For those who have been playing Nintendo games for decades, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is a who’s who of cameos. Wart, Birdo, R.O.B., the literal T-Rex from Super Mario Odyssey, and even Fox McCloud pop up in a movie custom-made for Easter-egg hunters. It makes for a fun guessing game — a “Can you name these video game characters?” TikTok reel stretched to 98 minutes. But all that fun comes at the expense of coherent storytelling. While The Super Mario Galaxy Movie sure has a long list of characters, most of them are NPCs.

In gaming lingo, an NPC denotes a “non-playable character.” That’s a broad term covering anything from plot-important sidekicks to run-of-the-mill shopkeepers, but the acronym has earned a more derogatory connotation in recent years as it has entered Gen Z slang. In real life, NPC is an insult aimed at people who lack independent thought and simply do what they’re programmed to do. It’s a hell of a dunk, but one still rooted in old-school video game fundamentals. Characters drive the action; NPCs repeat their canned lines to make sure those characters get to where they need to go next.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’s struggle to create memorable characters starts to make more sense when you put it in the context of that structure. In some ways, it may be the most faithful video game adaptation of all time. The story begins when Bowser Jr. kidnaps Princess Rosalina, who gets very little screen time past the film’s opening sequence. Word gets to the Mushroom Kingdom, so Mario and the gang set out on an intergalactic journey to save the princess. From there, the gang hops from planet to planet,........

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