Fake plastic Toads.

Have you ever seen the NileBlue video where he makes the world's purest cookie? It's a pretty entertaining watch, if you haven't seen it; essentially, it's a professional home chemist sourcing some incredibly expensive lab-grade materials in order to chemically synthesize a completely refined cookie. No contaminants, no adjustments to or from the recipe, no ingredients which haven't been first sourced and validated by a chain of scientists. It costs thousands of dollars, requires a fully-stocked laboratory environment, and only ends up producing a single cookie. But, by the end of the video, it's ready. They've got a cookie. A real, honest-to-God, chocolate chip cookie. It's been made in a lab rather than in a kitchen, but it's a cookie all the same. The chemist lifts it up and takes a bite. He chews, and chews, and then grimaces, setting it back down. He says the cookie is bad, and he doesn't know what went wrong.

New Super Mario Bros. U is that cookie.

The word of the day is "sterile", because it's the only thing you could possibly call New Super Mario Bros. U. It uses heat-blasted tools fresh from the autoclave because it's horrified that it might introduce an imperfection or accidentally open a new pathway for experimentation. It's a base template released as a finished project. It's math worksheets. Nothing has been done to make it interesting, because the director has mentally checked out. The newest additions are coins that are colored green rather than gold or red or blue, and a flower power-up that lets you shoot snowballs instead of fireballs. We aren't exactly inventing the wheel, here.

It's a remarkably uninteresting game. The music is some of the worst in the series, everything looks like shitty action figures, there are essentially zero unique power-ups or gimmicks to keep the gameplay fresh. You would hope, then, that the levels would be some great pure-platforming challenges with solid designs and interesting layouts. They aren't. The overwhelming majority of the levels in this are long platforms followed by instakill pits followed by long platforms. You run in a straight line, jump over the pit, run in a straight line, jump over another pit, and repeat until the level ends. Sometimes the pit is bottomless, and other times it's filled with poison, and other times it's filled with lava. Picking up frozen enemies requires a second button press rather than just holding down the run button the way that you do for koopa shells, for some reason. There was one level that was actually interesting, where everything was shaded to look like Starry Night, and it seems to be the only level that anyone actually remembers. I suppose there's also the level near the end which suddenly requires you to use tilt controls for the first time in seven worlds, but that one's more memorable in the sense that you've never forgotten the time that you really embarrassed yourself in school.

Mario as a franchise (the 2D department, at least) was clearly in need of a shake-up long before this came out. It's a stagnant pool, filled with bacteria and fly eggs, completely unfocused. Even New Super Mario Bros. 2 at least tried to do something interesting by flooding the screen with coins. What does this have? Really, what does it have? Some boring levels and no personality? The vastly superior Super Mario Bros. Wonder shares only one game designer and two level designers from New Super Mario Bros. U out of the respective nine and twelve members of each department for Wonder. I don't want to suggest that those who worked on New Super Mario Bros. U and found themselves ultimately replaced are talentless — many of them are currently doing far better work on other, non-Mario games — but I think it's obvious that they got complacent. This game feels like the product of bored minds. Something released purely by compulsion; "the console is drowning and we need a new Mario game, so just get one out in time for Christmas!"

This is an era of Mario that I'm very glad has been left behind. Hopefully it'll remain as little more than a Super Mario Maker template for interested fans to add four games worth of tools to in order to bolster it into something actually entertaining. Aside from that, it's best that we just forget about this and move on. This should have stayed trapped in the coffin that is the Wii U instead of getting a Switch re-release. I'm certain that the resources wasted on putting it out again could have been better used literally anywhere else in the company.

Baby Yoshi fucking rules.