"Super Mario Odyssey’s" very first DLC made its way onto my Nintendo Switch with no warning last week. Thanks, automatic updates. The mini-game titled “Luigi’s Balloon World” is timed hide-and-seek with balloons, giving players the option of strategically placing balloons in far and discreet places for other players to find online and vice versa.

The free update gives players that completed 100% of the game and have nothing left to do a good reason to pick it back up. As bare-boned as it is, it’s still a nifty little feature that’s fun to play for a quick Switch fix.

Along with Luigi and his balloons came some new camera filters for fresh photo ops Mario can pose for and three new outfits available for Mario to purchase at his dedicated swag shop, "Crazy Cap."

New garments are perfectly priced at approximately “an arm and a leg” which gives players more of an incentive to find and hide balloons to make an extra buck. Obsessive coin collectors like myself, however, are able to afford them right away, leaving us with no other reason to hit up Luigi other than for fun. I’m sure Nintendo knew it's easy to get those outfits for some, did they do that on purpose?

'Balloon World' could be a teaser

Perhaps "Luigi’s Balloon World" is only a taste of what the game will offer in the future.

There’s room even for the mini-game itself to be updated but there are more things that can hopefully be added. Most of the future DLC will likely be free, if any are coming, given the amount of content the game offered out of the box. If Nintendo comes up with something really cool, they’re better off saving it for the next game so frivolously fun things could be all we’re looking at.

More filters and cool outfits from the Mario games of the past will always be appreciated on my side of town. More rank-based online mini-games can come soon, of course. They already did it once. Who knows? Maybe a “Coin Attack” to see who can muster up the most coins in a given area before an allotted time runs out.

The kingdoms already exist so a coin collecting mini-game is as simple as it gets for Nintendo to smack onto one of their downloadable updates.

Imagine every 2D area in the game copied and pasted together into one linear speed run challenge. That would be amazing.

One can only speculate

Nintendo is really secretive with their developments until they’re certain about their plans with them. There’s no way to really know if there will be more coming to "Odyssey" until future Nintendo Direct presentations. What we do know is that there is already available DLC which can’t be said about most Mario games. This console cycle is clearly different from others and the Nintendo Switch’s content quality control is being handled tremendously by the company this time around.

Whatever keeps us actively picking up our joy cons, they will deliver. It’s what’s healthy for the consumer’s attachment and their continuous success as a brand.

They will be able to keep track of it through Balloon World’s rankings and "Odyssey’s" play activity rates. If enough people pop balloons, we could be seeing more reasons to pick “Super Mario Odyssey” back up very soon.
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