The story in Super Mario Bros Wonder is that Bowser captured Princess Peach and you have to rescue her. Wait…no that’s a different game and in this one Bowser is a…castle? Taken right out of Smithy’s playbook, Bowser caused himself to become part of a castle.
Bowser visited the Flower Kingdom and took Toad as a prisoner and after taking a magical seed called a Wonder Seed, Bowser became a part of the kingdom’s castle that has imprisoned Toad. Now Mario and his friends are tasked with gathering Wonder Seeds and Royal Wonder Seeds in an effort to put an end to Bowers’s terror across the Flower Kingdom and rescue Toad. Mario and friends are accompanied by Prince Florian who helps you navigate his kingdom, explaining how Wonder Seeds work along with explaining various other game mechanics.
Super Mario Wonder is the largest Mario game I have ever played. There are eight worlds with each having its own unique environment. You have Pipe-Rock Plateau, Fluff-Puff Peaks, Shining Falls, Sunbaked Desert, Fungi Mines, Deep Magma Bog, and Petal Isles. The eighth world is a special world that is its own environment that features nothing but the hardest stages in the game. Each world consists of anywhere from twelve to eighteen stages each.
The stages themselves can be either traditional platforming stages or challenges. These challenges can be either arena challenges to obtain Wonder Seeds, or badge challenges that can unlock badges which give you special abilities. Besides the stages, each world has a Poplin Shop. Poplins are the inhabitants of the Flower Kingdom. The shops can be visited to purchase badges, standees, or 1-Ups.
In each stage, there are three purple coins hidden throughout to collect. In addition to these coins, you also have up to two Wonder Seeds to collect. Challenge stages will have one while traditional stages will have two. One to collect by going through the stage and the second is obtained if you can manage to land on the flag on the flag pole. The game refers to this as a Wonder Flag which is a charming name given the game’s namesake.
How you collect a Wonder Seed is that you have to collect the wonder flower/plant. Once you collect it, the entire dynamics of the stage you are in change. For instance, instead of just jumping over pipes in one of the stages, they will constantly move up and down and in some cases come to life and start moving across the ground like a caterpillar. In another stage when you collect one, instead of just dodging one of the enemies that are in the stage or defeating them, there will be a giant heard of them chasing you and they will be about four times the size of the original enemy. Another stage has you becoming really tall and skinny and the entire stage is dark leaving you to only see shadows of yourself and enemies. Not only that, but you have to make yourself taller or really really short in order to avoid obstacles and traverse the stage. So the Wonder Seed gathering of the game makes for some really innovative and unpredictable mechanics that are a lot of fun.
Speaking of badges, there are a whopping twenty-four badges to collect. These can be either action badges or boost badges. Action badges give you an ability you can use in a stage to help you complete it. Boost badges give you a passive ability like a double jump or adding blocks to a stage, both of which could help you navigate the stage more easily.
Several new, as well as staple power-ups have made an appearance in this new game. Staples like the Fire Flower, Super Mushroom, and the Power Star have all made a return, while new power-ups come in the form of the elephant balloon, bubble flower, and the drill mushroom. The elephant balloon allows you to transform into an elephant and use your trunk to attack enemies and spray them with water, in addition to being very heavy. Bubble flowers are similar to the fire flower but instead of throwing fire, you throw bubbles. These bubbles can be used to jump on to reach higher areas, avoid landing in a pit, or even encapsulate enemies. The drill cap as its name suggests, allows you to drill through the ground to avoid enemies, get through obstacles, or even traverse the stage ceiling to get to hidden areas. In addition to being a mode of transportation and defense, it can also be used to attack enemies, but at very close range. While the badges can be used on any stage, power-ups are stage-dependent, with some power-ups specific to a stage and some found in every stage.
I mentioned earlier that Mario and his friends have to take down Bowser, well in this game, Mario has more friends to help him out than ever before! You can play as Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Princess Daisy, Toadette, Nabbit, one of four colored Yoshis, a Yellow Toad, or a Blue Toad. Neither Nabbit nor any of the colored Yoshis are able to take damage or transform when you use power-ups. Sadly, we will never know what Yoshi would have looked like as an elephant. All of the other characters are the same outside of animations and voices. Mechanically, they all play exactly the same way.
In terms of the number of players, the game supports up to four players playing simultaneously with no player collision. Playing previous games in the series this came as a surprise, but becomes clear as to why Nintendo chose to go this route. You see, when you have more than one player, the game will focus on one of them and place a crown above their head. Combine this with the amount of things on screen all at once, it’s a good thing that you don’t have to contend with player collision. Though I think we could have done without the crown aspect. It’s meant to act as a competitive element among you and your friends, but it ultimately becomes an obstacle that makes the game harder. You don’t have a score counter at the top like in previous games, but the game does keep score. The score is a per-player score as far as I can tell and the game tracks each player as they collect items, take down enemies, and collect the Wonder Seeds in each stage.
The player to get the highest score between each other is the one who gets the crown and is the top player. The problem with this is player scores are done so behind the scenes and not something that is evident which is why I am speculating as to how it’s calculated. Once one of the players has the crown, the game puts emphasis on this player with the game perspective and progressing the dialogue that happens between stages. So this means that if the crown player jumps on an enemy or another element to get to a higher aspect of the stage, it will focus on them and leave the other players to struggle to keep up to not end up off-screen and end up a ghost. This in turn will cause all players that become ghosts to then lose whatever power-ups they had, including Super Mushrooms.
An interesting mechanic in Super Mario Bros Wonder is the addition of standees, which serve a dual purpose. First and foremost, they are meant to be yet another set of collectibles. You can purchase a mystery one from Poplin shops which will give you one at random in an effort to collect them all. Second, they are a means to help online players as they go through the stages. Yes, this Mario game has an online multiplayer mechanic. While playing online, you have other player ghosts or shadows playing the same stage you are in real time and the standees can be used to revive fallen players.
You see, when you die, you become a ghost for a few seconds. In those few seconds, you can touch a standee that another player has put down and use it to revive yourself. You can do this in local multiplayer as well, but you can’t use your own, you have to use another local player’s standee. Another thing that standees can be used for is a means to designate a tough section of the game. Whether you’re playing online in real time, or offline and take the game online, your standee will remain in the spot you put it. So if there is a tough spot in a stage, or you just want to let other players know you were there, you can place the standee and they will find it.
The graphics in Super Mario Bros Wonder is the best I’ve seen in any other in the series. Every character model looks polished with some awesome animation. Characters express themselves when pushing large objects and a look of determination when running really fast; among other expressions. Not only with the characters but every enemy has great animation and expressions too. When you’re attacking them, Goombas will express being scared or surprised just before you jump on them and the Koopa’swill do the same. This all adds an element of depth that has never been seen in the series which is a welcome addition.
Beyond the animations and expressions of each enemy and player character, each stage uses both foreground and background elements to give it unprecedented depth. In the mines, for example, the stages feature a cave background but also have foreground rocks and crystals to add depth to the cave you’re in. Camera perspective on the world map coupled with small cutscenes help to give a sense of scale when it comes to the game world that looks really impressive.
So how does all of this going on affect performance? Well to put it simply, it doesn’t. It’s so finely tuned and optimized for the Switch that it runs buttery smooth. This level of performance can only come from Nintendo. Even with Nintendo behind this, I had my reservations. I expected to have maybe a performance hiccup here and there given the age of my launch edition Switch but there wasn’t a single issue during my playthrough.
When it comes to sound, well I have really only one issue. The single issue I have with this game is the sound that jumping makes. Though each character’s jump sound is unique, the amount of jumping you do in this game can be a lot. With this, the jump sound can be very repetitive and a tad annoying. This is only amplified by the number of players playing with you. Though I will admit, the more you get into the game, the less this is noticeable over time, at least it was something I could come to ignore over time. But through the first few stages, it was somewhat bothersome. Besides this, each character has their expressive sounds that really add to their personality and even if it’s not the original voice cast, the voices still sound really good and add a fun element to the game.
The background music is where the game really shines in the sound department. As a fan of the Mario series, I was surprised by the music choices they went with for the stages. While I was expecting something more akin to New Super Mario Bros Wii/U, what we got was more in line with a theatrical production. From the upbeat music found in the first world to the rock music found when taking on the Bowser stages, the game feels more like a theatrical film than a traditional Mario game. As a fan of the Super Mario Bros movie that was recently released, I really enjoyed the soundtrack in this game. It gave a sense of the game being more of an interactive film with a rich story rather than just another game in the Mario franchise.
In conclusion, it’s easy to see why this game is so highly praised by fans and critics alike. Not only is this the pinnacle of the series when it comes to the side-scrolling entries; it’s not one that we were expecting. The last side-scrolling “new” Mario game we got was Super Mario Maker 2. With as much freedom as you have with that game and the ability to create entirely new full-fledged games, Nintendo didn’t seem too interested in giving us another traditional Mario game. So when this game was revealed, it was a shock to most of us; myself included. The game definitely lived up to the hype surrounding it and is easily my favorite Mario game in the series. If you haven’t played this game and are a fan of the Mario franchise, do yourself a favor and pick this game up!
Disclaimer: A review key was provided
