I can't believe how harsh some people are on Mario Sunshine. Yeah, that commercial was terrible, but it was still a solid game. Oh well, I guess it just goes to show why Nintendo can never try anything different with their established franchises.
Actually, my problem with Mario Sunshine wasn't that it dared to do different things, but that it was an utterly boring game. In fact, some of my problems with Sunshine carried over into Galaxy: the same goddamn "start from a hub world, select a world, select a star, get a star, return to the hub, select a world, select a star" progression that was acceptable in Mario 64 only because it was the first game of its kind to try it. Throw in the complete removal of the exploration aspect of Mario 64 (where you could select one star and end up with a completely different one), the monotony of every "world" having the same tropical theme, the utterly pointless and poorly-implemented addition of Yoshi, the lame story, and the entire creation of Bowser Jr. and you have a game I just loathe. I've said before that FLUDD was not my main problem with the game, and in fact could have worked if the rest of the game wasn't so mundane.