Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Nintendo Switch Review)

Super Mario Bros. Wonder
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Released October 20, 2023
Directed by Shiro Mouri
Developed by Nintendo
Listing at Super Mario Wiki
$59.99 paid for Mario’s visit to the Betty Ford Clinic in the making of this review.

It took 38 years but Nintendo finally figured out to just run with the “Mario on Drugs” joke.

The above screenshot is from the second level in the game. During the first stage, I was worried that I was heading for another New Super Mario Bros. “I guess this just isn’t for me” experience. And then in the second level, I dropped acid and the piranha plants started singing and having a parade, and I was hooked. Oh they don’t call it “acid.” They’re called “Wonder Flowers” but they have a psychedelic glow to them and they do things like make the pipes come to life like they’re inchworms or cause missiles dropping rainbow smoke trails behind them, and yes, even make you see dragons. This isn’t symbolism, people. This is as on the nose as it gets, and I’m there for it.

The only proof this isn’t really drugs: Mario actually caught the dragon.

For a while, I really thought Mario Wonder was cruising to the title of “best 2D Mario game” with no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. This was based largely on the stellar level design and batsh*t insane Wonder Effects. But some really head-scratching decisions made it an actual debate, which I’m grateful for because this would have been a pretty boring review for me otherwise. Which isn’t to say you can get bored playing Mario Wonder. Oh no. This is far and away better than any of the games in the New Super Mario Bros. franchise and a return to form for Mario as a 2D gaming stalwart. MOST of the levels are pretty damn amazing, and the three new power-ups are a lot of fun to use. I can’t really pretend this wasn’t the absolute best time I’ve ever had with a 2D Mario game, even with all the problems. Actually, the levels are so phenomenal that it’s kind of shocking the game did anything wrong at all, but it did.

The “Mario on Drugs” stuff really isn’t helped by the fact that the screen becomes trippy during the Wonder Effects. Again, this really isn’t winking. This is a drunk tapping you over and over saying “DO YOU GET IT?”

For one thing, the levels don’t scale right at all, nor are they ordered correctly. In the Magma World, there’s a level where evil popcorn kernels walk across giant rocks that heat up and cool down, and if they touch a hot surface (or are shot by a fireball) they pop and become evil popcorn. But, you can permanently deactivate the heating rocks by hitting them with water, either by throwing a pot of water at them or using Elephant Mario’s ability to store water in the trunk and spray it. It’s a fun stage, but then the stage you unlock is one of the “break time” stages. These are tiny micro levels that have a gimmick attached to them, some of which aren’t even real challenges and are just for funsies type of deals. Well, the break time stage in question is like a tutorial type of stage for the whole “get water on the heating/cooling rocks” concept. That’s not an exaggeration, either. It’s genuinely the type of brief micro stage that you would build to introduce a brand new gameplay concept, except you just finished a massive, difficult world built around the mechanic. What the hell?

This is the big stage in question. I had to beat it a third time to get the hidden exit, which a couple stages in each world has. Mario Wonder, from a pacing point of view, is heir-apparent to Super Mario World. They even have the same initials. Except they don’t because it’s not “Super Mario Wonder” but rather “Super Mario Bros. Wonder.”

I don’t want to imply that the “Break Time” or “Badge Challenge” micro stages are a complete disaster, because that’s not the case at all. Some of them had me smiling ear-to-ear. But the structure of the game, or rather the lack thereof, causes a lot of pacing problems. Sometimes the overworld maps are walled-off and sometimes you’re free to wander off the paved pathway and take a large cluster of levels, full-sized or micro, in any order you want. You also can’t rely on Wonder’s built-in quick travel to give you a proper level ordering either, because it always puts the full-sized levels ahead of the micro-levels. There is an attempt to tell you the scaling. The levels are given a one-through-five rating on their challenge, but I really didn’t feel they were accurate. I beat many four star levels on my first life and died a lot on plenty of two star stages.

Where you’re free to roam around the map, there’s lots of hidden stuff. Rarely a stage, and more typically Captain Toad who gives you 50 purple coins. Since you’re practically picking purple coins out of your ears, I don’t think the trade-off of a less logical level progression was worth it. I’d rather have the game follow a semi-strict linear progression with the occasional branching path. If 1991’s Super Mario World can do it brilliantly and still offer a sense of exploration and discovery even with paved pathways, then it’s proven that there is no need to suddenly allow players to walk around the map.

It feels like the developers just threw together the game’s courses and couldn’t decide on an order, so they gave up on the process almost entirely. But the example in the lava world I cited above was one of those pathway parts of the map. It wasn’t MY choice for how it played out. It was the development team’s choice. This isn’t a nothing-burger complaint, either. Pace and tempo matter a great deal. I put a very high premium on a game’s maintaining one consistent tempo of quality, and Wonder is all over the place. And some of the “break time” levels really are a complete waste of time, offering neither quirkiness nor challenge. It’s been a long, long time since I played a modern Nintendo game that had so many aspects of it that felt like placeholders for something bigger that just never got finished. They also should have probably somehow incentivized the badges that are outright handicaps. The one I hated the most sees you perpetually bouncing. I would never use it voluntarily, but they could have easily added some post-game content just by offering rewards for beating specific levels with specific badges. Without that, most badges will go completely unused outside of their micro-stages.

The new bubble power offers the same type of instakill satisfaction of the classic Super Mario fire flower (which is also in this game) but with the added benefit of being able to use the bubbles as boosts for your jumps. But, what really makes it work well is that it’s not effective enough to be able to use it to cheese stages. Its usefulness for platforming, even in multiplayer, is very situational, but in a good way. Actually, none of the power-ups are overpowered. There’s no p-wings or hammer bros. suits to wreck the difficulty curve. Probably a good thing, since Nintendo screwed the pooch on curve from the format alone. Also, since I couldn’t find a spot to talk about it, the drill power is one of the most satisfying Mario powers when you do a Bugs Bunny attack on enemies. Ain’t Mario a stinker?

And while I’m complaining about things, Mario Wonder has the typical mediocre 2D Mario bosses. Yeah, yeah, I know I’m deeply in the minority on that opinion, but I just never enjoy the traditional Mario “jump on the head” boss fight style. I can, and have, enjoyed it in other games, but for some reason, it’s always a letdown for me in a Mario game. Maybe it just doesn’t feel like it matches the epic scope and scale of the worlds themselves. But the fights with Bowser Jr. in Mario Wonder, even though it tries to change up the formula by giving the battles the “Wonder Effect” after the first hit, never felt big or climactic to me. I couldn’t wait for them to be over with and my motivation for them was purely “I don’t want to go through this again.” Hell, the “bosses” of the airships are a literal single button that must be pressed, and the act of getting to that button was so simple and easy to bypass the “logic” of the chamber, especially if you have a badge that boosts your jumping ability, that I was always startled that the fight was over when it was. I guess I just assume based on the enjoyment of the levels that they’re capable of better bosses.

I don’t think this was the wisest spell to cast, Bowser Jr. It’s right up there with Ralph Wiggum getting the first swing of the sword and stabbing himself through the heart. Holy crap, Bowser Jr. IS the Ralph Wiggum of Nintendo. I just spent five minutes staring off into space, imagining the implication of that. By the way, Mario Wonder’s co-op doesn’t have the old fashioned New Super Mario “bounce off each-other” mechanics, and so I actually had a really great time playing co-op with Sasha.

There’s fifty-six total Wonder Effects throughout the game, but a lot more levels than that, so many effects repeat, and not every effect is a winner. Some are typical video game stuff, like running away from the giant spiked ball, or even returning an old Mario item like Balloon Mario from Mario World. Others are more outlandish, like requiring you to jump in sync with a musical beat or answer trivia questions where, if you look closely, the things doing the trivia look kind of like the viruses from Dr. Mario. All of the Wonder Effects are fun, truly! Well, they’re fun ONCE, and if they were each unique to a specific stage, I wouldn’t even have this paragraph. But I grew bored with several effects. The most annoying repeat is “Wubba Mario” which they must have been really proud of because all four of its appearances happen around the same time and it’s even highlighted in a story-driven level where you rescue a bunch of trapped miners. But it’s really nothing special. I’ve played plenty of games where you’re a sticky mass that sticks to every surface. This has been done, and yet they gave this over to a not-unsubstantial portion of the game, and I kind of hate that they did that. The kids loved it, though.

And actually, I think the levels with Wubba Mario were some of the weaker ones in Mario Wonder. Between its four appearances, they could have constructed one ultimate level that took all the best bits of them and made a full stage out of it, and it would have been awesome and welcome. Or hell, spread it out! It’s a great big game. Nope. It really does kind of hit close to four in a row and it just kills the excitement of getting Wonder Flowers. By the way, you then have to repeat one of those levels, literally just play it one more time, to open the path to that world’s Special Stage level. It might be the best 2D Mario ever, but Super Mario Bros. Wonder is NOT perfect.

There’s also an “easy mode” in the form of the Yoshis or Nabbit, who only can die from things like lava and pits, but enemies don’t damage them and Nabbit doesn’t even get stun-locked. This is important, but first let me say that, like Super Mario World, there’s a bonus Special World where every stage is designed to be extra difficult. When I reviewed Super Mario World and didn’t struggle all that much with Special Stages (which, for the record, I did, the first time I played the game as a kid), someone said “have you considered that you’re just really good at video games?” Which is flattering, but if it were true I wouldn’t have needed over one-hundred combined lives over the course of three days just to beat this one level:

This is one of those levels where whole new swear words had to be invented. I think I got up to eleven syllables for one of them.

It’s called “Special Climb to the Beat” and allegedly jumping to the rhythm is the key to winning. Okay, so I’m tone deaf and I have shaky hands, so this was fated to be my mortal enemy anyway, but it also annihilated the kids too. I sincerely thought I would not be able to finish the game.  I actually finished this review, but that niggling little voice that says “come on, you’re so close to acing the game” started screaming in the head, and I did eventually get to the top. And by the way: I HATE that getting the top of the flagpole is one of the requirements for 100%ing the game, because when I had to replay a few levels to unlock the ultimate final challenge (which is just a marathon of using ten of the badges, though there are a few checkpoints so it’s not THAT bad), for a few of them, the only thing I was missing was touching the top of the flag. There’s nothing worse than replaying a full stage just to do one thing at the very end differently. Anyway, back to the problem with the Yoshis and Nabbit.

Finally!

After beating the wall-jumping stage from hell, Sasha hopped on for co-op, and in fact, we beat four of the Special World levels on our first attempt WITH the purple coins and flagpole. But this is not a +1 in the “maybe she’s just good at video games” pile because co-op made it kind of easy AND the Yoshis made it even easier. Sasha, playing as Yoshi, could not be killed by enemies, and if only one of us was dead, we could come back to life just by our ghost hitting the other within “five seconds” but it’s really closer to eight or nine seconds. So after that stage that killed me a ton, we sort of flew through the Special World. If it took us twenty minutes total, I’d be stunned. Solo? Oh, these stages are brutal. But in co-op? We both died a lot AND beat the stages on our first try. Also, the Special World really isn’t THAT special. What made the Special World stand out in Mario World is that the levels were weird, experimental, and crazy. Well, that’s sort of the whole game of Mario Wonder, isn’t it? Wonder’s Special World stages are harder, but they’re not creatively better because the whole game is this kind of weird, experimental, and crazy.

Now here’s the good news: when Mario Wonder is at its best, it’s pure gaming euphoria. Well, I’d hope so since that’s sort of the point of drugs. One of the many reasons it stands tall over the New Super Mario games is that those always felt like they used the original 8-bit/16-bit games as little more than a checklist. “These are the things we need to put into the games, because nostalgia.” Not Wonder, though. It feels like it used the original games for inspiration to do a game that feels modern and not like a throwback. Which isn’t to say that the games don’t fit with those. The jumping physics are as intuitive as Mario World’s. The cast of enemies is right up there with Super Mario 3’s. The effort made to give each stage its own personality also matches Mario 3’s, and that’s where Wonder really shines. It feels like a true evolution instead of a cash-grab homage.

There are multiple levels in Mario Wonder that are very obviously not designed with co-op in mind. I’m totally fine with that because, say it with me: CO-OP RUINS EVERYTHING. One of the reasons the New Super Mario series is so f*cking bland is because Nintendo put such a heavy premium on the co-op gameplay that came at the expense of the single player experience. Every single stage had to work with four players bouncing off each-other. They clearly didn’t give a crap about that with Wonder, because levels like this one, where you launch super high with each jump, caused more fatalities than a Mortal Kombat tournament. I’m all for it, too.

Like Mario 3, if any stage doesn’t “do it” for you, that’s fine because you’re one stage away from a completely unique experience. Even if the Wonder Effect is a repeat, how the stage is built, and the ebb and flow of it, will almost certainly feel like a one-off. It must be hard to do, because there’s not a lot of 2D platformers that can maintain that for the full length of the game. Even Mario World didn’t completely succeed there. With Mario Wonder, Nintendo has now done it twice in this franchise (probably three times since Yoshi’s Island kind of did it too).

Yes, yes, we all liked Limbo, Nintendo. I wonder if the elongated Mario being framed in silhouette like this was a joke against Limbo the indie game and limbo the thing drunk people throw their backs out doing. “Limbo under the bar when you’re stretched out like this, bitch!”

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the polished, modern Super Mario Bros. 3, and to a lesser extent, Super Mario World. What stood out to me in Mario 3 is how, in retrospect, Nintendo did a pretty poor job of incentivizing exploration of the stages. They jammed plenty of content if you do explore, but didn’t effectively corral players into it. The most important question a game designer can ask is “why?” As in “why would players find this stuff?” And I don’t think “just because” is a good answer. I don’t think Nintendo knew that “WHY?” was the be-all, end-all design question in 1988, but they sure did by 2023. Mario Wonder is the most effective 2D Mario for convincing players to see everything through natural gameplay mechanics. They asked themselves “WHY?” and came up with answers, and as a result, for all of its glaring flaws, Mario Wonder is the best 2D Mario game. Sorry, Super Mario Bros. 2 and ROM hacks of Super Mario Bros. 3, but you’ve finally been beaten.

As I stated in my Super Mario Advance 4 review, Mario 3 was a game made in Nintendo’s adolescence. As amazing for its time as the game was, it was also still a game being made by people who were still learning how to develop “Nintendo” style games. Almost exactly thirty-five years to the day after Mario 3 released for the first time and Super Mario Bros. Wonder hit stores, and it’s a game made by Nintendo designers who have graduated as game designers. They know what they’re doing now. They ask “WHY?” a lot, and they understand how to maximize every gameplay mechanic. Mario Wonder IS Mario 3, all grown-up. The irony is, there’s still a lot of gamers out there, 50-somethings, who insist they will NEVER play “modern crap” because they just know in their heart the classics can never be beaten. They refuse to grow up, and I’m very happy the people designing games at Nintendo aren’t like them. Growing up ain’t so bad after all.
Verdict: YES!

They really did need better unlockables than this, though. Couldn’t they have given costumes for the characters?