I’ve either fallen out of love with 2D platformers, or I should stop expecting greatness from this series.

I was very much looking forward to this game as I previously considered myself a fan of 2D Mario games. Super Mario World is one of my favorite games ever, but I hated the New Super Mario Bros games; so when Mario Wonder was announced I breathed a sigh of relief. “Finally a new 2D Mario with a fresh artstyle and new music!” Then I played the game.

I think I realized something was wrong when I couldn’t find myself playing this game for more than 45 minutes at a time. I would boot up the game excited to play but by the 45 minute mark, the thought of playing any more seemed like torture. I found myself puzzled by this feeling, certainly Mario Wonder does not do anything wrong. The game is gorgeous, the animations are top notch, and the sound design is excellent. So what gives? Then I found out.

Simply put, the game is boring. Yes the game does not do anything overtly wrong, but it also does not do anything really well either, at least from a gameplay perspective. Mario Wonder does not excite, does not thrill, does not challenge, does not ask much of anything from the player. Just by simply picking up a controller you can beat the game. It may sound harsh but I would seriously dissociate for 30 minutes and find myself beating a major world without even realizing what I just did. The game would simply play itself, it just needed my hand on the controller. Even with the later levels and the secret world, I would just brainlessly plug away until all the obstacles were cleared. I think this is where the characters were a missed opportunity. I get that making every character play the same would make it so the level design can be as consistent as possible, but this consistency came at the cost of fun, in my opinion. There are already characters that make the game easier, why not include characters that make the game harder? And this may be the boomer in me talking, but not having Luigi have his waddle jump or Peach have her float is borderline sacrilege to me.

Speaking of the level design, I have serious disagreements with how Mario Wonder was built. Essentially every level has a unique gimmick that plays out and then never returns. This applies to every level for the most part. This can be a unique enemy type, a form of traversal or weird set piece. You will see that gimmick once and then never again. So if you were hoping to have the gimmicks become more fleshed out as the game progresses, well too bad cause does not happen in Mario Wonder. It genuinely feels like a really well curated set of Mario Maker courses that Nintendo selected for you to play. I’m not entirely sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it feels inappropriate in a mainline 2D Mario game. Why not have the levels tell a narrative instead, building up to the castle of that world? The game already does this at a small capacity with some small dialogue boxes between levels. I do not think it is too much to ask for some narrative/gameplay cohesion.

Last thing I’ll mention are the badges. I think they are a wonderful addition to the game and it was genuinely fun collecting all of them. The problem is that these badges make the game even easier so it just exacerbates the problems I’ve mentioned previously. I do hope these come back in other Mario games as being able to personalize Mario’s moveset sounds like a fantastic idea for the series moving forward. Other than that, the music is okay I guess. No real standouts here either, nothing that made me want to look up songs on Youtube anyway. In the end, Mario Wonder is a perfectly competent and capable platformer with plenty of charm that essentially plays itself to the end. Definitely a good choice for someone’s first video game, but that’s about it.