On Super Mario Odyssey shaped by a designer trusted by his bosses, no matter what.
He also bluntly stated at a roundtable press conference in Japan, "We should have designed the game differently, but we couldn’t." To Miyamoto’s credit, his confidence in Koizumi’s potential as a designer never wavered.
Koizumi became producer of Super Mario Odyssey after directing Sunshine, Galaxy, Galaxy 2 and 3D World. It’s interesting to see the trust: a game designer missing the mark on a huge IP like Mario would get fired or be sent to a closet inside the company in the West. At Nintendo they encouraged him and let him work on what would become Super Mario Galaxy.
I think the Galaxy games are the finest Mario games, if not finest platform games ever made. It’s joy all along. I would love a version that goes forever, cutscene-free. I would just send Mario to rest like we do in MMOs.
TL;DR: legendary game developer trusts newbie to take over one of the biggest IP in the world, newbie kind of fails, developer keeps trusting him, newbie directs and produces the best platform games ever made.
I like that.