We’ve been starving for a new 2D Mario game for a minute now. I’ll save you all from me bitching about NSMB, as I’m pretty sure everyone is aware of those games at this point. I was ecstatic to see this revealed at the Nintendo Direct it was presented in with its profound new artstyle, but I started to get weary of the footage from the trailers as to if it was going to suffer the same design problems as the NSMB games did with its spacious stages to account for multiplayer.
Levels are very spacious, and Mario Wonder is definitely best played with others because of this. They’re not as broad as something like NSMB Wii, but a lot of sections don’t have much going on in them. It’s a good medium, though, as I get that it’s hard to make levels that work well for 4 players and 1 player at the same time. There’s no player collision in this game either, which makes multiplayer pretty hassle-free. I played through the game by myself and tried multiplayer for a bit, and even though multiplayer is more fun, it was still great to focus on getting 100% as a single player experience. You honestly miss out on a lot if you don’t 100% this game; there’s secret exits, flower coins (which are this game's star coins), and stuff like reaching the top of the flagpole even counts for 100%, and a lot of stages will use their gimmick at the end accustomed around reaching it, kind of as a level design progression to see if you’ve mastered the stage. Stuff like this is why I really appreciate Mario Wonder’s game design, and it’s clear there was a lot of work put in to make these stages all feel unique.
The double-edged sword of why I really like and don’t like Mario Wonder, though, is its badges. Kind of being a bit of a reference to Paper Mario, this game has a bunch of badges that will grant your character a unique ability, some much better than others. The first one you get is a Parachute Cap, which lets you hover and can also be used to float back onto walls as an infinite wall climb, making a later badge basically useless. A lot of these badges, most notably the boosting spin jump badge, can be used to cheese a lot of the game's secrets and ignore a lot of the game's level design. There’s also stages designed around the badges, and a few are honestly some of my favorites in the game. Stages designed around these new mechanics usually have two per badge, the first of which is a tutorial of sorts and the second to see if you’ve mastered it. One of my favorites was the second wall climb jump stage, which is basically Getting Over It if it were a Mario stage. These stages had me thinking, “Why hadn’t they integrated some of these new mechanics into the movesets?”. A perfect one to have added to the moveset would have been the Dolphin Kick, which would have actually made the water levels fun for once, offering a new, faster-paced movement style.
Other additions to Mario Wonder are its three new power-ups and the Wonder Flowers. The new power-ups are all really fun, my favorite being the elephant, since I kind of like having a strong melee attack in platformers. It kind of goes against Mario’s whole gimmick of stomping on enemies heads, but it is a power-up, and you can lose it, so I was trying to keep it as best as I could. Then there’s the Wonder Flowers, which I can only imagine are a direct response to complaints about NSMB being really boring. Every main stage has one, which will either enable some new visuals or change the way the game plays. These are honestly really hit-or-miss, as a lot of them are really boring. Some of the more fun ones are when they’ll change your character into an enemy, sometimes as a sort of debuff that you’ll have to work around, changing the way you approach the stage. From the top of my head, I think my favorite one was where you have to walk on the wall in the background. Outside of these Wonder Flowers, a lot of the stages already have their own unique gimmick, so it wasn’t like these were entirely necessary, but I enjoyed their addition.
Mario Wonder was very refreshing nonetheless, and I’m glad I gave it a shot. I loved getting all the secrets and using the new badge abilities. I can only hope we get new 2D Mario games in the near future, as this was a huge step in the right direction. It’s cool to see Nintendo actually listen to fans on this one, and we got one of the more creative Mario experiences out of it.
Levels are very spacious, and Mario Wonder is definitely best played with others because of this. They’re not as broad as something like NSMB Wii, but a lot of sections don’t have much going on in them. It’s a good medium, though, as I get that it’s hard to make levels that work well for 4 players and 1 player at the same time. There’s no player collision in this game either, which makes multiplayer pretty hassle-free. I played through the game by myself and tried multiplayer for a bit, and even though multiplayer is more fun, it was still great to focus on getting 100% as a single player experience. You honestly miss out on a lot if you don’t 100% this game; there’s secret exits, flower coins (which are this game's star coins), and stuff like reaching the top of the flagpole even counts for 100%, and a lot of stages will use their gimmick at the end accustomed around reaching it, kind of as a level design progression to see if you’ve mastered the stage. Stuff like this is why I really appreciate Mario Wonder’s game design, and it’s clear there was a lot of work put in to make these stages all feel unique.
The double-edged sword of why I really like and don’t like Mario Wonder, though, is its badges. Kind of being a bit of a reference to Paper Mario, this game has a bunch of badges that will grant your character a unique ability, some much better than others. The first one you get is a Parachute Cap, which lets you hover and can also be used to float back onto walls as an infinite wall climb, making a later badge basically useless. A lot of these badges, most notably the boosting spin jump badge, can be used to cheese a lot of the game's secrets and ignore a lot of the game's level design. There’s also stages designed around the badges, and a few are honestly some of my favorites in the game. Stages designed around these new mechanics usually have two per badge, the first of which is a tutorial of sorts and the second to see if you’ve mastered it. One of my favorites was the second wall climb jump stage, which is basically Getting Over It if it were a Mario stage. These stages had me thinking, “Why hadn’t they integrated some of these new mechanics into the movesets?”. A perfect one to have added to the moveset would have been the Dolphin Kick, which would have actually made the water levels fun for once, offering a new, faster-paced movement style.
Other additions to Mario Wonder are its three new power-ups and the Wonder Flowers. The new power-ups are all really fun, my favorite being the elephant, since I kind of like having a strong melee attack in platformers. It kind of goes against Mario’s whole gimmick of stomping on enemies heads, but it is a power-up, and you can lose it, so I was trying to keep it as best as I could. Then there’s the Wonder Flowers, which I can only imagine are a direct response to complaints about NSMB being really boring. Every main stage has one, which will either enable some new visuals or change the way the game plays. These are honestly really hit-or-miss, as a lot of them are really boring. Some of the more fun ones are when they’ll change your character into an enemy, sometimes as a sort of debuff that you’ll have to work around, changing the way you approach the stage. From the top of my head, I think my favorite one was where you have to walk on the wall in the background. Outside of these Wonder Flowers, a lot of the stages already have their own unique gimmick, so it wasn’t like these were entirely necessary, but I enjoyed their addition.
Mario Wonder was very refreshing nonetheless, and I’m glad I gave it a shot. I loved getting all the secrets and using the new badge abilities. I can only hope we get new 2D Mario games in the near future, as this was a huge step in the right direction. It’s cool to see Nintendo actually listen to fans on this one, and we got one of the more creative Mario experiences out of it.
7 Comments
@Weatherby If I replay this I'll definitely try not using badges, admittedly I was getting a kick out of getting the collectables beyond their intended method, but it got old quick 😅
Most of the badges had me thinking "well, I will never actually use this", for sure. And I'm of the opinion that actually doing 100% is not worth it just because of the invisibility section in the Final Final Challenge. That shit was straight up mean, so my recommendation will always be to do 99% of the game and forget that final stretch of the thing.
Wonder Flowers at first amazed me because they just didn't repeat, ever. Then they started repeating, and I was suddenly turning into a goo for the 4th damn time.
To me, it started as a S-tier Mario game, but ended up at A-tier, so I like it more than you do, I think
Wonder Flowers at first amazed me because they just didn't repeat, ever. Then they started repeating, and I was suddenly turning into a goo for the 4th damn time.
To me, it started as a S-tier Mario game, but ended up at A-tier, so I like it more than you do, I think
@Artur I did really enjoy the last level and really wanted more levels that use the badges for the level design, but that invisibility section without a checkpoint was cruel as hell tbh. I feel the same way about them reusing the Wonder Flowers too, I kind of got sick of the silhouette one since it was pretty similar to the levels in Tropical Freeze
broadly agree with the rating and the reasoning. the levels being designed with the existence of badges in mind kind of makes them all feel a bit worse? they're mostly pretty easy, and when they aren't they often have a clear badge solution
good review, i feel the same way about the badges. i think that we could have had some badge abilities like faster swimming and timed high jumps integrated into the default gameplay instead of having the option to pick them...
Weatherby
1 month ago