7.7 KiB
| title | date | score | game_release_year | howlongtobeat_id | howlongtobeat_hrs | game_name | game_developer | game_genre | tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Super Mario Bros. Wonder: Pipe Dreams Do Come True | 2023-12-03T08:47:00+01:00 | 5 | 2023 | 130444 | 9.3 | Super Mario Bros. Wonder | Nintendo EPD | 2D Platformer |
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2023 has been an amazing year for games, and Nintendo's wonderful Wonder is no exception. Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the first truly new 2D Mario game since the release of the New Super Mario Bros. (NSMB) franchise in 2006---that's a stunning 17 years, for anyone who's counting! When it comes to bringing back to life beloved 2D genres, Nintendo seems to be on a roll. Just like the recent Metroid Dread, Wonder scored wonderfully high among critics, and just like Dread, there's very little here to complain about, besides perhaps the fact that the wonderfulness is over too quickly.
In Wonder, Mario and his friends are invited to a party in the Flower Kingdom, giving Nintendo a good excuse to get rid of the conventional Mushroom Kingdom mechanics. Taking a cue from the Super Mario Land Game Boy series, the Flower Kingdom's level structure, fauna, and flora is unique to say the least. Besides the occasional Goomba and Koopa Trooper, the overwhelming part of Mario's adversaries---besides the ubiquitous Big Bad---are completely new and fresh. You've got flying gnawlers eating up coins, strange birds that shoot out temporary platforms, weird shapes that are both platform and enemy, bull stampedes, and much more. Both the enemy and the location design is a radical departure from the conventional NSMB backdrops we're all tired of seeing appear in Mario platformers.
During our playthrough, I was regularly reminded of the oddities of Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins, as that game also came with delightfully weird enemy design. Even the slime-like jelly Mario has to wade through makes a return. But Wonder also steals ideas from Super Mario Odyssey, as catching a Wonder Flower might transform Mario himself into one of his enemies.
Speaking of Wonder Flowers, in (almost) every level, you're on the hunt for two Wonder Seeds: one gained by exiting the game via your expected flag pole, and the other by nabbing it after making it through a trip after the Wonder Flower completely transforms the level into something else. One minute you're playing... well... a Mario game: hitting blocks, shooting enemies with your fire flower ability, and the next, you're suddenly running from a pack of angry bulls, or you become the bull. Some flowers even change the camera angle and turn Super Mario Bros. Wonder into a top-down game!
I won't spoil the most wonderful (ha!) surprises, but suffice to say, we had a big grin on our face while playing through every single level. The variation and creative inventiveness the team managed to come up with is simply jaw-dropping. Every level does something else, and just when you're about to say "hey, I think I've seen it all", the game throws something new at you.
That new isn't limited to the mechanics of the Wonder Flower, though. The color palette and the theme of each world is atypical for a 2D Mario game as well. After finishing three worlds, you can choose in which order you tackle the rest of the worlds---again, just like in Mario Land 2. World 4 is called Sunbaked Desert, and I was afraid that that world would contain nothing but uninspired piles of sand, pyramids, and various yellow-to-brown texture work. Instead, I find myself in the middle of an Arabian Nights story, and the palette shifts from yellow to deep purple. Suffice to say, even though the game's conventional world system wants you to think it's going to serve conventional levels, that's just there to misdirect the player (and surprise them even more).
Power-ups, then. Everybody has seen the weird Mario-elephant in the promotional videos, and although it was fun to run around with a trunk full of water, it wasn't as ground-breaking as I thought it was going to be. And perhaps that's not bad. The other two new power-ups---shooting bubbles and drilling into the ground or ceiling---are just as subtle, but still introduce a significant enough gameplay element that enables hunting for secrets in a new way. For instance, your trunk can bash blocks that would otherwise require a shell, or you could simply drill down and ignore the blocks all-together. The bubbles you shoot out can be used as temporary platforms and can pass through solid walls, making the power-up a good leverage booster. They're not as ground-breaking or wow-ing as the rest of the game, though.
The power-ups shine a light on another superb aspect of Wonder: its sound and music design. As soon as you turn into an elephant, the soundtrack evolves into a more trumpety variant, fit for a true gray jungle beast. As soon as you dig into dirt, the soundtrack becomes muffled, not unlike submerging yourself into water or the jelly of the first screenshot here. On top of that, tiny Mario's jumps actually sound puny, if that makes any sense.
But it doesn't stop there: some levels feature singing piranha plants where the vocals can temporarily drop off if you manage to shoot the plants. This sounds silly, but its effect is very impressive in-game. Many new fully orchestrated soundtracks come with the game, and a few clever remixes such as the underground theme left me yearning for more underground-like levels. Koji Kondo's team did it once again.
In case the ample showcase videos and above screenshots fail to highlight yet another strong point of Wonder: the animation work is truly stunning. The way Mario tucks his hat over his head when ducking, the way he enters and exits pipes by wiggling and grabbing the hat he sometimes forgets, the way Elephant Mario crawls along the level, it's all just wonderful. I know, I know, it's getting old, but it deserved a mention. It all runs flawlessly (wonderfully? okay I'll stop) on the Switch, in both docked and handheld mode.
Is there something less wonderful present in Wonder? Perhaps not. We didn't care for the online mode, so I can't comment on that, but if there's something I'd have to remark, it would be the needless jabbering of some of the characters you encounter during your adventure. It's just weird to see that many text boxes in a 2D Mario platformer, and to be perfectly frank, we jammed the A button as quickly as we could every time someone had something insignificant to say.
Other than that, Mario's "slippery" movement mechanics take some getting used to, especially if you came from a (S)NES or GB Mario game before it. It's not as bad as the NSMB games, but you better keep that run button pressed---otherwise the jumps suddenly lose momentum and cover not even a third of the distance you'd expect it to cover.
Is Super Mario Bros. Wonder the best (2D) Mario game out there? I don't think so. Super Mario World is extremely tough to beat, but as my wife neatly summarized it: "this is the best Mario game since the SNES one I played as a kid!". I completely agree. 2023, what a year.