as predicted, i am very much in love with this game but i also want to echo this feeling of reminding me of Odyssey, a game that i felt was one of the best 3D Marios ever when i played it and obsessed over crushing it via completing literally everything and after that i have not touched that game in several years and would say it’s not anywhere near replay-able as even 3D World still is, let alone 64
that being said, i am moving through this game slowly to savor every bit while i can. it’s got just enough collectibles to replay multiple times and feels like a dream to try to speed run through. at first i was concerned it was gonna be too easy to max out everything over all but then i finally got to the first Special World level and boy was i humbled and excited for what’s to come
Nintendo released their classic sort of pseudo press-release interview and they do specifically contextualize Wonder as an attempt to adapt the more lax/less demanding form of the 3D games to 2D.
Hayashida: I think that this gameplay is adapted to modern times. Tezuka-san suggested we could perhaps use 3D Mario platformers as a reference point, since their gameplay is designed for players to reach the end.
Also the flowers are apparently a carryover from an earlier point where they were considering full commentary.
Hayashida: We actually spent about six months seriously developing live commentary. We tried adding voices to match the player’s actions. Even though we’d added various voices, questions like, “Who’s doing this commentary?” started to pop up amongst the team. Something about it just didn’t feel right. (Laughs)
Tezuka: I was quite a fan of it. (Laughs)
Mouri: Even the team was evenly split between those in favor and those against. (Laughs) The default voice was very generic, like a newscaster, but you had the option to switch it to a Tsundere (17) commentary.
Interesting to me was that the goombas/koopas reacting 2 the music cues in nsmb (only charming aspect imo) seems to be the sound department’s concept
Kondo: Until now, we’ve typically joined during the latter half of development, and even if I thought it would be fun for the visuals to change in response to the sound, it wasn’t something we could really implement. So I was itching for a chance to do it. In the previous game too, I joined in the final phase of development, so the most I could do was make Goombas jump in time with the background music.
& it sounds like they should be listening a little more closely to Koji Kondo in general
Kondo: I also contributed a lot of suggestions at the idea-sharing session.
You shared ideas too, Kondo-san? Kondo: Yes. I shared the idea of an eight-heads-tall, life-sized, live-action Mario humming along with the background music as he goes along.
Eight-heads-tall, life-sized Mario?!
Kondo: Yes. When he jumps, he says to himself, “Boing!” …The idea was never used, though.
Edit: We’re only starting World 3 or so, but there was one Effect that flipped the level so that you are suddenly walking on the background as if it’s a top-down game while the enemies remained in their original places and still acted like they’re in a sidescroller. It’s easier to explain as “you’re playing Zelda while the rest of the world is still Mario.”
So far, that’s the only one that my wife didn’t really get because I don’t think she’s played a Zelda game and the shifts are kinda frantic. The rest have either been pretty intuitive (the water is upside down, the pipes are moving, you’re really tall, the ground is rotating, etc.) or they do the classic good Mario thing of teaching you without overexplaining (see this weird platform or enemy and how it moves? OK, that’s you now). I’d love a deep dive interview on what Effects were cut because I bet they came up with a lot of wild stuff that they ultimately figured wouldn’t fly with normies.
I’m enjoying this game a lot, and I think the character designs/animations/graphics are way better than the NSMB series ever delivered, and movements feels really good, but I find myself wishing this had done more to distinguish itself aesthetically from the NSMB series.
(For the record, I enjoyed NSMB U for the most part and I feel like NSMB U shows movement in the direction of this game.)
Just finished the game. New ideas right up through the end credits! My high score for the end credits sequence was 331. I cleared all the courses except for the special world, which I was saving for now. I liked this one a lot but will probably be a while before I go back to it. Definitely going to finish the special world courses before I put it down.
Hahaha the very, very last level is killing me. It’s long and requires mastery of all the action badges (that I basically wasn’t using for the whole game lol), eats up extra lives like candy and the best part is I’ve missed hitting the top of the flag pole twice now and have to restart the whole thing each time just to make another attempt.
But I am getting pretty good at it though. Parts of it I can breeze through like it’s nothing but other parts still require a level of mastery I haven’t quite achieved yet (and may not even be possible with some of these badges?) so I don’t know. Hitting this flag pole is the only thing keeping me from having a green check mark on my save file. It’s literally the very last thing left to do and I’m debating if I even want to do it. I’m so close but it could be days before I finally get it. You kind of have to be lucky I think. I’m not sure if there is a consistent, skilled-based method of doing it.
Trying not to let this sour me on the game because I really enjoyed it up to this point. It was mostly on the easy side 95% of time. Which, yeah, I know it’s a game for children so that makes sense. Even the special levels weren’t that challenging. Only a couple of them really gave me any trouble. I think some of these badges are more interesting in concept than in practice. Specifically the spring feet and invisibility badges. They make the game harder but not in a good way because they each remove a specific layer of control over your character.
Or maybe that’s what makes them the most brilliant badges. I don’t know I’m kind of back and forth on this. I like the ideas but in that very, very last course you have to use both of these badges in their own special sections and they are just the most stressful parts of the game.
I’ll probably make one attempt at this each day until I finally get it and then delete the game and never think about it again 10/10 perfect Mario.
Really strong Mii avatar synergy, I think. And that last badge you get for doing this is, well, it’s really cute but maybe not cute enough to get me to keep the game installed.
Anyway I largely liked this one but in the end I don’t love it like I do Mario 3/World/Sunshine (that’s my Mario trifecta what’s yours?). I don’t know if I enjoyed it enough to replay it more than once a decade but the movement and feel and animation and sound are all so good I would play DLC for this. Honestly I was hoping after the credits rolled it would dump a whole other set of remixed courses with higher difficulty on me like 3D Land. There’s a game I wish was on Switch but perhaps 3D World is better? I need to go back to that one and finish it.
While the game started out very strong I’m afraid in the end Nintendo may have released a one-hit wonder (I’m sorry I had to work that in there surely I’m the very first person on the internet to have this specific take and word it with that specific pun).
We played a bit of Yoshi. They are way too good at collecting things that are intended to require power-ups/badges/good platforming. IMO Yoshi should not be invincible, leave that for Nabbit. Two players can coordinate a Jumping Yoshi Dismount™, which makes up for the lack of boosted jumps thanks to no air collision.
I like the mildly chaotic design decision of allowing only the “easy” character to carry others. The possibility for accidental (or non-consensual) mounting is strong. They should have gone all the way with it and let the other player smack Yoshi to extend their tongue.
I’ve been playing this with my partner, and the lack of player-player friction makes this a much less frustrating experience (particularly for her) than the NSMB games, and the lives/respawning system is nicely generous.
But the viewport is pretty narrow! A little too easy to lose the second to fourth players, turning them into (mercifully not-dead, but still inconvenienced and could die) ghosts. It’s a perfectly calibrated window for single player, imo, but it gets a little wild and unwieldy in multiplayer, especially with large vertical gaps or areas where the game expects you to run really fast.
Once we get a bit farther in the game I’m gonna start up a new single-player save to see how the game plays that way.
I was really excited about this and assumed I’d like it more than everyone else here, so I came here to see if people had articulated why I wasn’t enjoying it
I guess just backwards taste on my part? Is this the Dragon’s Quest of sidescrolling Marios???
In the last year I played SMW, SMB2USA, NSMB2, NSMB U, a couple of the later Yoshi’s Islands, Super Mario 3d land and 3d world, and the wii and wii u Donkey Kong Country games. My appetite for side scrolling mario games is still high – and I really loved/liked all of those listed above, so I’m clearly a soft touch when it comes to these things
My biggest concrete issue is just all the talking. There is so much talking. And not fun Paper Mario talking. Bad talking. I muted the flowers after the prologue and I still dislike just seeing their dialogue bubbles. And the interface is filled with things. Little moving, greebly things. Text everywhere. I might as well be reading Ulysses over here
I definitely reacted to the singing Piranha Plants with “i feel like i’m playing a goddam rayman”
3 worlds in, I do not like how the wonder stars are handled – mainly as a gate to the second half of the level? Can these be used in a more freeform or exploratory way? Or are they really just the scene in the first level of Monster Party where the world turns scary, over and over? I suspect there is a more interesting way that I could be playing the game maybe
So I guess my issue is probably just that I had a narrow idea of what the game was going to be and what I wanted it to be, and it was something else
Another possibility: my fiancée is out of town and I am sad, and joyous words turn to ash in my mouth
I guess all that to say that I haven’t zeroed in on any obvious [to a layperson] design issues or any mechanics that bug me especially. So I’m starting with vibe issues
This was a pleasant way to pass a few airplane flights, but it sometimes felt more like a game-shaped audiovisual experience than a game. Like in the singing plants autoscroller, the plants are mostly popping in safely out of reach and you barely need to move at all. There’s music but it doesn’t ask the player to be in harmony with it.
i have also just full completed it. it really felt like the difficulty curve for the whole game spiked to an insane degree right at the end and by “the end” i mean literally just the last “final-final” level. some levels felt challenging but it usually took me like 1-2 tries to get everything. maybe 3. but i played that last level to get all the purple coins and final gold flag and it felt like it took me longer to just get that than it took me to play the entire rest of the game. (not too dissimilar from the feeling of Champion’s Road in 3DW) it’s the closest to me imo that playing a mario level felt like learning a song on guitar.
it felt amazing to finally pull it off but yeah it’s gonna be hard to pick this one back up years down the road, tbh. i do want to run through it with other people now to feel what that’s like.
and after all that effort? once i got that final badge? and found out what it did? so fucking funny. i laughed so hard. it’s so fucking stupid. 10/10
