One of the complaints thrown around when Super Mario Odyssey was released was the crazy amount of Power Moons there were to collect in the game. Sure, you only needed to collect 124 of them to beat the base game, and it’s only possible to get 462 before the final boss battle, but when everything’s said and done, there are 880 unique Power Moons to collect across the various kingdoms Mario can explore. And that’s not counting the ones you can simply purchase, either. Many people have wondered what reason there could possibly be for Nintendo to cram so many Power Moons into the game, and now we have an answer.
Power Moons are not just used to power up the Odyssey so Mario can travel from kingdom to kingdom, as we learned when exploring the power plant in New Donk City. While making our way through the area, we get to pass by a room full of Power Moons being fed into the city’s power plant. Twitter user Supper Mario Broth was able to calculate not only the rate at which these Power Moons were used to power the city, but also how many moons that worked out to be per day and per year.
Sucking up one Power Moon every second, this single city burns through an absurd 86,400 Power Moons each and every day. That comes out to over 31.5 million a year! If you thought that 880 was a lot, Mario wouldn’t even be able to power New Donk City for a full 15 minutes if he dumped them all in the power plant.
Now, the implications of this are very concerning in a way that we will probably never see any official response or answers to from Nintendo. Are Power Moons actually that weak as a power source, or is New Donk City’s power plant just terribly inefficient? Where is the city getting this seemingly endless supply of Power Moons? Mario is basically tripping over them hidden under piles of dirt, but the city would need some kind of large source. What will happen when they run out? What happens to the used Power Moons? Is there some kind of waste product building up somewhere?
These are not the kind of questions we should be spending our time thinking about, and yet Nintendo makes it almost unavoidable by showing us all those precious power moons just out of reach.
