Don't shoot me for this PLEASE but at the end of the day Wonder shares many of the same issues I have with the majority of the 2D mario games, which is that at some point I go on auto-pilot and just blaze through a bunch of worlds because the main gameplay consists of holding right while jumping or throwing out some attacks if you have a power up. Sometimes there is a collectible to grab that requires a bit more thinking but generally these games just kind of fly by for me and while Wonder's central new mechanic, wonder effects, does help to alleviate this feeling, it feels more like a band-aid fix on a style of games that isn't particularly gripping to me.
This is easily among the best, if not the best, 2D mario, and yet I cannot shake the feeling that many of the changes are rather superficial. Wonder effects start out strong but as the game goes on they start to fall into various categories: Mario turns into enemy, Mario is chased by big enemy, Mario is put into a segment straight out of Mario Galaxy. Sometimes these are accompanied by musical numbers (which are great). This summary is obviously reductive but once you notice how similar many of the wonder effects are in terms of gameplay or aesthetics, that 'wonder' turns more into 'repetition,' especially when levels straight-up re-use wonder effects.
There's some actually bad levels here as well. The treasure hunts are clearly meant for 2-4 players but no effort was made to accomodate solo players because there's some dumb guess work involved in many of them if you don't have a bunch of players randomly jumping around or happening to be the correct character to see the hidden block.
The "break time!" levels are also painfully mediocre and feel like an excuse to give children free seeds so they can continue with the story without having to do many of the actual levels. They are so mindnumbingly easy and there's way too many of them, it never felt rewarding to complete one of these.
But realistically? The "Final-Final" level probably takes the cake for being the worst level in the game. What a middle finger to any solo player trying to 100% the game to put a bullshit invisible balloon fish jumping section at the end of your stupid challenge level, with a checkpoint FOUR entire challenges back. If there had been a checkpoint before the invisibility challenge I probably wouldn't be complaining about it now because you could grind it out, but there isn't so I am complaining. What a stupid fucking design decision man. 1/3rd of my total playtime was probably on this level alone. Additionally, this level rips into your purple coin economy so have fun grinding game over's after you are done with it so you can farm purple coins from those bonus levels to fill out your standee collection.
I think it's a good game, if I could give it a score between a 3.5/5 and a 4/5 I would, but the core on which it is built is rotten. This is a good game, albeit one that I'm not likely to remember particularly strongly, but it hasn't justified to me why 2D mario still deserves to be a flagship series for Nintendo: there simply is not enough meaningful innovation here outside of the aesthetical.
This is easily among the best, if not the best, 2D mario, and yet I cannot shake the feeling that many of the changes are rather superficial. Wonder effects start out strong but as the game goes on they start to fall into various categories: Mario turns into enemy, Mario is chased by big enemy, Mario is put into a segment straight out of Mario Galaxy. Sometimes these are accompanied by musical numbers (which are great). This summary is obviously reductive but once you notice how similar many of the wonder effects are in terms of gameplay or aesthetics, that 'wonder' turns more into 'repetition,' especially when levels straight-up re-use wonder effects.
There's some actually bad levels here as well. The treasure hunts are clearly meant for 2-4 players but no effort was made to accomodate solo players because there's some dumb guess work involved in many of them if you don't have a bunch of players randomly jumping around or happening to be the correct character to see the hidden block.
The "break time!" levels are also painfully mediocre and feel like an excuse to give children free seeds so they can continue with the story without having to do many of the actual levels. They are so mindnumbingly easy and there's way too many of them, it never felt rewarding to complete one of these.
But realistically? The "Final-Final" level probably takes the cake for being the worst level in the game. What a middle finger to any solo player trying to 100% the game to put a bullshit invisible balloon fish jumping section at the end of your stupid challenge level, with a checkpoint FOUR entire challenges back. If there had been a checkpoint before the invisibility challenge I probably wouldn't be complaining about it now because you could grind it out, but there isn't so I am complaining. What a stupid fucking design decision man. 1/3rd of my total playtime was probably on this level alone. Additionally, this level rips into your purple coin economy so have fun grinding game over's after you are done with it so you can farm purple coins from those bonus levels to fill out your standee collection.
I think it's a good game, if I could give it a score between a 3.5/5 and a 4/5 I would, but the core on which it is built is rotten. This is a good game, albeit one that I'm not likely to remember particularly strongly, but it hasn't justified to me why 2D mario still deserves to be a flagship series for Nintendo: there simply is not enough meaningful innovation here outside of the aesthetical.