psychbomb
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--
Days in Journal
1 day
Last played
October 20, 2023
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Seventeen years ago, Nintendo released New Super Mario Bros., and they fucking meant it when they said “new”.
The company may as well have struck crude oil for the sheer amount of money that they printed after its release; thirty million copies sold served as the clearest sign they were ever going to get that this was the way the series needed to be from here on out. A decade and a half later, and almost literally every single 2D Mario game we’ve gotten since has been a member of the New sub-franchise — New Super Mario Bros. Wii, New Super Mario Bros. 2, there was even a New Super Luigi U. You can argue that Super Mario Maker breaks the pattern, but I’d argue back that dropping a glorified level editor and telling the players to design the games themselves doesn’t count for much. Besides, Mario Maker is still a lateral step at best; it’s playing the same hits as before, just rolling four previously-released games together to be swapped around as needed. The New Super Mario Bros. mode, funnily enough, turned out to have the most advanced movement tech, meaning that the most serious players and level designers effectively found themselves with yet another New game fairly early into Mario Maker’s lifespan.
Nintendo’s modus operandi seemed to be that if you somehow weren’t sick of New Super Mario Bros. yet, then they’d make sure that you would be. Every subsequent game seemed to scrape a couple of extra flakes of wood off of the bottom of the barrel, desperate to find something else they could extract from this fucking sub-series. New Super Luigi U was a download-only level pack for New Super Mario Bros. U that starred exclusively Luigi, because at least that was different enough from starring Mario to warrant its own game; New Super Mario Bros. 2 put an obscene emphasis on the act of collecting coins, which is almost universally the least exciting part of any Mario game. The 3D entries — Galaxy, 3D World, Odyssey — seemed to be the place where Nintendo was still experimenting and innovating what Mario could be, while the 2D games quietly shuffled along in rote stagnancy for two decades like retirees towards death. There was no zest, nothing fresh, just an endless series of “bah-bah”s and maybe one or two new power-ups every couple years so you didn’t start thinking that you spent sixty dollars for the exact same game again (you did).
Super Mario Bros. Wonder gives 2D Mario a personality again, and it’s a complete triumph for that fact alone.
How truly great it is to play a game like this without any positive expectations, and instead come away with full confidence that it’s some of the best that Mario has ever been. Of course, maybe that’s not saying much — 2D Mario has been almost exclusively New Super Mario Bros. for about half of the entire franchise’s lifetime now — but Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3 are often hailed as the best platformers ever made, so anything that can stand next to them is doing something very right. If I’m being completely honest, I think it clears both of them easily. Call it recency bias, but it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been this impressed by anything Nintendo’s put out.
The game managed to get all the way through prototyping without a deadline, and it unquestionably shows. Wonder has a whole box full of toys that it's eager to show the player, and it almost never lingers on any of them; the majority of level gimmicks here get used just a single time and never again, while the most common returning gimmicks really only appear maybe three times before vanishing forever. All of them feel about as realized as they could be; while it may sound a bit like the game is just throwing out everything in the hope of something sticking, most of these concepts are really only fun for one or two levels, and it wouldn't be wise to try making a full game out of them.
It revels in being strange. As strange as Mario is ever going to be allowed to be, at least. It took me a little bit to make a decision on whether I thought the talking flowers were charming or annoying, but I eventually ended up liking them; as the game goes on, they get progressively more and more unhinged, dropping the "you did such a good job" schtick to just start saying strange shit. One level is filled with green goo that you need to swim through to progress, and the flowers won't stop talking about how much they want to eat it. When you get the wonder seed, turn into a goo ball, and then pass by one of the flowers, he audibly licks you and then says how delicious you are. I think about that flower a lot. What a little fucking freak he was.
The badge system serves mostly to trivialize an already easy game, giving the player the option to get extra mid-air jumps, or a free rescue from a bottomless pit, or adding exclamation point blocks everywhere that cover basically every hazard you could ever possibly deal with in a given stage. It definitely feels designed more to provide an experience than a challenge, and I think that's fine. I would love to see a level pack for this that ramps up the difficulty so I'm not constantly walking around with 99 lives and 999 flower coins, but I'm probably not the target audience for this anyway. Mario is for kids, after all. We've gotta wean them off of this before we start hitting them with the Celeste C-sides. Regardless, though, the badges mostly offer some unique ways to engage with these levels, and there are tons of secret paths in every single one that you can only access by snooping around off the top of the screen or behind brick-covered passageways. There's a shocking amount to explore here, which is extra surprising considering how inherently linear a 2D sidescrolling stage is going to be.
I had an absurd amount of fun with Wonder, and the ten or so hours it took me to breeze through it just melted away without me even noticing. Fingers crossed that this completely buries New Super Mario Bros. from here on out. If this is the way that Nintendo is going to be developing 2D Mario games, then I'm absolutely going to be here for it.
I have to be careful about asking for more like this, though. Nintendo might spend the next twenty years making nothing but Super Mario Bros. Wonder sequels.
The company may as well have struck crude oil for the sheer amount of money that they printed after its release; thirty million copies sold served as the clearest sign they were ever going to get that this was the way the series needed to be from here on out. A decade and a half later, and almost literally every single 2D Mario game we’ve gotten since has been a member of the New sub-franchise — New Super Mario Bros. Wii, New Super Mario Bros. 2, there was even a New Super Luigi U. You can argue that Super Mario Maker breaks the pattern, but I’d argue back that dropping a glorified level editor and telling the players to design the games themselves doesn’t count for much. Besides, Mario Maker is still a lateral step at best; it’s playing the same hits as before, just rolling four previously-released games together to be swapped around as needed. The New Super Mario Bros. mode, funnily enough, turned out to have the most advanced movement tech, meaning that the most serious players and level designers effectively found themselves with yet another New game fairly early into Mario Maker’s lifespan.
Nintendo’s modus operandi seemed to be that if you somehow weren’t sick of New Super Mario Bros. yet, then they’d make sure that you would be. Every subsequent game seemed to scrape a couple of extra flakes of wood off of the bottom of the barrel, desperate to find something else they could extract from this fucking sub-series. New Super Luigi U was a download-only level pack for New Super Mario Bros. U that starred exclusively Luigi, because at least that was different enough from starring Mario to warrant its own game; New Super Mario Bros. 2 put an obscene emphasis on the act of collecting coins, which is almost universally the least exciting part of any Mario game. The 3D entries — Galaxy, 3D World, Odyssey — seemed to be the place where Nintendo was still experimenting and innovating what Mario could be, while the 2D games quietly shuffled along in rote stagnancy for two decades like retirees towards death. There was no zest, nothing fresh, just an endless series of “bah-bah”s and maybe one or two new power-ups every couple years so you didn’t start thinking that you spent sixty dollars for the exact same game again (you did).
Super Mario Bros. Wonder gives 2D Mario a personality again, and it’s a complete triumph for that fact alone.
How truly great it is to play a game like this without any positive expectations, and instead come away with full confidence that it’s some of the best that Mario has ever been. Of course, maybe that’s not saying much — 2D Mario has been almost exclusively New Super Mario Bros. for about half of the entire franchise’s lifetime now — but Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3 are often hailed as the best platformers ever made, so anything that can stand next to them is doing something very right. If I’m being completely honest, I think it clears both of them easily. Call it recency bias, but it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been this impressed by anything Nintendo’s put out.
The game managed to get all the way through prototyping without a deadline, and it unquestionably shows. Wonder has a whole box full of toys that it's eager to show the player, and it almost never lingers on any of them; the majority of level gimmicks here get used just a single time and never again, while the most common returning gimmicks really only appear maybe three times before vanishing forever. All of them feel about as realized as they could be; while it may sound a bit like the game is just throwing out everything in the hope of something sticking, most of these concepts are really only fun for one or two levels, and it wouldn't be wise to try making a full game out of them.
It revels in being strange. As strange as Mario is ever going to be allowed to be, at least. It took me a little bit to make a decision on whether I thought the talking flowers were charming or annoying, but I eventually ended up liking them; as the game goes on, they get progressively more and more unhinged, dropping the "you did such a good job" schtick to just start saying strange shit. One level is filled with green goo that you need to swim through to progress, and the flowers won't stop talking about how much they want to eat it. When you get the wonder seed, turn into a goo ball, and then pass by one of the flowers, he audibly licks you and then says how delicious you are. I think about that flower a lot. What a little fucking freak he was.
The badge system serves mostly to trivialize an already easy game, giving the player the option to get extra mid-air jumps, or a free rescue from a bottomless pit, or adding exclamation point blocks everywhere that cover basically every hazard you could ever possibly deal with in a given stage. It definitely feels designed more to provide an experience than a challenge, and I think that's fine. I would love to see a level pack for this that ramps up the difficulty so I'm not constantly walking around with 99 lives and 999 flower coins, but I'm probably not the target audience for this anyway. Mario is for kids, after all. We've gotta wean them off of this before we start hitting them with the Celeste C-sides. Regardless, though, the badges mostly offer some unique ways to engage with these levels, and there are tons of secret paths in every single one that you can only access by snooping around off the top of the screen or behind brick-covered passageways. There's a shocking amount to explore here, which is extra surprising considering how inherently linear a 2D sidescrolling stage is going to be.
I had an absurd amount of fun with Wonder, and the ten or so hours it took me to breeze through it just melted away without me even noticing. Fingers crossed that this completely buries New Super Mario Bros. from here on out. If this is the way that Nintendo is going to be developing 2D Mario games, then I'm absolutely going to be here for it.
I have to be careful about asking for more like this, though. Nintendo might spend the next twenty years making nothing but Super Mario Bros. Wonder sequels.