eventually, the culprit was found: at three points in the game, Mario is knocked unconscious and players must hit the jump button to proceed. Two of these aren't considered jumps by the game, but one is. And problematically, it's mandatory.
Even though failure seemed certain at this point, the Odyssey crew pooled its resources one last time and struck gold with an ingenious solution. Switching to two-player mode, fans learned that the Cappy player is able to rouse Mario from his slumber so that the troublesome jump input isn't required. And thus, a complete no-jump Mario Odyssey run (by the game's own definition of jump, at least) was achieved.
It's an impressive feat, and a wonderful example of a community coming together, simply because it can and because of a shared love for a single game.
Gamechamp3000's video charting the journey to hard-won victory is a fun watch, and includes all sorts of fascinating additional details about how the run was achieved. Who knows what fans will attempt to get Mario not to do next.