I'm playing Super Mario Galaxy on my Android phone. Here's how to get it on yours right now

Emulation isn’t new, and neither is running Nintendo games on smartphone hardware. Nintendo’s portable-first console experiences translate beautifully to smartphone hardware, making its platform a prime target for emulation. However, as good as emulation is, a native port always hits differently due to the performance improvements and reduced latency that it brings.

Earlier this week, I came across a project dubbed Galaxy Android that brings Super Mario Galaxy, widely considered one of the greatest 3D platformers ever created, to Android as a native experience. Released as part of the OpenPort Labs project, the Android build makes copious use of AI to get it up and running, but it’s important to acknowledge the seven and a half years of effort by the Petari decompilation project to write the code by hand. With that in mind, the only real question was to see how well it performed.

While the desktop version of the port is known to offer native-like performance, I spent some hands-on time testing it on my OPPO Find X9 Ultra to see how it holds up in everyday use. Let’s just say that while the experience of spinning Mario across a galaxy on my smartphone screen is undeniably cool, there are still enough quirks and performance caveats that you might want to stick to running the game via emulation a little while longer.

How to install Super Mario Galaxy on your Android phone

Getting Super Mario Galaxy onto your Android device is surprisingly straightforward, though it does require a bit of manual legwork. Your first stop is the Galaxy-Android repository hosted on GitHub, where you can grab the APK file. The port is under active development, so make sure to test a couple of builds to see what works best on your device.

Because Nintendo, obviously, protects its copyrighted intellectual property, the GitHub repository does not contain any actual game assets. You will need to supply your own legally acquired Super Mario Galaxy game files to extract the necessary game data. I ripped my own copy of the game years ago and had it sitting on my NAS, but if you don’t have one, you might have to sail around a bit on the high seas until you can score yourself a copy.

With that said, the setup process is remarkably simple.

Once you download the project APK from GitHub, sideload it and install it via the file manager. After launching the app for the initial configuration, you’ll have to point it to your game’s ISO file.

Part of what the app does is extract the game files and convert the assets into a format that the Android-based engine can process and load. The port translates all the game logic to Android-native code, and all you’ll pull from the game disk are the art assets.

At this point, you can choose to install the game with or without cutscenes. The cutscenes add an extra 3 GB or so of space to the install, so if you’re running short of storage on your smartphone, or if you want to install the game just for the gameplay and not for the story, you can choose to do so.

Once done, the app automatically places your extracted game assets into a dedicated directory. Further, the launcher will automatically process the files, set up your virtual on-screen touch buttons, and prepare the core engine to boot. If you prefer physical inputs, pairing a standard Bluetooth controller like a DualSense or Xbox controller works right out of the box and makes navigating the game much more enjoyable. For my tests, I tried it out using both the on-screen controls and a dedicated telescopic controller.

The game looks great on Android, but the beta build is still pretty rough

Unfortunately, compared to the emulated version of the game, my initial launch was not entirely frictionless. In fact, I ran into a crash the very first time I tried to boot into the game. Things improved the next time I launched the app, and the game loaded right into the title screen with no immediate issues.

Once you get past that initial bump, the visual quality is what grabs your attention. While you can’t switch resolutions and scaling on the fly, you can choose the resolution you want to play at from the game launcher. I maxed it out at 1080p, and the game looks exceptionally crisp, more so because the art style continues to hold up.

This port integrates the visual enhancements from the official Nvidia Shield release that Nintendo and Nvidia launched in China several years ago. So, instead of blowing up the soft 480p resolution of the original Wii hardware, the game looks tack-sharp with high-resolution UI elements and noticeably crisper character models that look gorgeous on smartphone displays.

With that said, the project is an early beta, and it shows. The experience can be impressive one minute and come to a grinding halt the next. During my first attempt, I was able to explore the opening stage just fine before I began to notice micro-stutters and slowdowns.

These slowdowns appear to stem from real-time shader compilation, as I only observed them when I entered a new area. Turn around and walk the same section of the map, and these slowdowns completely clear up. I experimented with the various graphics driver settings and swapped between OpenGL and Vulkan backends, but it made no difference to the experience.

This is largely in line with what other users have reported, too. While a lot of users faced some, if not all, of the same slowdowns and crashes that I experienced, others have reported being able to play at a rock-solid 60 FPS for an extended period of time. All that to say the performance is all over the place right now, with even powerful hardware delivering unpredictable results.

While testing the software, I also decided to update to the latest experimental beta build to see whether recent commits had addressed shader compilation stutters or ironed out any remaining graphical quirks. That probably wasn’t the best call, as unlike the previous version, which only had slowdowns, the latest beta just crashes every time I try to create a new save file or load a new one. For now, it’s clear that the software is squarely in alpha-build territory, even though the pace of development is pretty fast.

Super Mario Galaxy on Android is promising, but there’s still work to do

Taken as a whole, this unofficial Super Mario Galaxy port is a remarkably promising project that will almost certainly improve over time. It is without a doubt rough around the edges right now, and you will need to go in with realistic expectations regarding shader stutters and occasional launch hiccups.

But playing this legendary platformer natively on a phone is already an incredible technical feat, and given the speed of development of the many other recompilation projects, it should be a matter of weeks at most for a rock solid build to be out. If you’re a fan of platformers, and especially Nintendo platformers, this project is definitely worth keeping an eye out for.

In the meantime, you might want to check out the best emulators for Android to relive old classics.