It's fine. This was my first real experience with the chill 'normal thing simulator' genre, so maybe my expectations just weren't calibrated correctly, but it was just a bit slower than I wanted it to be with regard to level progression and upgrades and whatever. I know that killing time is essentially the point, but I did occasionally slip over the line from relaxed into bored territory. Still, it's basically the perfect podcast game and has a cute little unobtrusive story and lots of little quirks to enjoy.

First of all, don't get too excited by the title - it's just a cynical attempt to cash in on '90s fads. Not a whole lot of ninjutsu going on here, is what I'm saying. Just a dumb clown punching and kicking stuff like normal. This seems to be one of the earliest US-made brawlers, so the art feels different from its contemporaries - kind of an EARTHWORM JIM or Ren & Stimpy type vibe. It does have at least a little personality (which is more than you can say for many) but the animation is so herky jerky that the look suffers nonetheless. And the sparse frames means it plays like crap, too, of course. If it were smoother, the passable mechanics might have felt okay, but as is it just feels pretty bad to play. At least it's short.

Notable for featuring one of the most confusing map screens of all time which is not helped by the fact that the game lazily repeats its levels over and over. There are three stages called "Streets" ffs.

So, what exactly is the "wonder" of the title? Put plainly, it's one unusual, psychedelic bonus area per stage, usually where you are empowered or altered in ways that no Mario title has ever tried before. Is that addition enough to justify the game, and set it apart from the NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. series? Sure! I was compelled to play every new stage for more than just completion - I was genuinely interested to see what was next. Can't always say that for these latter-day 2D Mario games. Is it challenging? No, absolutely not. Aside from the unbelievably cheap and pointless bonus levels you get for 100%ing the game, nothing here is going to give anyone any trouble, even if you're a completionist. But does that matter? Not for what the game is going for. It wants you to feel wonder, and that doesn't require any meaningful challenge, really.

So, it's fun! And it's gorgeous. And the platforming is as tight as ever - so it's good! But is absolutely anything in this game going to stick in your mind for even as little as a week after you beat it and put it on a shelf? Probably not.

The whole coins thing in this game is interesting because you couldn't really pull it off with any other series and have it be this effective. For so long, Mario coins meant exactly one thing to us and were precious in a very specific way and doled out and withheld from us in a very specific way. This exploits those multiple decades of history in kind of a profound psychological trick, just showering you with them in a way that, upon starting the game, if you have any experience with the series at all let alone a long and deep connection, is going to give you an undeniable dopamine dump and shoot lightning through your most base lizard gaming brain like nothing else. And the excess extends to everything - NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. WII was already insanely generous with powerups (seriously, you were never more than a screen away from at least a Fire Flower in that shit) but they crank it up even further here, and for what I believe is the first time in the series, the lives counter goes up to three digits. And boy, you're gonna need that extra zero on there, because besides getting multiple hundreds of coins per level now and green mushrooms flying every which way, this game is just absurdly easy. Comparing it to its two immediate (extremely, extremely mechanically and structurally similar) predecessors, this feels like the same game on some kind of baby mode. Levels are flat out designed in a much more forgiving way, and the focus is squarely upon arranging fun and surprising ways to earn more and more coins rather than any kind of meaningful platforming challenge. I went through multiple worlds in a row - WORLDS, not levels - without losing a single life. Without even getting to small Mario status!

All of that together certainly does amount to a new vibe for the series. Levels feel less like gauntlets and more like playgrounds, or silly high score events. It's almost like some kind of joyful celebration of the series, a game-long bonus round, a veritable Mario heaven. But really, that high only lasts for a little bit. At some point the novelty wears off, and it isn't replaced with anything else, leaving you playing a very, very easy carbon copy of the first one where you wade through a neverending sea of coins, caring less and less every level about about how many you're getting. You plow through areas barely even noticing the themes behind the waves of gold, get to world bosses so simple you might think they're a first phase or just a joke or something, and then the series' second consecutive auto-scroller final boss, and then that's it. There's no way you're as pumped by the end of this thing as you were when it started.

Credit where it's due - this is more "New" in some respects than the other ones, but cashing in (har har) on our hardcoded expectations of video gaming's most ubiquitous item, while clever, isn't really a compelling basis for a whole game, let alone one that we have otherwise already played more challenging and better versions of.

Is the multiplayer enough to excuse how safe this game is? It was certainly a big deal, and justifiedly so - it is great and terrible in a system-defining way. But damn if this isn't just dull as hell, otherwise. And it shouldn't be! The control and platforming mechanics are probably the best the series has ever been, and even the motion control gimmicks aren't half bad. That little waggle air spin that gets you more distance on a jump - divine. But I would give absolutely anything for more interesting levels, characters, map layout, secrets, music, art, a final boss that's not terrible ... anything. Just so bland. Like eating a perfectly-made gourmet rice cake.

It's so hard to know how to rate this, because it's mechanically perfect and technically does do stuff the series hasn't ever before. But boy does it not feel like it.

A fair bit better than I've probably been giving it credit for all these years. It's still aggressively bland from an aesthetic standpoint - just nothing interesting going on at all - but mechanically and as far as level and overall game design go, it's quite strong.

Upon starting it (especially if coming right off of previous Mario games, as I just have) the controls feel very slow and slippery, which is, of course, a necessity given the smaller view of the handheld and how much of the screen Mario now takes up. But if you stick with if for just a little while, you can quickly get dialed in and discover some of Mario's exciting new abilities, like the really good, chunky wall-jump. Another issue you have to retrain your brain on a bit is the hitboxes, which are always going to be worse with 3D models, especially low-count ones like these. But if anything, they're generous, with you being able to fully clip into Thwomps, etc. a little bit without them killing you. You just gotta go with it and trust the behind the scenes math - Nintendo's guys still know what they're doing better than anyone when it comes to platforming, and in the end, it all works just fine.

On top of some overall top-notch level design (which features a shift further into breaking each stage down into sequences of discrete challenges, reinforced by the offshoot feats needed to get each level's three big coins - a great addition, imo), I also really like the structure of the world maps. Along with the big coins, the more prevalent branching paths design folds a kind of minor collectathon aspect into Mario, evolving the exits from SUPER MARIO WORLD and expanding it into a meatier completion system. It's great! You can mainpath it to the end pretty quick even without warping if you want to, but you're not going to see nearly all of what the game has to offer if you do. I think this is one of the more rewarding Mario games to 100%. (I mean, not in terms of unlocking anything meaningful or whatever. Goodness, no.)

Aside from the beyond-boring look and sound, and little lamenesses like the nothing final boss and a couple too many autoscrollers (although they do each have unique spins on the idea, at least), the game is quite good and lives up the legacy of the series well enough. It may have begat a solid decade of dull retreads, but I guess I probably shouldn't let that skew how I feel about this one specifically.

Just right off the bat, I think this is the best that Mario has ever looked or sounded. You could say that the graphics are simplistic compared to stuff that would come later in the 16-bit era, but it's unique to the series as it's the only Mario game that feels like it's influenced by cartoon animation specifically (I love non-mushroomed small Mario's little Ren & Stimpy character-lookin ass) and the color and vibrancy of this world is just unbelievable - so gorgeous. Playing this on hardware on a Trinitron with S-Video is like seeing the face of God. Also the music and sound effects are absolutely untouchable.

The debate has been raging since the '90s, and I know there are a lot of well-intentioned however confused people out there, but I'm sorry, this game is a lot better than SUPER MARIO BROS. 3. It has less 'stuff' in it, but trades the scattershot, throw-everything-in approach for a careful, deliberate structure and virtuoso level design. Not to mention it wisely doubles back to correct all of 3's odder missteps, and tightens the already industry-best mechanics even further, to the point where if you play this game for like, an hour, you can basically control Mario by thought and make pixel perfect jumps no problem.

It's so good, I forgive it for Ghost Houses.

After SUPER MARIO BROS. 2 was essentially nothing more than a nightmare-difficulty levelpack, they took it upon themselves to REALLY go big on this one, and damn. An H-bomb explosion of creativity and ideas blown across an absolutely epic adventure that feels like it has about twenty times the content of its predecessors. To this day, it is dazzling in its scope, but it also suffers from a bit of bloat and hit-or-miss stuff, as anything this big (for the time) must. Not all the new core design choices are good (short stages but a trillion of them, no mid-level checkpoints, weird continuing), but plenty are (world map, inventory, bonus games), and the mechanics from 1 and 2 have been tuned juuuust a little bit to the point where playing is now a breeze, but it still feels so recognizably Mario that you barely notice a change.

It's an eternally top-tier platformer and introduced about 90% of the stuff that we now think of as Mario mainstays, so it's legendary no matter what ... but it also invented the thing where the mushrooms run away from you when they come out of the block, so it's not seeing a perfect score from me, fuck that.