Every single New Mario game completely changes the Mario you know. Whether that’s with Mario 3 adding in so many new features, Mario World adding in cool new animations, Mario 64 bringing Mario to the Third Dimension, or pretty much any other mainline Mario game, each new entry found some new and creative way to shake up the formula, However, after New Super Mario Bros Wii, that came to a halt. While New Super Mario Bros 2 and U are good games in their own right, they didn’t really change things but instead regurgitated elements from their previous entries, which made fans get sick of the New series, myself included. But I can say with great confidence that Mario Wonder shakes up the formula yet again, and is the most creative 2D Mario game since Super Mario World, which came out 30 years ago!
Instead of using the same recycled plot of Bowser kidnapping Peach, Wonder goes for something different. Mario and friends get invited to the flower kingdom by Prince Haru… I mean Prince Florian (it’s not the same flower kingdom from the ova). However, Bowser shows up and steals a wonder flower, which merges him with the flower castle into this giant smoke castle. So now it’s up to Mario and friends to stop Bowser and save the Flower Kingdom. Quite a simple plot, but do you need any more from Mario?
In this game, you get to choose which character you want to play. The character choices are the obvious Mario, Luigi, Blue and Yellow Toads, and Toadette, but for the first time in a 2D game since Super Mario Bros 2, you can play as Peach again, AND for the first time ever, you can play as Princess Daisy! The only mainline game that Daisy’s appeared in is Super Mario Land, so it’s really cool to see her return, let alone as a playable character. All of these characters play the same, but if you want an easier experience with the game, you have different Yoshis and Nabbit. They can’t take damage, but at the same time, they can’t use any powerups, which I think is a good trade-off. While it is slightly disappointing that the Yoshis are easy-mode characters, it’s still cool to have them be playable regardless.
But how does the game itself play? Well… it controls effortlessly! They seem to have combined the best elements of Super Mario World’s controls with the slightly advanced controls of the New series and mixed it all into a fantastic control scheme. You really feel like you’re in control of the game.
The staple powerups return, but there are some cool new ones. The first new one turns you into an elephant, which reminds me: before the game was released, Nintendo released some short videos to promote the game. One of them was this… yeah, turns out that Bowser has a thing for elephants. Anyways, as an elephant you can smash through enemies and bricks by swinging your trunk. You can also store some water in your trunk, which you can spray on small flowers to get some flower coins. I’ll talk about what the flower coins do later. Another new powerup is the bubble flower, which lets you shoot bubbles. These bubbles can be used to trap and defeat most enemies, but you can also use the bubbles as platforms. The final new powerup is the drill cap, which lets you defeat enemies using your head. You can also use this to burrow into the ground and even the ceiling. All of these new powerups are great to use and are all useful in their own way.
You also meet talking flowers in every level. They’re usually just there to say something to you, but they can occasionally give you small hints at secrets in the level.
The local multiplayer in this game works similarly to previous entries, however, you can no longer jump on each other or throw other players into pits, and instead pass through each other. I can see why they made this change since multiplayer in the new games would get rather chaotic. But if another player uses Yoshi, then you can ride on their back and get carried through the entire level. This even applies to elephants and other Yoshis. Unfortunately, you can’t create a 4 player stack of Yoshis which I think would’ve been cool, but it’s understandable why this isn’t an option.
In addition to local multiplayer, you can also play with friends online! The other players appear as ghosts that you can’t interact with. However, online multiplayer works slightly differently from local. If you die, you turn into a spirit, and if you interact with another player then you’ll get revived. You can also get revived by a player standee, which anyone can place anywhere in the level. But if you’re like me and… have no friends… then you can play with random people online if that’s something that interests you! Whether you play this game alone or with friends, it’s still an incredibly enjoyable experience!
Another thing this game does that really impresses me is it gives everything expressive animations. The New Super Mario games kept reusing the same basic animations, but for this game, they decided to increase the animation budget, which went a long way! Characters are more expressive, enemies get scared when you’re about to attack them, you no longer warp through pipes but climb through them… the list goes on, but it goes to show how some extra small animations can go a long way, especially in a game like Super Mario. The game also received a new art style, which looks amazing! To me, this is the best-looking Mario game, as well as the best-looking game on the Switch.
Something else this game does differently from previous entries is Mario and Luigi’s voices. Ever since Super Mario 64, Mario, Luigi, Wario, and Waluigi have all been voiced by Charles Martinet. However, just a few months ago, Nintendo announced on Twitter that Charles would no longer be voicing the characters, and would instead become a Mario ambassador, which nobody currently knows what exactly that is. In this game, Mario and Luigi are voiced by Kevin Afghani, who does a fantastic job at voicing the iconic plumbers! I likely wouldn’t have even known they had a new actor if I wasn’t informed beforehand; he’s that good!
Now let's talk about the world map and level themes. I won’t reveal each world, but I can confirm that this game has some unique worlds that aren’t just “grass, desert, ice, water, jungle, mountains, sky, lava” which is a very refreshing change of pace. Since the game takes place in a new kingdom, they were able to be expressive with the world map. Speaking of, some parts of the world map are linear, but for the most part, you can run around freely and choose which levels you want to play. And the levels themselves are fantastic; they all stand out from one another, and no two levels feel identical to play. There are also some break levels, where instead of moving from A to B, you complete a small challenge. You also have pop-up shops, where you can spend flower coins to get items such as badges. Oh yeah, let’s talk about the badges.
The game has a huge variety of badges that you can buy or collect. They all have their own different abilities and uses. For example, the cap badge lets you slowly glide down using a makeshift cap, or the crouch jump badge brings back the Mario 2 crouch jump. There are even some support ones if you want to make the game easier, but every single badge changes the game in one way or another.
You might be wondering “How difficult is the game?”. Well, the difficulty in this game can vary. Each level has a star rating from 1 to 5, with 1 being the easiest and 5 being the most challenging. You’ll mostly come across 3-star levels, which are fairly balanced. The entire game isn’t a spring breeze like New Super Mario Bros 2, but it also isn’t an unfair or painful experience like The Lost Levels. I’d say they got the difficulty balanced just right, which makes the game a fun experience.
The music is nothing short of incredible, which is to be expected from a Mario game. Each level theme fits right in with the game, and one thing I find cool about it is that when you become an elephant, the music becomes trumpet-based. I can’t even begin to explain how good the music is, so take a listen!
If you find a wonder flower in one of the levels, you get a wonder effect that drastically changes the level. There isn’t a single one that I disliked; I thought they were all good in their own way. Sometimes the level itself changes, and sometimes you get a power-up that completely changes the way you play; there’s a huge variety of wonder effects in the game that make the levels even more fun to play. Sometimes these can make the level easier, but there are ones that make it more challenging, like the levels where Bowser tries to blast you from the background, or cosmic Mario from Galaxy shows up and follows you. There are also musical wonder effects, where the enemies will start to sing. In one of the musical levels, King Boo shows up and starts singing opera… now if that isn’t awesome, then I don’t know what is! There’s one wonder effect in particular that made me lose my mind, and it’s in the level high voltage gauntlet. If you grab the wonder flower in this level, you become metal, and that iconic music starts playing. I was overjoyed when I saw this in-game for the first time, and I’m still in disbelief that they brought it back. The wonder effects in this game are fantastic!
Another thing I couldn’t talk about last time is the bosses. Since the Koopalings don’t show up for this game, you’d think they came up with some unique and original bosses, right? Oops! All Bowser Jr. At first I thought his boss fight was awesome; he gets his own wonder effect that changes his appearance to make him look menacing, and then changes the boss room layout with wonder effects. However, he shows up for every single palace in the game, and although the terrain is different each time, he still has the same attack patterns as before which makes fighting him start to get kind of tedious. And Worlds 3 and 5 don’t even have an end-of-world boss, you just get given the royal seed. I get that people may be sick of the Koopalings now because of the New series, but I feel like they could have actually worked well in this game. Like imagine if they all had their own new wonder forms, that make fighting them feel different to any previous entries. Literally, anything else would have been better than fighting Jr 4 times (no offence Bowser Jr), which is a shame because there are so many cool ideas seen throughout the game, but it’s the bosses that get the short end of the stick. However, I did enjoy the final boss. You fight a smoke cloud bowser, who you have to defeat by jumping in time with the beat to hit him. It was a little too easy for a final boss, but I did enjoy the fight; it felt unique.
One other issue I have with the game is that you can’t create multiple save files. You only get one save file per Switch account, so if you wanna completely replay the game then you either have to create a new account or erase your save data, which I’m not doing since I spent so long completing everything. Granted, you can replay every level at any given time, but it doesn’t feel quite the same as starting from scratch. This isn’t the only switch game to do this, but it’s such a shame that there’s something like this in the game to hinder its replayability.
Speaking of replayability, this game does in fact include a special world. You access this world by finding secret exits in levels, similar to how you’d find the star road in Mario World. But unlike Mario World, you have to find every single entrance in every world to play all of the levels. If you get 6 wonder seeds in this world, you can unlock the semi-final test, a reprise of the Piranha Plant Parade level from World 1, which was one of my favourite wonder effects. It’s much harder than the first version of the level, but it’s still really fun. And if you get every single wonder seed in the special world, you unlock the final test, a level that uses multiple wonder effects at once to test your experience with them. It’s one of the hardest levels in the game, and actually took me a few tries to beat.
But that isn’t the end of things! There is a secret final level. To unlock this, you have to go back and collect every single wonder seed, every single 10-flower coin, and reach the top of every single flag pole. I didn’t mind doing this; it was actually quite fun to revisit a lot of levels since they’re really fun to play. However, this also includes the search party levels, which I didn’t enjoy. In these levels, you have to find 5 wonder coins that merge into the wonder seed, which wouldn’t be that bad, except for the fact that most of them are hidden in the most cryptic places possible. I had to look up a guide for that, which I had to wait a while for since I played this at launch. But those levels aside, it was still really enjoyable going back to get everything. Once you have everything, you can finally unlock the final final test, which is without a doubt the hardest level in the entire game. This one tests how experienced you are with every single badge in the game. It may not seem too bad at first, but if you only used certain badges during your entire playthrough, you’re gonna need to adapt quickly or struggle, as I did with the spring and invisibility badges. This level did take quite a long time to beat, but I pulled through and beat it in the end. You actually get the final badge in the game for beating it; the sound-off badge. This badge replaces some of the sound effects with uhh… yeah. It’s more of a novelty badge, but it is kind of a cool reward.
You’d think that’s everything, but there’s one last objective to get 100%. Remember when I brought up standees in the last video? Well, collecting all of them must account for something, right? So, I took some time to grind for flower coins so that I could buy every single one. And once I did, what was the reward? A black background on the title screen. This reminds me of the postcard from Mario Sunshine, but here you’ll see this background every time you boot up the game, to remind you that you’re a super player.
To conclude, I think that Super Mario Bros Wonder is an incredible experience that everyone should play, as it’s definitely worth your money. I can guarantee that you’ll all have as much fun with the game as I did, so go play this game, you won’t regret it!
Instead of using the same recycled plot of Bowser kidnapping Peach, Wonder goes for something different. Mario and friends get invited to the flower kingdom by Prince Haru… I mean Prince Florian (it’s not the same flower kingdom from the ova). However, Bowser shows up and steals a wonder flower, which merges him with the flower castle into this giant smoke castle. So now it’s up to Mario and friends to stop Bowser and save the Flower Kingdom. Quite a simple plot, but do you need any more from Mario?
In this game, you get to choose which character you want to play. The character choices are the obvious Mario, Luigi, Blue and Yellow Toads, and Toadette, but for the first time in a 2D game since Super Mario Bros 2, you can play as Peach again, AND for the first time ever, you can play as Princess Daisy! The only mainline game that Daisy’s appeared in is Super Mario Land, so it’s really cool to see her return, let alone as a playable character. All of these characters play the same, but if you want an easier experience with the game, you have different Yoshis and Nabbit. They can’t take damage, but at the same time, they can’t use any powerups, which I think is a good trade-off. While it is slightly disappointing that the Yoshis are easy-mode characters, it’s still cool to have them be playable regardless.
But how does the game itself play? Well… it controls effortlessly! They seem to have combined the best elements of Super Mario World’s controls with the slightly advanced controls of the New series and mixed it all into a fantastic control scheme. You really feel like you’re in control of the game.
The staple powerups return, but there are some cool new ones. The first new one turns you into an elephant, which reminds me: before the game was released, Nintendo released some short videos to promote the game. One of them was this… yeah, turns out that Bowser has a thing for elephants. Anyways, as an elephant you can smash through enemies and bricks by swinging your trunk. You can also store some water in your trunk, which you can spray on small flowers to get some flower coins. I’ll talk about what the flower coins do later. Another new powerup is the bubble flower, which lets you shoot bubbles. These bubbles can be used to trap and defeat most enemies, but you can also use the bubbles as platforms. The final new powerup is the drill cap, which lets you defeat enemies using your head. You can also use this to burrow into the ground and even the ceiling. All of these new powerups are great to use and are all useful in their own way.
You also meet talking flowers in every level. They’re usually just there to say something to you, but they can occasionally give you small hints at secrets in the level.
The local multiplayer in this game works similarly to previous entries, however, you can no longer jump on each other or throw other players into pits, and instead pass through each other. I can see why they made this change since multiplayer in the new games would get rather chaotic. But if another player uses Yoshi, then you can ride on their back and get carried through the entire level. This even applies to elephants and other Yoshis. Unfortunately, you can’t create a 4 player stack of Yoshis which I think would’ve been cool, but it’s understandable why this isn’t an option.
In addition to local multiplayer, you can also play with friends online! The other players appear as ghosts that you can’t interact with. However, online multiplayer works slightly differently from local. If you die, you turn into a spirit, and if you interact with another player then you’ll get revived. You can also get revived by a player standee, which anyone can place anywhere in the level. But if you’re like me and… have no friends… then you can play with random people online if that’s something that interests you! Whether you play this game alone or with friends, it’s still an incredibly enjoyable experience!
Another thing this game does that really impresses me is it gives everything expressive animations. The New Super Mario games kept reusing the same basic animations, but for this game, they decided to increase the animation budget, which went a long way! Characters are more expressive, enemies get scared when you’re about to attack them, you no longer warp through pipes but climb through them… the list goes on, but it goes to show how some extra small animations can go a long way, especially in a game like Super Mario. The game also received a new art style, which looks amazing! To me, this is the best-looking Mario game, as well as the best-looking game on the Switch.
Something else this game does differently from previous entries is Mario and Luigi’s voices. Ever since Super Mario 64, Mario, Luigi, Wario, and Waluigi have all been voiced by Charles Martinet. However, just a few months ago, Nintendo announced on Twitter that Charles would no longer be voicing the characters, and would instead become a Mario ambassador, which nobody currently knows what exactly that is. In this game, Mario and Luigi are voiced by Kevin Afghani, who does a fantastic job at voicing the iconic plumbers! I likely wouldn’t have even known they had a new actor if I wasn’t informed beforehand; he’s that good!
Now let's talk about the world map and level themes. I won’t reveal each world, but I can confirm that this game has some unique worlds that aren’t just “grass, desert, ice, water, jungle, mountains, sky, lava” which is a very refreshing change of pace. Since the game takes place in a new kingdom, they were able to be expressive with the world map. Speaking of, some parts of the world map are linear, but for the most part, you can run around freely and choose which levels you want to play. And the levels themselves are fantastic; they all stand out from one another, and no two levels feel identical to play. There are also some break levels, where instead of moving from A to B, you complete a small challenge. You also have pop-up shops, where you can spend flower coins to get items such as badges. Oh yeah, let’s talk about the badges.
The game has a huge variety of badges that you can buy or collect. They all have their own different abilities and uses. For example, the cap badge lets you slowly glide down using a makeshift cap, or the crouch jump badge brings back the Mario 2 crouch jump. There are even some support ones if you want to make the game easier, but every single badge changes the game in one way or another.
You might be wondering “How difficult is the game?”. Well, the difficulty in this game can vary. Each level has a star rating from 1 to 5, with 1 being the easiest and 5 being the most challenging. You’ll mostly come across 3-star levels, which are fairly balanced. The entire game isn’t a spring breeze like New Super Mario Bros 2, but it also isn’t an unfair or painful experience like The Lost Levels. I’d say they got the difficulty balanced just right, which makes the game a fun experience.
The music is nothing short of incredible, which is to be expected from a Mario game. Each level theme fits right in with the game, and one thing I find cool about it is that when you become an elephant, the music becomes trumpet-based. I can’t even begin to explain how good the music is, so take a listen!
If you find a wonder flower in one of the levels, you get a wonder effect that drastically changes the level. There isn’t a single one that I disliked; I thought they were all good in their own way. Sometimes the level itself changes, and sometimes you get a power-up that completely changes the way you play; there’s a huge variety of wonder effects in the game that make the levels even more fun to play. Sometimes these can make the level easier, but there are ones that make it more challenging, like the levels where Bowser tries to blast you from the background, or cosmic Mario from Galaxy shows up and follows you. There are also musical wonder effects, where the enemies will start to sing. In one of the musical levels, King Boo shows up and starts singing opera… now if that isn’t awesome, then I don’t know what is! There’s one wonder effect in particular that made me lose my mind, and it’s in the level high voltage gauntlet. If you grab the wonder flower in this level, you become metal, and that iconic music starts playing. I was overjoyed when I saw this in-game for the first time, and I’m still in disbelief that they brought it back. The wonder effects in this game are fantastic!
Another thing I couldn’t talk about last time is the bosses. Since the Koopalings don’t show up for this game, you’d think they came up with some unique and original bosses, right? Oops! All Bowser Jr. At first I thought his boss fight was awesome; he gets his own wonder effect that changes his appearance to make him look menacing, and then changes the boss room layout with wonder effects. However, he shows up for every single palace in the game, and although the terrain is different each time, he still has the same attack patterns as before which makes fighting him start to get kind of tedious. And Worlds 3 and 5 don’t even have an end-of-world boss, you just get given the royal seed. I get that people may be sick of the Koopalings now because of the New series, but I feel like they could have actually worked well in this game. Like imagine if they all had their own new wonder forms, that make fighting them feel different to any previous entries. Literally, anything else would have been better than fighting Jr 4 times (no offence Bowser Jr), which is a shame because there are so many cool ideas seen throughout the game, but it’s the bosses that get the short end of the stick. However, I did enjoy the final boss. You fight a smoke cloud bowser, who you have to defeat by jumping in time with the beat to hit him. It was a little too easy for a final boss, but I did enjoy the fight; it felt unique.
One other issue I have with the game is that you can’t create multiple save files. You only get one save file per Switch account, so if you wanna completely replay the game then you either have to create a new account or erase your save data, which I’m not doing since I spent so long completing everything. Granted, you can replay every level at any given time, but it doesn’t feel quite the same as starting from scratch. This isn’t the only switch game to do this, but it’s such a shame that there’s something like this in the game to hinder its replayability.
Speaking of replayability, this game does in fact include a special world. You access this world by finding secret exits in levels, similar to how you’d find the star road in Mario World. But unlike Mario World, you have to find every single entrance in every world to play all of the levels. If you get 6 wonder seeds in this world, you can unlock the semi-final test, a reprise of the Piranha Plant Parade level from World 1, which was one of my favourite wonder effects. It’s much harder than the first version of the level, but it’s still really fun. And if you get every single wonder seed in the special world, you unlock the final test, a level that uses multiple wonder effects at once to test your experience with them. It’s one of the hardest levels in the game, and actually took me a few tries to beat.
But that isn’t the end of things! There is a secret final level. To unlock this, you have to go back and collect every single wonder seed, every single 10-flower coin, and reach the top of every single flag pole. I didn’t mind doing this; it was actually quite fun to revisit a lot of levels since they’re really fun to play. However, this also includes the search party levels, which I didn’t enjoy. In these levels, you have to find 5 wonder coins that merge into the wonder seed, which wouldn’t be that bad, except for the fact that most of them are hidden in the most cryptic places possible. I had to look up a guide for that, which I had to wait a while for since I played this at launch. But those levels aside, it was still really enjoyable going back to get everything. Once you have everything, you can finally unlock the final final test, which is without a doubt the hardest level in the entire game. This one tests how experienced you are with every single badge in the game. It may not seem too bad at first, but if you only used certain badges during your entire playthrough, you’re gonna need to adapt quickly or struggle, as I did with the spring and invisibility badges. This level did take quite a long time to beat, but I pulled through and beat it in the end. You actually get the final badge in the game for beating it; the sound-off badge. This badge replaces some of the sound effects with uhh… yeah. It’s more of a novelty badge, but it is kind of a cool reward.
You’d think that’s everything, but there’s one last objective to get 100%. Remember when I brought up standees in the last video? Well, collecting all of them must account for something, right? So, I took some time to grind for flower coins so that I could buy every single one. And once I did, what was the reward? A black background on the title screen. This reminds me of the postcard from Mario Sunshine, but here you’ll see this background every time you boot up the game, to remind you that you’re a super player.
To conclude, I think that Super Mario Bros Wonder is an incredible experience that everyone should play, as it’s definitely worth your money. I can guarantee that you’ll all have as much fun with the game as I did, so go play this game, you won’t regret it!