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StarTopic Super Mario Bros. Wonder |ST| It’s a Wonderful Extra Life

been on vacation the last couple weeks but started my playthrough of wonder during it. never really had an opportunity to do long sessions, mostly just played on train rides and stuff. Also only played on Switch lite as my Swoled was too unwieldy to bring with me. Thinking of restarting the game when I get home.

Would ya'll restart? I just got to shining falls. Never got to experience the apparently really good use of HD Rumble or see the game docked on TV
 
Thunder84 said:
I guess this is unpopular, but I don’t really care about difficulty in Mario at all
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For what it’s worth I like the difficulty in Wonder, which is that it’s a range from stroll in the park to life-munching challenges. The game keeps throwing new stuff at you and that’s what’s making it fun for me.
 
Just beat the final level online with strangers. Loved the experience of spamming the happy emote whenever the last of us made it to the end of a section; and all three of us hit the top of the flagpole together.
 
Just beat this game last night. The final level and boss were just pure bliss imo.

And I actually enjoyed the credits too!
 
So I've finished the game 100% and have been thinking about it for like a week, and I'm having trouble putting together my complete thoughts on it. I've seen the game compared to a series of appetizers, because everything is so bite-sized and compartmentalized. This approach and the emphasis on gimmickry was likened to Odyssey, and I've seen it lamented that the ideas weren't really maximized like in a Celeste or Tropical Freeze, making it feel ultimately unsatisfying despite its high quality. And in a broad sense, I agree with a lot of these evaluations and criticisms, yet somehow my takeaway from the game is so much more positive.

First, addressing the similarities to Odyssey: I'm not an Odyssey fan at all, but I think Wonder and Odyssey is a similar situation to Odyssey and Breath of the Wild in 2017, where a lot of the same concepts were present in both but executed much better in Zelda. I'm a big critic of the practice both games employed with their shrines/whatever you want to call Odyssey's standardized "here's a platforming challenge with two moons in it" sections. Both in how it resulted in a gutted, short form version of a Zelda dungeon and a 3D World 4koma level respectively that loses everything but the barest skeleton of the design, and how it isolated most of the level design you would expect from these series away from the game world proper.

But Wonder doesn't really have these issues in its own "bite-sized design" because these levels are basically the entire game instead of a side attraction, and they have the presentation you'd expect (shout out to Shining Falls for looking like a Sonic level in a Mario art style) while being overstuffed with all the delightful bells and whistles ancillary to platforming challenges that make a Mario stage special. Right from the get go, the first level sets you up for this running jump near the start where if you bounce off of a Goomba your trajectory will send you perfectly into an invisible block containing a 1-Up. These little moments of joy and surprise are everywhere, and I love that they doubled down on them so hard for this one because they're one of the original defining aspects of a Mario game alongside the simple fun of controlling Mario and the freedom to skip around the game however you like.

That's something that has been mostly lost ever since Sunshine's weird "nothing matters but the Shadow Mario missions" structure. You can no longer pick and choose which parts of the game to experience like you could with the classics, through secrets or otherwise. Secrets, which were once such a huge part of the appeal, were in general de-emphasized and became considerably less secret because they had to be found. The beauty of how many things were hidden in Mario 3 and how weird and specific some of them were is that you weren't really missing anything if you didn't find them. Originally, there was a balance where finding secrets was an alternative path to success of sorts, all of them were geared towards helping you get through the game on something other than your raw platforming skill, creating a buffer of extra lives and extra hits and helpful extra abilities. Even the act of hitting a ? block was part of this dynamic, it's that ingrained into Mario's identity, but taking the time to search the blocks for hidden power-ups is so basic and understood by every Mario player now that it's hard to imagine the idea that there was originally a novelty to the concept and a reason for the ? design. It never quite went away, but the inclusion of that spirit of discovery and hidden novelty in Mario levels became increasingly perfunctory. It's not like extra lives and such even really mattered anymore, and proper warp zones were a thing of the ancient past. Even games which try to present a similar veneer to older ones like Galaxy or New Super Mario Bros. U are in reality far less free. Bar perhaps Bowser's Fury, Wonder is the most open Mario game since 1996.

A big part of that is the Wonder Seeds. Mario Wonder is following in the footsteps of 3D Land and 3D World by bringing this concept of requiring collectibles to progress into 2D Mario proper, but it does it so much better than those games. Wonder Seeds aren't the Star Coins of this game, but instead are actually awarded for finishing a level or the game's equivalents of bonus rooms. These being the various short challenges outside of the main levels and the wonder effect sections within them. There's not really any standardization to these, and we'll get back to that, but it was my first impression after seeing continuous footage of the game and I still think it's the best way to describe them. The Wonder Flower is like a level within a level that further breaks up and disrupts things, making the game feel even more divided into short chunks. And Wonder Seeds now function on a per-world basis, rather than game-wide. This is where the Odyssey comparison was immediately obvious to me, but I felt they had an almost opposite impact here. In Odyssey, I hated the way moons worked. This works a lot better because the individual levels within a world are a lot more distinct and meaningful than the individual Power Moons in an Odyssey world, and although you are still required to complete all six main worlds to beat the game, it lets you have a lot more freedom in how you get to the endpoint of each. And it also allowed them to let you tackle the entire second half of the game in any order you please!

The transformations are definitely another parallel, and there's at least one shared between the two in the Goomba. In this case I actually think Odyssey at its best worked out better. While there's a lot more chaff, the best captures had new enemies created specifically to provide interesting mechanics when captured rather than as foes (so like, they could have just been power-ups and the entire capture concept was ultimately kind of pointless, but shhh). Wonder doesn't really have a Pokio or Uproot or Tropical Wiggler. The blob one is pretty cool I guess? They're definitely no Animal Buddies, and I can sympathize with the perspective that any time you're not playing as Mario is a downgrade. The nicest thing I can say is that most of them don't outstay their welcome.

But that's kind of the thing about this game. It unleashes a blitz of novelty and variety upon you, quality control be damned. The only unbreakable structural rule it follows is that each full level has a Wonder Flower. Otherwise, it can really do whatever. The Wonder Flower can be at the beginning, the middle, or the end. There can be one checkpoint, two, or none. This is not an immaculately designed game, for all its polish it has some hilariously awful ideas sometimes, and honestly, that's kind of what I love about it?

New Super Mario Bros., in comparison to the classic Mario games, feels like a regression and a redirection. It reverts to the status quo of Mario 1 in a lot of ways and takes a different path forward, with more emphasis on developing the one idea of each level in a consistent, textbook manner. This style of level design, referred to as 4koma by the developers of 3D World, has been omnipresent in nearly every Mario game from NSMB till now. But it comes off more like a watered down, overly formulaic Donkey Kong Country to me than the Mario games of old that these titles try to evoke. I'd like to make a distinction between the basic principles underlying 4koma (introduce a new mechanic in a safe manner, develop it in increasingly complex permutations, repeat next level), which are just good game design, and the practice of designing the levels themselves around this structure, which is what I'm talking about. Super Mario Galaxy is a great example of a game that does not disregard this practice, but doesn't build its levels around it either. All three stars of Gusty Garden begin with Mario riding dandelions on the wind, and then that might suddenly lead into a level about ground pounding to expose moles, or chasing a rabbit around a giant hedge maze cube, or whatever Gravity Scramble is supposed to be. Each of these ideas is generally developed in the manner you would expect when it's in the spotlight, but the level itself is not a coherent whole mechanically or even thematically (again, what does Gravity Scramble have to do with anything?), and may switch tracks at the drop of a hat. Mario World can be similar, especially the castle levels.

The NSMB games and 3D Land/World use 4koma in a much more basic sense than most other games, in that they really follow it verbatim and go "yep, that's the level". Other games like Celeste and Tropical Freeze, which I'm a huge fan of, have taken these principles and gotten much more complex and less structurally rigid with them, weaving ideas together and really taking each one to its limit. I don't actually want Mario to be like those games. Don't get me wrong, Galaxy 2 is my favorite in the series by far, in large part because it produced the most creative and sophisticated iteration of this type of level design, thereby making it the one most like a Donkey Kong game. I was really disappointed by 3D Land and to a lesser extent 3D World, because in cynically imitating the old Mario games and adopting retro trappings in a continued effort to try and make 3D Mario more palatable to the masses, they were deliberately dumbing themselves down from what they had just accomplished in Galaxy 2. I can enjoy 3D World for what it is, especially now with the Switch version whose pacing actually resembles that of the games it was trying to be like, but the whole idea just strikes me unavoidably as a regression, something with no real creative upsides compared to the thing they were just doing that was so similar but allowed to be so much more.

But, Donkey Kong can be Donkey Kong. I think we lose something if we don't allow Mario to be Mario. And this approach from Wonder feels so purely Mario. Yes, the levels are very short, dense excursions which hit you with a frantic dose of some weird new concept and breeze by in an instant. Just like Mario 3. Yes, it's a game full of distracting novelties, underutilized mechanics and ideas, and interactions between them which most players will never even see or find any use for. Just like Mario World. Maybe I'd feel differently if this was a style of game that had actually stuck around all these years and been consistently pitted against the alternative, but I never thought we'd get a Mario game like this ever again and had zero expectations that Wonder would be the one to bring it back before playing it.

Mario 3 is a game that I would say is fully more than the sum of its parts. What it does is quite clever. By relying on things like the macro structure of the worlds and the inherent fun of Mario's movement, it can have numerous short, unique levels whose actual contents almost don't matter. They're over so fast they can hardly ever outstay their welcome, but they add to the frenetic nature of the game by injecting constant variety. In contrast to all the platformers that took after it, the world maps of Mario 3 are almost like a turn-based board game where the objective is to manage your resources and use your skills to reach the castle at the end, and each "board", rather than the individual courses, is the real stage. Looking at it critically, something like the Angry Sun level is not really a good platformer stage. The first part leading up to the tornado jump has nothing to do with anything, and then the rest of it is a flat expanse of the exact same thing repeating over and over. 3 is full of levels that aren't necessarily good, but it's never really that noticeable because of the way you frantically blitz through them. World was slower-paced, but it had a similarly freeform nature in its own way. You had things like the Forest of Illusion or that Star Road level that was basically a single screen puzzle. To be honest, I always chalked up the inconsistency of these games to how early and formative they are, there were no standards back then. But then, in 2023, Wonder is much the same way.

I feel very similarly about Wonder to how I feel about 3. To be sure, they're leaving things on the table by flitting from concept to concept so quickly, and their ideas are not always all that great. But there's something so engaging about the lightness of it, leaping constantly from one thing to the next just slowly enough to avoid whiplash, something so special about the constant onslaught of surprise and joy in them. I might prefer the more disciplined, symphonic way DKC goes about it, but I want this kind of game to exist too.

And now, a brief roast of all of Mario Wonder's worst ideas:
- Search Parties. Oh my god. Did they want to recreate the experience of communal problem solving of cryptic secrets in old video games? Some classic Nintendo bullshit right there.

- The wonder effect in the one lava stage that's just standing in place for a really long time while the statue shoots non-threatening fireballs at you and the flower screams constantly. There are some forgettable ones for sure, but this is possibly the only one I would call actively boring to sit through.

- The Talking Flowers are a lot less annoying than I expected, but for a game which thrives so much on constant novelty, it's weird how much of their dialogue is essentially just "hi!", screaming, and some variation of "well that just happened". They're talking a lot, but they're not saying anything. The times they really add something are pretty rare relative to how frequently they're on screen. But this is listed among the game's worst ideas because it was what ultimately replaced the tsundere narrator; a blunder of staggering proportions.

- The music sections like the Piranha Plant level that was constantly getting praise here are cute, apart from being a well they go back to perhaps a few too many times to retain its impact, but they're no Grassland Groove or anything. For one, they're in a game without a particularly great soundtrack. While their choreographed autoscroller nature might place them closer to the music levels of Rayman Legends, the comparison there isn't too favorable either, as those are way more exciting and elaborate setpieces. I'm actually not a huge fan of the Legends music levels and consider them the biggest example of style over substance in a game that already has an issue with over-streamlining things, but despite being even simpler mechanically, they're still more fun to play than Wonder's just because slow autoscrollers rarely have much to offer. And these are still pretty short even at that speed.

- Why are the silhouette sections so fumbling and sloppy compared to Donkey Kong's? There's no careful use of shapes and colors to make things readable, instead they deliberately obscure objects and the whole effect is more akin to a bunch of cartoon characters in a dark room with only their eyes visible. Also the stretching up and down transformation is horribly awkward and definitely should not have come back for another go round, its section in the forest level already felt really long compared to most. And those tall spring guys are the second coming of Bonehead Jed, one of the most annoying enemies in Returns. There's something uniquely aggravating about being unable to jump over an enemy in a platformer because it's just stupidly tall. Others have mentioned it, but there were a lot of ideas in this game taken from other platformers, and unfortunately usually they were done better elsewhere.

- Whatever they did to wall jumping that made it so much less reliable, and then including a section that requires a lot of rapid fire wall jumps to survive, right at the end of a level with no checkpoints.

- I'm seeing double here! Four Bowser Jr. fights!

- The sheer audacity of actually making you play as invisible Mario is mind-blowing. This is so transparently horrible an idea I'm amazed it's even a badge as a gag feature, never mind a thing you have to do to fully complete the game!

After comparing the soundtrack directly to past games: it's the best 2D Mario score, but that isn't saying much, considering the crown was previously held by either Super Mario Land or the DS New Super Mario Bros.

It's pretty consistently a marked improvement over the NSMBWii soundtrack, which was rather dire even before it was recycled into oblivion, but it's nothing all that great either. Mostly just about passable, with an increasing number of pretty solid tracks here and there as it goes on. By my count there are 16 regular level themes, which is a slight uptick from NSMB, but still downright pathetic next to 3D World's 25+, never mind the likes of Tropical Freeze, where it's easier to count the levels that don't have unique music.

My favorite theme in the game is the dark forest, which I would guess is Koji Kondo, something about it is very Majora's Mask-esque. Honorable mentions as well to the lava and factory themes (Shiho Fujii and Sayako Doi respectively?)





By the way, I think it's interesting how polarizing the final boss seems to be. I loved it, it's definitely my favorite non-chase Bowser fight in the series. It probably gets a lot less interesting as you add more players and all the running around and multitasking goes away, but platformers are always bad in multiplayer tbh, if you did that it was your own fault.

I'm also not sure why there's such a controversy about this game's difficulty, I can't say I noticed anything out of the ordinary about it myself. It certainly wasn't 3D Land sleepwalking territory, I never found the game unengaging except perhaps for that one fireball section mentioned above, but even that gives you the decimal coins to collect to keep you busy if dodging them is trivial. Great idea by the way, it lets the singular Flower Coins still feel valuable, DKCR should have implemented something similar to avoid such blatant Banana Coin inflation compared to DKC2.
 
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I know I'm slower than many here (full time job and family) but I 100%'d it last night, finally.

6 medals and all.

Whoever came up with that last part (invisible bounce-jumping around with no floor) is cruel sadist.

At least I can now consider myself a master in the jet run badge part of the final challenge, flawless run every time (getting every coin) lol.

Began with 99 lives going into this final challenge, completed with 53 lives remaining.
 
My wife and I just finished the super extra final level. Went from 99 lives down to 6 when we beat it. It was a heck of a finale, though I wish maybe the last section was swapped with another. She'd been playing most of the special world as a Yoshi, and it's clear that some parts of the level just aren't designed with them in mind, for good and for bad.

Won't say what it is, but the final reward for doing so is pretty fun too! We had a great time just running back through old levels to test it out.

Only one more medal to earn now too! I think it's for all standees, so looks like we'll grind out some purple coins. Then I'll re-run the whole game in single player and see how differently it plays.

Edit: Oh! And the lead up to the final story level was awesome! I loved that every level had a new kind of bullet bill variant. I feel like I'll need a new avatar with missile meg or the sectioned one who's name I missed.
 
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Stilt Village said:
But, Donkey Kong can be Donkey Kong. I think we lose something if we don't allow Mario to be Mario. And this approach from Wonder feels so purely Mario. Yes, the levels are very short, dense excursions which hit you with a frantic dose of some weird new concept and breeze by in an instant. Just like Mario 3. Yes, it's a game full of distracting novelties, underutilized mechanics and ideas, and interactions between them which most players will never even see or find any use for. Just like Mario World. Maybe I'd feel differently if this was a style of game that had actually stuck around all these years and been consistently pitted against the alternative, but I never thought we'd get a Mario game like this ever again and had zero expectations that Wonder would be the one to bring it back before playing it.
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Great analysis. I especially like this part. I was pretty surprised having just played 3 at all of the criticisms at levels not developing ideas enough because they're too short when that's basically a staple of the older Mario games people loved.

Though I will say I'm not sure which of the stretching Wonder gimmicks you're referring to - the accordion where you're a platform I thought was great and one of the best ones? The one where you're just really tall is pretty bad, and I think that's the one that comes back twice so I'm assuming that's the one you mean.
 
Update:

I beat it. Fully.

After spending hours trying to get through the Final Final level, I beat it but missed the top of the flagpole because I was invisible and couldn't see where I was about to land. And of course, if you land wrong on the flagpole that means you can't just pick up the checkpoint and retry 😩

So I had a thought, people said something about using Yoshi for harder levels. I hadn't considered that!! And he has the flutter jump, which meant I could float through the bouncy balloon part of the invisibility section!! So since I beat it once the "right" way with a normal character, my pride stepped aside and I selected Yoshi and went back to the Final Final. I breezed through to the last checkpoint without dying once, and there were so so so so many times I would have but Yoshi just bounced off. Places where I would've fallen to my death I was saved by his flutter jump. I covered ground quick. And sure enough, Yoshi's flutter jump made the invisibility portion much more doable.

Then I got to the end, bounced off the thingie, listened for the flutter jump and pushed right, and there it was: Yoshi hit the top.

I now have all the badges, and all the medals. It's done.


Oh and the Sound Off badge is fantastic
 
Hmmm
I wish a couple of these worlds were a bit longer. A couple of them don't even have final levels, and the fungal mines was short.

I feel like they ran out of time or something.

...having a great time though. 👍
 
AngryAlchemist said:
Though I will say I'm not sure which of the stretching Wonder gimmicks you're referring to - the accordion where you're a platform I thought was great and one of the best ones? The one where you're just really tall is pretty bad, and I think that's the one that comes back twice so I'm assuming that's the one you mean.
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Yeah, it was the tall one, very awkward to control and the sections using it went slowly, compounded by it only showing up alongside the silhouette gimmick. I actually completely forgot about the accordion platform one, which goes to show how much stuff there is in this game I guess.
 
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I just beat the game. Unfortunately, count me in as one of the people who thought the final boss was kind of bad. Or just ... boring? In a game all about how fun movement is, it was weird that it was basically just a set piece of waiting to jump. I also think my concern about this being Forgotten Land again was unfortunately kind of true, Forgotten Land ran out of ideas in the last two worlds, and while that doesn't necessarily happen here the last two worlds start reusing gimmicks in some pretty unsatisfying ways, along with feeling unfinished which is probably even worse. World 6 in particular feels like it could have been the best world in the entire game, but it feels like it's 4-5 levels short.

That being said, still a great game. Probably a top 50 all time for me. I'm a big fan of platformers as a genre but also very picky with them, so that's saying a lot. Definitely solidified me as a fan of 2D Mario and now I want to see where the series goes next.
 
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Stilt Village said:
So I've finished the game 100% and have been thinking about it for like a week, and I'm having trouble putting together my complete thoughts on it. I've seen the game compared to a series of appetizers, because everything is so bite-sized and compartmentalized. This approach and the emphasis on gimmickry was likened to Odyssey, and I've seen it lamented that the ideas weren't really maximized like in a Celeste or Tropical Freeze, making it feel ultimately unsatisfying despite its high quality. And in a broad sense, I agree with a lot of these evaluations and criticisms, yet somehow my takeaway from the game is so much more positive.

First, addressing the similarities to Odyssey: I'm not an Odyssey fan at all, but I think Wonder and Odyssey is a similar situation to Odyssey and Breath of the Wild in 2017, where a lot of the same concepts were present in both but executed much better in Zelda. I'm a big critic of the practice both games employed with their shrines/whatever you want to call Odyssey's standardized "here's a platforming challenge with two moons in it" sections. Both in how it resulted in a gutted, short form version of a Zelda dungeon and a 3D World 4koma level respectively that loses everything but the barest skeleton of the design, and how it isolated most of the level design you would expect from these series away from the game world proper.

But Wonder doesn't really have these issues in its own "bite-sized design" because these levels are basically the entire game instead of a side attraction, and they have the presentation you'd expect (shout out to Shining Falls for looking like a Sonic level in a Mario art style) while being overstuffed with all the delightful bells and whistles ancillary to platforming challenges that make a Mario stage special. Right from the get go, the first level sets you up for this running jump near the start where if you bounce off of a Goomba your trajectory will send you perfectly into an invisible block containing a 1-Up. These little moments of joy and surprise are everywhere, and I love that they doubled down on them so hard for this one because they're one of the original defining aspects of a Mario game alongside the simple fun of controlling Mario and the freedom to skip around the game however you like.

That's something that has been mostly lost ever since Sunshine's weird "nothing matters but the Shadow Mario missions" structure. You can no longer pick and choose which parts of the game to experience like you could with the classics, through secrets or otherwise. Secrets, which were once such a huge part of the appeal, were in general de-emphasized and became considerably less secret because they had to be found. The beauty of how many things were hidden in Mario 3 and how weird and specific some of them were is that you weren't really missing anything if you didn't find them. Originally, there was a balance where finding secrets was an alternative path to success of sorts, all of them were geared towards helping you get through the game on something other than your raw platforming skill, creating a buffer of extra lives and extra hits and helpful extra abilities. Even the act of hitting a ? block was part of this dynamic, it's that ingrained into Mario's identity, but taking the time to search the blocks for hidden power-ups is so basic and understood by every Mario player now that it's hard to imagine the idea that there was originally a novelty to the concept and a reason for the ? design. It never quite went away, but the inclusion of that spirit of discovery and hidden novelty in Mario levels became increasingly perfunctory. It's not like extra lives and such even really mattered anymore, and proper warp zones were a thing of the ancient past. Even games which try to present a similar veneer to older ones like Galaxy or New Super Mario Bros. U are in reality far less free. Bar perhaps Bowser's Fury, Wonder is the most open Mario game since 1996.

A big part of that is the Wonder Seeds. Mario Wonder is following in the footsteps of 3D Land and 3D World by bringing this concept of requiring collectibles to progress into 2D Mario proper, but it does it so much better than those games. Wonder Seeds aren't the Star Coins of this game, but instead are actually awarded for finishing a level or the game's equivalents of bonus rooms. These being the various short challenges outside of the main levels and the wonder effect sections within them. There's not really any standardization to these, and we'll get back to that, but it was my first impression after seeing continuous footage of the game and I still think it's the best way to describe them. The Wonder Flower is like a level within a level that further breaks up and disrupts things, making the game feel even more divided into short chunks. And Wonder Seeds now function on a per-world basis, rather than game-wide. This is where the Odyssey comparison was immediately obvious to me, but I felt they had an almost opposite impact here. In Odyssey, I hated the way moons worked. This works a lot better because the individual levels within a world are a lot more distinct and meaningful than the individual Power Moons in an Odyssey world, and although you are still required to complete all six main worlds to beat the game, it lets you have a lot more freedom in how you get to the endpoint of each. And it also allowed them to let you tackle the entire second half of the game in any order you please!

The transformations are definitely another parallel, and there's at least one shared between the two in the Goomba. In this case I actually think Odyssey at its best worked out better. While there's a lot more chaff, the best captures had new enemies created specifically to provide interesting mechanics when captured rather than as foes (so like, they could have just been power-ups and the entire capture concept was ultimately kind of pointless, but shhh). Wonder doesn't really have a Pokio or Uproot or Tropical Wiggler. The blob one is pretty cool I guess? They're definitely no Animal Buddies, and I can sympathize with the perspective that any time you're not playing as Mario is a downgrade. The nicest thing I can say is that most of them don't outstay their welcome.

But that's kind of the thing about this game. It unleashes a blitz of novelty and variety upon you, quality control be damned. The only unbreakable structural rule it follows is that each full level has a Wonder Flower. Otherwise, it can really do whatever. The Wonder Flower can be at the beginning, the middle, or the end. There can be one checkpoint, two, or none. This is not an immaculately designed game, for all its polish it has some hilariously awful ideas sometimes, and honestly, that's kind of what I love about it?

New Super Mario Bros., in comparison to the classic Mario games, feels like a regression and a redirection. It reverts to the status quo of Mario 1 in a lot of ways and takes a different path forward, with more emphasis on developing the one idea of each level in a consistent, textbook manner. This style of level design, referred to as 4koma by the developers of 3D World, has been omnipresent in nearly every Mario game from NSMB till now. But it comes off more like a watered down, overly formulaic Donkey Kong Country to me than the Mario games of old that these titles try to evoke. I'd like to make a distinction between the basic principles underlying 4koma (introduce a new mechanic in a safe manner, develop it in increasingly complex permutations, repeat next level), which are just good game design, and the practice of designing the levels themselves around this structure, which is what I'm talking about. Super Mario Galaxy is a great example of a game that does not disregard this practice, but doesn't build its levels around it either. All three stars of Gusty Garden begin with Mario riding dandelions on the wind, and then that might suddenly lead into a level about ground pounding to expose moles, or chasing a rabbit around a giant hedge maze cube, or whatever Gravity Scramble is supposed to be. Each of these ideas is generally developed in the manner you would expect when it's in the spotlight, but the level itself is not a coherent whole mechanically or even thematically (again, what does Gravity Scramble have to do with anything?), and may switch tracks at the drop of a hat. Mario World can be similar, especially the castle levels.

The NSMB games and 3D Land/World use 4koma in a much more basic sense than most other games, in that they really follow it verbatim and go "yep, that's the level". Other games like Celeste and Tropical Freeze, which I'm a huge fan of, have taken these principles and gotten much more complex and less structurally rigid with them, weaving ideas together and really taking each one to its limit. I don't actually want Mario to be like those games. Don't get me wrong, Galaxy 2 is my favorite in the series by far, in large part because it produced the most creative and sophisticated iteration of this type of level design, thereby making it the one most like a Donkey Kong game. I was really disappointed by 3D Land and to a lesser extent 3D World, because in cynically imitating the old Mario games and adopting retro trappings in a continued effort to try and make 3D Mario more palatable to the masses, they were deliberately dumbing themselves down from what they had just accomplished in Galaxy 2. I can enjoy 3D World for what it is, especially now with the Switch version whose pacing actually resembles that of the games it was trying to be like, but the whole idea just strikes me unavoidably as a regression, something with no real creative upsides compared to the thing they were just doing that was so similar but allowed to be so much more.

But, Donkey Kong can be Donkey Kong. I think we lose something if we don't allow Mario to be Mario. And this approach from Wonder feels so purely Mario. Yes, the levels are very short, dense excursions which hit you with a frantic dose of some weird new concept and breeze by in an instant. Just like Mario 3. Yes, it's a game full of distracting novelties, underutilized mechanics and ideas, and interactions between them which most players will never even see or find any use for. Just like Mario World. Maybe I'd feel differently if this was a style of game that had actually stuck around all these years and been consistently pitted against the alternative, but I never thought we'd get a Mario game like this ever again and had zero expectations that Wonder would be the one to bring it back before playing it.

Mario 3 is a game that I would say is fully more than the sum of its parts. What it does is quite clever. By relying on things like the macro structure of the worlds and the inherent fun of Mario's movement, it can have numerous short, unique levels whose actual contents almost don't matter. They're over so fast they can hardly ever outstay their welcome, but they add to the frenetic nature of the game by injecting constant variety. In contrast to all the platformers that took after it, the world maps of Mario 3 are almost like a turn-based board game where the objective is to manage your resources and use your skills to reach the castle at the end, and each "board", rather than the individual courses, is the real stage. Looking at it critically, something like the Angry Sun level is not really a good platformer stage. The first part leading up to the tornado jump has nothing to do with anything, and then the rest of it is a flat expanse of the exact same thing repeating over and over. 3 is full of levels that aren't necessarily good, but it's never really that noticeable because of the way you frantically blitz through them. World was slower-paced, but it had a similarly freeform nature in its own way. You had things like the Forest of Illusion or that Star Road level that was basically a single screen puzzle. To be honest, I always chalked up the inconsistency of these games to how early and formative they are, there were no standards back then. But then, in 2023, Wonder is much the same way.

I feel very similarly about Wonder to how I feel about 3. To be sure, they're leaving things on the table by flitting from concept to concept so quickly, and their ideas are not always all that great. But there's something so engaging about the lightness of it, leaping constantly from one thing to the next just slowly enough to avoid whiplash, something so special about the constant onslaught of surprise and joy in them. I might prefer the more disciplined, symphonic way DKC goes about it, but I want this kind of game to exist too.

And now, a brief roast of all of Mario Wonder's worst ideas:
- Search Parties. Oh my god. Did they want to recreate the experience of communal problem solving of cryptic secrets in old video games? Some classic Nintendo bullshit right there.

- The wonder effect in the one lava stage that's just standing in place for a really long time while the statue shoots non-threatening fireballs at you and the flower screams constantly. There are some forgettable ones for sure, but this is possibly the only one I would call actively boring to sit through.

- The Talking Flowers are a lot less annoying than I expected, but for a game which thrives so much on constant novelty, it's weird how much of their dialogue is essentially just "hi!", screaming, and some variation of "well that just happened". They're talking a lot, but they're not saying anything. The times they really add something are pretty rare relative to how frequently they're on screen. But this is listed among the game's worst ideas because it was what ultimately replaced the tsundere narrator; a blunder of staggering proportions.

- The music sections like the Piranha Plant level that was constantly getting praise here are cute, apart from being a well they go back to perhaps a few too many times to retain its impact, but they're no Grassland Groove or anything. For one, they're in a game without a particularly great soundtrack. While their choreographed autoscroller nature might place them closer to the music levels of Rayman Legends, the comparison there isn't too favorable either, as those are way more exciting and elaborate setpieces. I'm actually not a huge fan of the Legends music levels and consider them the biggest example of style over substance in a game that already has an issue with over-streamlining things, but despite being even simpler mechanically, they're still more fun to play than Wonder's just because slow autoscrollers rarely have much to offer. And these are still pretty short even at that speed.

- Why are the silhouette sections so fumbling and sloppy compared to Donkey Kong's? There's no careful use of shapes and colors to make things readable, instead they deliberately obscure objects and the whole effect is more akin to a bunch of cartoon characters in a dark room with only their eyes visible. Also the stretching up and down transformation is horribly awkward and definitely should not have come back for another go round, its section in the forest level already felt really long compared to most. And those tall spring guys are the second coming of Bonehead Jed, one of the most annoying enemies in Returns. There's something uniquely aggravating about being unable to jump over an enemy in a platformer because it's just stupidly tall. Others have mentioned it, but there were a lot of ideas in this game taken from other platformers, and unfortunately usually they were done better elsewhere.

- Whatever they did to wall jumping that made it so much less reliable, and then including a section that requires a lot of rapid fire wall jumps to survive, right at the end of a level with no checkpoints.

- I'm seeing double here! Four Bowser Jr. fights!

- The sheer audacity of actually making you play as invisible Mario is mind-blowing. This is so transparently horrible an idea I'm amazed it's even a badge as a gag feature, never mind a thing you have to do to fully complete the game!

After comparing the soundtrack directly to past games: it's the best 2D Mario score, but that isn't saying much, considering the crown was previously held by either Super Mario Land or the DS New Super Mario Bros.

It's pretty consistently a marked improvement over the NSMBWii soundtrack, which was rather dire even before it was recycled into oblivion, but it's nothing all that great either. Mostly just about passable, with an increasing number of pretty solid tracks here and there as it goes on. By my count there are 16 regular level themes, which is a slight uptick from NSMB, but still downright pathetic next to 3D World's 25+, never mind the likes of Tropical Freeze, where it's easier to count the levels that don't have unique music.

My favorite theme in the game is the dark forest, which I would guess is Koji Kondo, something about it is very Majora's Mask-esque. Honorable mentions as well to the lava and factory themes (Shiho Fujii and Sayako Doi respectively?)





By the way, I think it's interesting how polarizing the final boss seems to be. I loved it, it's definitely my favorite non-chase Bowser fight in the series. It probably gets a lot less interesting as you add more players and all the running around and multitasking goes away, but platformers are always bad in multiplayer tbh, if you did that it was your own fault.

I'm also not sure why there's such a controversy about this game's difficulty, I can't say I noticed anything out of the ordinary about it myself. It certainly wasn't 3D Land sleepwalking territory, I never found the game unengaging except perhaps for that one fireball section mentioned above, but even that gives you the decimal coins to collect to keep you busy if dodging them is trivial. Great idea by the way, it lets the singular Flower Coins still feel valuable, DKCR should have implemented something similar to avoid such blatant Banana Coin inflation compared to DKC2.
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The silhouette levels are some of the best levels in this game. They are so good. Nothing about how it's set up visually is unreadable.
 
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I have already 100%d the game, but have been playing through the most difficult level a couple of times online solely focusing on helping other players get through it. It's so much fun! I didn't expect this to be my best online experience of the year.
 
I just hit the credits. Still have a couple of Special World levels to finish but have done everything else 100%. Amazing game!
 
I think the perception of this game being easy is heavily colored by online mode and badges making it super easy to cheese through some of the most difficult challenges.

And to be clear, I love that to be the case. Much better than the super guides of the Wii era lol.
 
I enjoyed the final boss but it felt like a phase one of a two phase fight.

though I did appreciate how Bowser puffed up like he was getting ready to transform for phase 2, only to have his head pop and fizzle, then fall 🤣
 
One of the most brilliant things about this game is quite easy to overlook; the way it manages to convey the rules/mechanics of each Wonder without ever needing tutorials or prompts, just purely through visual design and game feel.

Some of these can change the gameplay quite drastically, but the game never has to explain itself in words, because its all just so effortlessly intuitive. It's utter genius but so masterfully done that it's easy to not even notice.
 
curl-6 said:
One of the most brilliant things about this game is quite easy to overlook; the way it manages to convey the rules/mechanics of each Wonder without ever needing tutorials or prompts, just purely through visual design and game feel.

Some of these can change the gameplay quite drastically, but the game never has to explain itself in words, because its all just so effortlessly intuitive. It's utter genius but so masterfully done that it's easy to not even notice.
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It's like the idea behind world 1-1 of SMB but taken to the extreme
 
chocolate_supra said:
Name a better feeling than finishing a 4-tier KO arena with 30 seconds to spare
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These are the only levels in the game I don't find fun, and there's a couple I still haven't cleared. I've done everything else, so this is all I have left to do when I turn the game on now and I hate it. I just...can't bring myself to keep playing them.

Still, I think I put more time into this one to do extra stuff than I did in Odyssey, so it was a good enough length and mostly really fun. Looking forward to seeing what they do next with 2D Mario.
 
chocolate_supra said:
I enjoyed the final boss but it felt like a phase one of a two phase fight.

though I did appreciate how Bowser puffed up like he was getting ready to transform for phase 2, only to have his head pop and fizzle, then fall 🤣
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This is the critique I've seen the most: the final boss is fun, but feels like it was cut short before it could really get going. Which is a sentiment I fully agree with.
 
Djehuty said:
have you [played donkey kong tropical freeze?

its just hard to view those as anything but really bad imitations of donkey kong
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Yes I have. Wonder's are just as good as the Tropical Freeze's. An aspect that also highlights the artstyle ad well.
 
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totofogo said:
I think the perception of this game being easy is heavily colored by online mode and badges making it super easy to cheese through some of the most difficult challenges.

And to be clear, I love that to be the case. Much better than the super guides of the Wii era lol.
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I mean yeah badges make the game easier, but they’re part of the game. That’s why it’s easier.

Maybe you could argue the Final Final Test is the hardest level in a Mario game and that balances it out. Just looking at the main campaign, the only 2D Mario games I think are easier are NSMB and NSMB2. But it’s more subjective whether or not that’s good or bad.
 
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OctoSplattack said:
This is the critique I've seen the most: the final boss is fun, but feels like it was cut short before it could really get going. Which is a sentiment I fully agree with.
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Honestly even 3D Mario games have pretty simple short final bosses. I remember Galaxy especially being... "that's all?"
 
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chocolate_supra said:
Update:

I beat it. Fully.

After spending hours trying to get through the Final Final level, I beat it but missed the top of the flagpole because I was invisible and couldn't see where I was about to land. And of course, if you land wrong on the flagpole that means you can't just pick up the checkpoint and retry 😩

So I had a thought, people said something about using Yoshi for harder levels. I hadn't considered that!! And he has the flutter jump, which meant I could float through the bouncy balloon part of the invisibility section!! So since I beat it once the "right" way with a normal character, my pride stepped aside and I selected Yoshi and went back to the Final Final. I breezed through to the last checkpoint without dying once, and there were so so so so many times I would have but Yoshi just bounced off. Places where I would've fallen to my death I was saved by his flutter jump. I covered ground quick. And sure enough, Yoshi's flutter jump made the invisibility portion much more doable.

Then I got to the end, bounced off the thingie, listened for the flutter jump and pushed right, and there it was: Yoshi hit the top.

I now have all the badges, and all the medals. It's done.


Oh and the Sound Off badge is fantastic
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Yeah, I just ran through it again with Yoshi and it was trivially easy in comparison. I even did the last section on my first try.

All I have left is grind for Purple Coins for Standees, I have 20 left to buy. Any good levels to grind on? I've just been doing Badge Challenges.
 
darthdiablo said:
I know I'm slower than many here (full time job and family) but I 100%'d it last night, finally.

6 medals and all.

Whoever came up with that last part (invisible bounce-jumping around with no floor) is cruel sadist.

At least I can now consider myself a master in the jet run badge part of the final challenge, flawless run every time (getting every coin) lol.

Began with 99 lives going into this final challenge, completed with 53 lives remaining.
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I've been playing since launch day and have been slower than you, despite having fewer reasons to be slow. For whatever reason, this is a game I like to play for no more than an hour or two at a time and often for less than an hour. I'm currently about to start World 6. I've been surprised by how fast some people not only beat the game but also 100%ed it (just given how long it has taken me), but I understand that everyone has different gaming styles, level of investment, and competing interests that determine how long a game lasts them. For example, if I lined up my Wonder play timeline with my timeline for Tears of the Kingdom, I know I'd have played enough Tears of the Kingdom to have beaten Wonder multiple times by now.
 
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I've currently beaten most of the game, but I've hit a road block.

Namely, the Final-Final level, the Invisibility section. Yeah, yeah, it's the most common culprit for being difficult, but I am sort of at a loss on how to handle it because the real snag is the Bloomps, because it's difficult to keep track of them in that part even though the first half with the bouncing cushions are easier.

Thank you for reading.
 
winstein said:
I've currently beaten most of the game, but I've hit a road block.

Namely, the Final-Final level, the Invisibility section. Yeah, yeah, it's the most common culprit for being difficult, but I am sort of at a loss on how to handle it because the real snag is the Bloomps, because it's difficult to keep track of them in that part even though the first half with the bouncing cushions are easier.

Thank you for reading.
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@Dishwasher mentioned the other day that if you keep spamming X to have an emote appear it'll help you keep track of your location during that part. It helped me bunches.
 
RagnarokX said:





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.. what? I feel so inadequate now lol.

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winstein said:
I've currently beaten most of the game, but I've hit a road block.

Namely, the Final-Final level, the Invisibility section. Yeah, yeah, it's the most common culprit for being difficult, but I am sort of at a loss on how to handle it because the real snag is the Bloomps, because it's difficult to keep track of them in that part even though the first half with the bouncing cushions are easier.

Thank you for reading.
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For me...

Basically what I did is, once the Bloomp inflates and starts flying right, I ran and jumped alongside it. Then I just held right and jump and just kept moving. I'd jump on a couple of green Bloomps and then I'd have enough momentum to hit the goal. You basically just have to have faith that you'll make it.

If you really get frustrated and can't do it, I highly recommend Yoshi. The flutter jump is a game changer. But I understand if you want to beat it "legit."

On that note, I finally grinded enough coins for all the Standees. So that's all medals done and game 100%. Wowie zowie.
 
chocolate_supra said:
@Dishwasher mentioned the other day that if you keep spamming X to have an emote appear it'll help you keep track of your location during that part. It helped me bunches.
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How does spamming X works when one button has to be on Y for dashing and B to jump? Sounds difficult to pull off when the controls have to be controlled like that.

Thank you for reading.
 
winstein said:
How does spamming X works when one button has to be on Y for dashing and B to jump? Sounds difficult to pull off when the controls have to be controlled like that.

Thank you for reading.
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Yeah, you cannot hold down 3 buttons at same time. I did use the spam X method but mostly to see where I am (get my bearing), before I start timing my next jump/bounce (which mean I can no longer spam X, at least until I'm bouncing stably and not bouncing off to the side at some dangerous angle)

But for the bloomps, I feel like there's not enough time to spam X, and in fact if I spam X, it just will make me lose focus, so instead I rely on the clouds to see where I am. After a few deaths I gradually get better at watching cloud patterns to figure out where I am and rely less on spamming X.
 
winstein said:
How does spamming X works when one button has to be on Y for dashing and B to jump? Sounds difficult to pull off when the controls have to be controlled like that.

Thank you for reading.
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When it got to that point, I stopped dashing. I noticed too that I couldn't spam X while holding Y (even though I physically could, the emote wouldn't come up unless I let off the dash button) so I focused on methodically alternating between timing the jump button to launch off the bloomps then spamming X while at the peak of the jump, then hitting jump on the next bloomp, spamming X at the peak, rinse and repeat.

It feels really weird, don't get me wrong. And it's still tough, but nowhere near as tough as just guessing where I was on the screen.
 
Surprised to see the comments that the final boss was too short. I actually was surprised at how long it went on. After the typical three hits it kept going for a while. Felt like it took 5/6? I’d understand the complaint more if it was worded like wanting more “phases” of the boss. As in, having the fight switch up and test different mechanics instead of the same rhythm jumping one. But in terms of length I was like “oh shit it’s not over yet?” twice.
 
Finished the game yesterday. Last boss was funny. I kinda also liked the last level.

I also took on the special stages. Left them open to get into the skill by beating the main story/game first.

Surprisingly, most of them were rather "easy", as in "i didn't rage-throw the controller". The multiplayer stuff and getting revived by other player definitely helped, though. Genius addition to the game.

Basically, i only have the Final Badge Test level left open. Heared a lot of scary impressions for that one, so i didn't wanna ruin my good mood yesterday. ^^

As for completionists, i have all Wonder Seeds, all big Purple Flower Coins, and all Flag poles.
From those stand-in-thingies, only 4 open, so ~120 Flower Coins left.

I admit though .... my thumbs hurt today.
 
Bonejack said:
Finished the game yesterday. Last boss was funny. I kinda also liked the last level.

I also took on the special stages. Left them open to get into the skill by beating the main story/game first.

Surprisingly, most of them were rather "easy", as in "i didn't rage-throw the controller". The multiplayer stuff and getting revived by other player definitely helped, though. Genius addition to the game.

Basically, i only have the Final Badge Test level left open. Heared a lot of scary impressions for that one, so i didn't wanna ruin my good mood yesterday. ^^

As for completionists, i have all Wonder Seeds, all big Purple Flower Coins, and all Flag poles.
From those stand-in-thingies, only 4 open, so ~120 Flower Coins left.

I admit though .... my thumbs hurt today.
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Just finished the game myself as well. Yeah, the last few levels are entertaining and creative, and the Bowser fight is very fun, though I wish it was a bit harder.
I've also got all of the Wonder seeds, so now I've got 2 gold metals, which is a first for me in a Mario game, as previous entries just frustrated me too much before I managed to clear all of the objectives. This game has so much variety and gameplay options, though, that it empowers and motivates you to do as much as possible. Regarding what comes after:

You shouldn't be afraid of the final badge test level. I've got it in like 2 or 3 attempts, so it isn't really that difficult. By comparison, I lost about 50 lives on the W2 special (the one where you have to climb platforms upwards to a beat). Given you've found all the specials easy, you'll break through the final badge easily.
 
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My strategy for the final section of the
final final
level when it got too much for me:
Pop it into two player mode and control the character with the crown above their head. It still took me a few goes to get it right, but having an on screen marker was a tremendous help. Note: unless you have a second player, this method will drain your lives
 
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