Taking Photos of Birds in Mario Odyssey is Great
But how come it’s so much fun?
Pause: the ultimate photographic fantasy. The whole world waits while you fix your composition!
Movement (but limited): When you switch into photo mode you can move and rotate the camera with SOME freedom, but not complete freedom. This and pausing gives photography a pleasant coarse phase (where is Mario) and granular phase (action is paused, let’s tweak this). That coarse phase stops the camera from feeling like some weird detached arbitrary 3d fly-through. It is also totally unrealistic and extremely satisfying. I would be interested in seeing future games implement something like bullet time during photo mode - slightly less control but slightly more of a feeling of capturing something in real-time?
Bird routines: they like to perch in the same places predictably. If you scare them off they fly back in a few moments. Their idle animation causes them to rotate through all directions. This quick cycle works very well when you mix in the aforementioned pausing thing - if you pause at the wrong time, you can unpause, and pause again in a moment, and have a different pose and setup.
Filters: most of these are trash but giving users a bit of control over how much edge blur and vignette is deployed is really nice for fine-tuning things. Wishlist: bokeh!
