Never been the biggest fan of 2D Mario, but this is a great time! The creativity bleeding through the levels in this game is definitely the reason it’s been drawing so much praise. These rarely change much of the actual gameplay, much of the game is still quite vanilla in that sense, but presentation wise it’s constantly surprising and has a ton of charm. The wonder seed transformations are easily the highlights of the game and are so much fun to seek out. The badges are a bit of a missed opportunity imo bc you can only equip one at a time and I can’t help but feel that really limits Mario’s potential moveset, and the level design doesn’t do much to encourage consistently experimenting with these either, but for what it’s worth Mario still does feel really good to control no matter what you have equipped. I don’t agree with this game being compared with the all time greats of the genre like Rayman Legends or Tropical Freeze, but I absolutely can recommend this game as a remarkably solid 2D platformer that never really gets stale.