Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a return to form for the Super Mario series, specifically the 2D games. As the name implies, it’s filled with the wonder and mystery you felt in the first Super Mario games. Your first time ever playing a Mario game, you probably thought to yourself “what happens when I hit this ? Block? Oh, a mushroom appeared! What happens if I touch it?” etc. etc. Wonder brings back that feeling of “What happens?” the Super Mario series has been solely lacking. Nintendo has made great Mario games these past few years, but they’re very predictable and all pretty much use the same formula. Wonder has Mario’s core, but ditches that tired and worn out formula for something completely new. It’s great, but they did decide to keep one part of the formula…

The only part they decided to keep was the boss fights. They’re really dull compared to the rest of the game. Bowser Jr. fights are all very similar, but the final boss was SUPER underwhelming. I’ve experienced MANY Bowser final bosses in my life and this one was honestly one of the worst ones. It’s just not that exciting, they had so many great new ideas throughout the game that they could’ve incorporated into this boss battle but they just don’t. The whole point of the story is to stop Bowser’s “grand wonder”, but when you finally see what it is it’s not so grand. In a game with so much creativity, bosses just feel off and dull compared to the rest of it.

Other than that one flaw, I do think the rest of the game is fantastic. It exudes charm on a level that hasn’t been seen in this series in ages. The talking flowers are actually pretty funny, the level design is fantastic, and in general it’s just a beautiful game to look at. Nintendo knows how to make colors absolutely pop in their games and Wonder is an excellent display of this. The animation and character designs for Mario & crew are great too. It’s clearly inspired by Yoichi Kotabe’s early Mario designs, and along with such fluid animation the cast of this game looks really good.

Out of all of that though, a key highlight for me is the music. Nintendo decided to ditch the idea of remixing the original SMB songs (like they had done for so many years with NSMB) and instead wrote brand new music for this game. It all sounds amazing, I don’t really know how to describe it besides the fact that it makes my ears feel good.

Another great thing about this game is the new voice actors. It had to happen eventually, Charles Martinet was going to leave his role someday whether we like it or not. Now we have Kevin Afghani as the new voice of Mario and Luigi. I can say that he absolutely KILLED IT! I love Martinet, I grew up on hearing his voice almost daily, but Afghani is an extremely good Mario/Luigi. This game being a reinvention of Mario is the perfect place to introduce a new voice actor and I’m very happy with Nintendo’s choice.

On the development side of things, this game is perfectly polished. It’s nice to see a truly complete game in a time where a lot of games release filled with bugs and glitches (looking at you, Spider-Man 2). Nintendo gave no deadline in the creation of this game and it really shows. I hope they continue to make games like this, I’d rather wait a bit longer and get video games on this level of quality rather than a game filled with bugs. Nintendo is definitely the king of gaming, their releases are always extremely polished on launch.

One more topic I’d like to touch on is this game’s references to other games. I think the game handles them well. They don’t shove in an expected 8-bit Mario as a reference and leave it at that. They reference games through short music stages, or a wonder effect here and there. I think it’s also neat that they reference games that they don’t usually do (spoiler: theres a whole lot of Sunshine and 64 references)

Aside from the asinine boss battles, I’d consider this game to be fantastic and one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had this whole year. The joy I felt playing this was well needed during a very stressful semester. The future looks bright, not only for Mario, but for Nintendo as a whole.