Super Mario Eclipse Is The Sunshine Sequel We Always Wanted

Published Oct 25, 2026, 9:00 PM EDT Tom Wilson is a Gaming Features Writer at Screen Rant. Over the past five years, Tom has worked as the Editor-in-Chief at The Game Crater, as a Staff Writer for GamingIntel, a List Writer at TheGamer, and, of course, as a Senior Writer at ScreenRant. Tom has experience writing reviews, guides, news, and features, and has been responsible for teams of writers, training them and editing their work. Tom graduated with a Masters in Multimedia Journalism, and has since gone on to build up his portfolio of games journalism work. It is no great surprise that Super Mario Sunshine isn't a great game. Sure, its vibes are immaculate; its gorgeous, vibrant visuals serve as the epitome of early 2000s gaming nostalgia, the striking blues and cozy beach atmosphere delivering a wave of nostalgia that is undeniably irresistible. However, all that superficial coating is merely shrouding a game that, in reality, suffered tremendously from a rushed development cycle. We can wax lyrical about Sunshine's many shortcomings (janky, unnecessarily difficult, ironically slippery, and often too innovative for its own good), but it would all be for naught, as, deep down, I believe there's a game nestled between all the flaws and frustrating design that could truly shine. Had Nintendo attempted to further Sunshine's lofty ambitions and refined its controversial mechanics to deliver the intended experience, we could have been in for a genuine delight. Unfortunately, Nintendo never did, but very fortunately, fans did, and that's how we got the perfect Sunshine sequel, Super Mario Eclipse. Super Mario Eclipse Is The Perfect Sequel Super Mario Eclipse is a fan-made mod for Super Mario Sunshine that is so big and so ambitious that it is ostensibly the unofficial sequel to Nintendo's divisive game. It takes the core Super Mario Sunshine experience and completely overhauls it, transforming it into an open-world game with an array of new features, content, and quality-of-life improvements. It was released two years ago, and since then the Eclipse Team has been updating it to continuously improve it and add even more content. The sheer amount of new content in Super Mario Eclipse is astounding. It adds 120 new shines, new regions in the open world (including Peach's Castle from Super Mario 64), original story content with hand-animated cutscenes, three new playable characters (Luigi, Il Piantissimo, and Shadow Mario), new boss fights, a new soundtrack, enhanced movement mechanics to remove the original's slippery feel, and a revamped engine to improve performance and visual fidelity. You can call it a remake, a reimagining, a sequel, or a mod, but no matter what it is labeled as, there is no denying that Eclipse is fantastic. Eclipse goes beyond the traditional Super Mario Sunshine remaster that simply tweaks the visuals or boosts the framerate. It is an ambitious project that completely redefines what the original game was, delivering an experience that ultimately feels akin to what Nintendo had imagined, to what it would have delivered had its development time not been so truncated. In that sense, Eclipse is truly the sequel fans, myself included, had always wanted because it not only delivers the enlivening sense of nostalgia, but also a gameplay experience that holds up to scrutiny even when compared to modern Mario titles like Odyssey. We Need An Official Super Mario Sunshine Sequel Of course, as much as I absolutely adore Super Mario Eclipse, it can only go so far, restrained by the limitations of Super Mario Sunshine's original design and concept. That's not to say that Eclipse is not worthwhile or indeed of a high enough caliber to be compared to Nintendo's own work, as that couldn't be further from the truth. Indeed, if you take anything away from this, it is that Eclipse is the definitive Sunshine experience that somehow takes an otherwise divisive game and transforms it into a masterpiece that ranks among the very best Mario games. If you're interested in playing Super Mario Eclipse, you can download it from its official GameBanana page. To run it, you'll need the Dolphin emulator, a device with an app capable of applying x-delta patches, and a legally obtained USA non-nkit.iso of Super Mario Sunshine. Rather, it is merely to state that I wish Nintendo would return to the Sunshine era, much in the same way many want a sequel to Super Mario Galaxy. It is evident that Nintendo had a lot of ambition and innovative ideas with Sunshine, something further reinforced by Eclipse's phenomenal repurposing of it. So, it would be a shame for Nintendo to never try its own hand at delivering the intended Sunshine experience with a modern-day sequel that utilizes the power of the Switch 2. At the very least, it would be nice for Nintendo to no longer look at Super Mario Sunshine as a mistake, and for the industry to return to, for just a moment, the glorious vibrancy of early 2000s gaming. Released August 26, 2002 ESRB E For Everyone due to Comic Mischief Developer(s) Nintendo EAD Publisher(s) Nintendo Franchise Super Mario Platform(s) GameCube Genre(s) Platformer