Interestingly I came out of this game feeling very similar to how I did about the Mario movie. In that as a Mario experience it's practically everything I could ask for. It may not be the most consistently engaging or fulfilling experience, but it more than makes up for it by being a refreshing reminder of why I love the series.
I have some criticisms but they're not enough to stop me from saying everyone should play this one. Ultimately any problems I may have (for the most part) are a result of my personal preferred design philosophy being kind of the exact opposite of how Mario games are generally designed from 2007 onward. If I'm designing an obstacle in Mario Maker, I want to give that obstacle a win and fail condition, which is to say it's placed there with the intent that if the player doesn't engage with it properly they'll be hit by it. But from seeing how low my clear percentages are, and watching other people play my levels in person, on top of what kind of levels are the most popular in Mario Maker, I see why Nintendo no longer designs Mario like this. And I bring this up because I've been very critical of the philosophy Nintendo found to replace the more traditional method. But I think they finally found a way to make what usually feels like a formula on autopilot into something I can't help but respect.
Sure I may find myself occasionally wishing they'd iterate a bit more on their really good ideas. I'd like to see more "Do or die" scenarios. I'm not asking for brutal difficulty but a LOT of what's here feels like you have to meet halfway. I find that major chunks of a lot of already short levels I can run through pretty effortlessly. But I also find that this game makes me WANT to meet it halfway. The nature of its focus on unpredictable wonder makes me stay and soak in the artistry and appreciate the effort in the design that I could so easily fly over. You're consistently rewarded for thoroughly exploring. Even if it's just to find some purple coins to buy stuff in the shops, I actually want to buy everything there and you can go through your coin count really fast so it works out great.
Another thing that makes me able to appreciate the design is their take on online, which I find ingenious. You don't join a group of 3 other people in a dedicated lobby and just play through the game with them. It's closer to a Dark Souls sytem in some ways which is a shockingly good fit in execution. You'll see ghosts of players who just happen to be around the same area or level you are. If you or someone else dies in this mode, they have 5 seconds to try and touch someone else to revive. You can also leave down signs which people can touch to revive, and many people use them to hint at secrets. You can even share powerups from your reserve slot. I played through most of the game online. For some of the select few challenging levels I turned it off so I couldn't cheese past the only somewhat demanding platforming moments. But for most levels I wasn't dying anyway so I didn't feel like it was a detriment. If anything hearing someone die super far away off screen gave a rush as I tried to run over to save them. Even in the local co-op you can't physically run into each other or pick each other up like in the NSMB games. I can appreciate the chaos in past Mario multiplayer modes but the way it's done here encourages wholesome positivity and playing with randoms online was a surprise highlight because of that.
I love seeing a group of people help each other try to find secrets. (There's actually optional mini-levels designed entirely around that. Not sure they'd be great in single player but they were a lot of fun online) And I love that you don't feel stuck with them, you can always play at your own pace and you don't even have to finish the level with them. You get as much out of the online as you want and it's very unobtrusive. You'll get +50 heart points every time you help someone or just happen to reach the flagpole with them, which is a lot of fun even though I'm pretty sure it doesn't do anything beyond intrinsic "I helped someone" energy. And furthermore it helps put the game's entire design philosophy into perspective. I may find most of the platforming comically easy but seeing the average player online, or playing co-op with someone like my mom...Makes me go "ah THAT'S why Nintendo designs it like this!" And I mean that in a positive way. It may not always lead to a game being made for me, but I find the prospect of designing a game truly for everyone fascinating and acknowledge how much of a challenge it is.
Starting from the Wii era Nintendo really pushed to be as inclusive as possible with their game design. The challenge being of course, that making a game for EVERYONE means they have to cater to my mother who hasn't held a controller since the SNES days...And someone like me, who has beaten every game in their catalogue let alone no-lifed much more demanding games. If there's anything Nintendo's got right during the Switch era, is that they finally found out how to make a game fun for both audiences.
I do have a few criticisms still though. Bosses are an easy one to point out. An area most Mario games falter in to be fair, but in some ways it's worse than ever here. I like the Wonder twists during them but idk how they make a game this creative and when it comes to making a boss fight...They make an empty rectangle and drop Bowser Jr. in it and give him the move left and right in his shell slowly moveset. They do have some decent iterations on the room layout as the fights progress but there's times the boss' moveset is so limited it can't even navigate its own simple room very well. The final boss was fun at least even if it failed to get a single hit off on me. And weirdly, 2 of the worlds don't have an end boss. On one hand I can appreciate the honesty. Like if you don't have an idea for a castle level and boss fight, I can respect that they chose not to go through the motions for what would have been a pretty mid world finale anyway. Just kinda ripping off the bandaid and saying "yeah sorry there's no cool conclusion, onto the next world" without wasting any time. So I get it, but doesn't make it any less lame. Feels like an area they had to cut a corner in because the rest of the experience is so ambitious.
One other small complaint starts with praise. This is the best world map I've seen out of a game like this in a long time. BUT it's still not as good as Mario World's map. Idk how important it is to others but I find the world map plays a HUGE role in a platformer's structure and is very important to me. Worlds are still very segmented off from each other, I don't understand why modern games feel the need to make 6 small, isolated worlds instead of making one big cohesive one. But Wonder does come close. They actually DO something with the small free roaming you're given unlike 3D World. There's stuff to find and each world has its own quirks and secrets. And I liked that one of the worlds was actually a hub containing the entrances for all the other main worlds. This game absolutely has fun with its world map but it still feels somewhat restrained from what SMW pulled off. Secret exits are still there and they're a lot of fun to find, but compared to SMW they're few and far between. And on a similar note the special world is nothing too special. The levels within are decently challenging relatively speaking and I think it's kind of cool how they tease you with the final challenge until you've found enough of the entrances throughout the other worlds. But it's ultimately pretty isolated, just there to host a few more challenging stages and your reward is simply the stages themselves. I really wish it wasn't so common for platformers to give you absolutely no reward whatsoever for 100% completion...BUT I liked the levels and finding them for what it's worth.
Only other thing that was a tad disappointing is that there's a few references to older Mario games' music. And hearing them put a smile on my face, but that's the only reason they're here. Considering there's a decent amount of music-themed stages, it feels like a waste for all of the reference music to be in 10 second long mini-stages. I can respect not wanting to rely on nostalgia bait, so in that sense it's cool they had restraint I guess. But it would have been cool to see levels designed around the old music instead of just single rooms where you go I recognize that! and move on. A handful of Rayman Legends style music levels using the reference songs they picked would likely force my hand to give a perfect 5 star.
But yeah big picture this has been my favorite 2D platformer in quite a long time. And just as Mario Odyssey did for 3D mario, Wonder did for 2D. Which is to say, brought me back into the series excited for its future for the first time since the NSMB era took me out of it. I definitely see myself wanting to play through this again, which is something I couldn't say for even really good modern platformers like DKC Tropical Freeze for example. The badge system that alters your moveset is really cool and I found all of them had valid utility. The bubble power-up especially has a surprising amount of utility as well. Looking forward to seeing and doing speedruns. And I'm curious how an exclusively offline playthrough would feel.
Also special shoutout to the huge amount of really good animation work they put in. The core concept behind the project is incredibly ambitious alone but to back it all up with such expressive animation the whole way through, on top of having multiple playable characters is insane. And then you realize the Elephant power-up functionally doubled the amount of animations they had to make and it's very evident how much care they put into this. Shoutouts to the new voice actors too. He had some huge shoes to fill after Charles Martinet retired but he did excellent. Luigi's spot on. And while Mario is at times clearly a different guy, it reminds me of the early days back when Mario's inflections would be a tad different between games as Charles himself grew into the character over time. I really like how he sounds here and I wouldn't be opposed to this just being his new voice moving forward. Less talked about is that Daisy's got a new actor as well and she does a great job, wouldn't have even noticed it was a different person. (Really happy she's playable in a major platformer for the first time too. Never been a huge Daisy fan necessarily but I'll take anything that's even technically Super Mario Land rep) And I'm glad they got a sizeable amount of lines in too. Featuring at least over 4 minutes of wahoo's and context sensitive yahoo's for every character.
Wouldn't be surprised if after sitting on it for a while if I bump this up to a perfect 5. But I could also see the very safe level design and game structure dropping to a clean 4 over time. Either way, I can't imagine a Mario fan not at least getting something out of this if not love it. Even as someone who's so cynical about style vs. substance level design that I don't even care for the galaxy games, this one's won me over. After each level the game shows you a random screenshot of your run through it. The fact that just about every single one is full of enough life to put on the back of the box shows how much personality is oozing out of every corner.
I have some criticisms but they're not enough to stop me from saying everyone should play this one. Ultimately any problems I may have (for the most part) are a result of my personal preferred design philosophy being kind of the exact opposite of how Mario games are generally designed from 2007 onward. If I'm designing an obstacle in Mario Maker, I want to give that obstacle a win and fail condition, which is to say it's placed there with the intent that if the player doesn't engage with it properly they'll be hit by it. But from seeing how low my clear percentages are, and watching other people play my levels in person, on top of what kind of levels are the most popular in Mario Maker, I see why Nintendo no longer designs Mario like this. And I bring this up because I've been very critical of the philosophy Nintendo found to replace the more traditional method. But I think they finally found a way to make what usually feels like a formula on autopilot into something I can't help but respect.
Sure I may find myself occasionally wishing they'd iterate a bit more on their really good ideas. I'd like to see more "Do or die" scenarios. I'm not asking for brutal difficulty but a LOT of what's here feels like you have to meet halfway. I find that major chunks of a lot of already short levels I can run through pretty effortlessly. But I also find that this game makes me WANT to meet it halfway. The nature of its focus on unpredictable wonder makes me stay and soak in the artistry and appreciate the effort in the design that I could so easily fly over. You're consistently rewarded for thoroughly exploring. Even if it's just to find some purple coins to buy stuff in the shops, I actually want to buy everything there and you can go through your coin count really fast so it works out great.
Another thing that makes me able to appreciate the design is their take on online, which I find ingenious. You don't join a group of 3 other people in a dedicated lobby and just play through the game with them. It's closer to a Dark Souls sytem in some ways which is a shockingly good fit in execution. You'll see ghosts of players who just happen to be around the same area or level you are. If you or someone else dies in this mode, they have 5 seconds to try and touch someone else to revive. You can also leave down signs which people can touch to revive, and many people use them to hint at secrets. You can even share powerups from your reserve slot. I played through most of the game online. For some of the select few challenging levels I turned it off so I couldn't cheese past the only somewhat demanding platforming moments. But for most levels I wasn't dying anyway so I didn't feel like it was a detriment. If anything hearing someone die super far away off screen gave a rush as I tried to run over to save them. Even in the local co-op you can't physically run into each other or pick each other up like in the NSMB games. I can appreciate the chaos in past Mario multiplayer modes but the way it's done here encourages wholesome positivity and playing with randoms online was a surprise highlight because of that.
I love seeing a group of people help each other try to find secrets. (There's actually optional mini-levels designed entirely around that. Not sure they'd be great in single player but they were a lot of fun online) And I love that you don't feel stuck with them, you can always play at your own pace and you don't even have to finish the level with them. You get as much out of the online as you want and it's very unobtrusive. You'll get +50 heart points every time you help someone or just happen to reach the flagpole with them, which is a lot of fun even though I'm pretty sure it doesn't do anything beyond intrinsic "I helped someone" energy. And furthermore it helps put the game's entire design philosophy into perspective. I may find most of the platforming comically easy but seeing the average player online, or playing co-op with someone like my mom...Makes me go "ah THAT'S why Nintendo designs it like this!" And I mean that in a positive way. It may not always lead to a game being made for me, but I find the prospect of designing a game truly for everyone fascinating and acknowledge how much of a challenge it is.
Starting from the Wii era Nintendo really pushed to be as inclusive as possible with their game design. The challenge being of course, that making a game for EVERYONE means they have to cater to my mother who hasn't held a controller since the SNES days...And someone like me, who has beaten every game in their catalogue let alone no-lifed much more demanding games. If there's anything Nintendo's got right during the Switch era, is that they finally found out how to make a game fun for both audiences.
I do have a few criticisms still though. Bosses are an easy one to point out. An area most Mario games falter in to be fair, but in some ways it's worse than ever here. I like the Wonder twists during them but idk how they make a game this creative and when it comes to making a boss fight...They make an empty rectangle and drop Bowser Jr. in it and give him the move left and right in his shell slowly moveset. They do have some decent iterations on the room layout as the fights progress but there's times the boss' moveset is so limited it can't even navigate its own simple room very well. The final boss was fun at least even if it failed to get a single hit off on me. And weirdly, 2 of the worlds don't have an end boss. On one hand I can appreciate the honesty. Like if you don't have an idea for a castle level and boss fight, I can respect that they chose not to go through the motions for what would have been a pretty mid world finale anyway. Just kinda ripping off the bandaid and saying "yeah sorry there's no cool conclusion, onto the next world" without wasting any time. So I get it, but doesn't make it any less lame. Feels like an area they had to cut a corner in because the rest of the experience is so ambitious.
One other small complaint starts with praise. This is the best world map I've seen out of a game like this in a long time. BUT it's still not as good as Mario World's map. Idk how important it is to others but I find the world map plays a HUGE role in a platformer's structure and is very important to me. Worlds are still very segmented off from each other, I don't understand why modern games feel the need to make 6 small, isolated worlds instead of making one big cohesive one. But Wonder does come close. They actually DO something with the small free roaming you're given unlike 3D World. There's stuff to find and each world has its own quirks and secrets. And I liked that one of the worlds was actually a hub containing the entrances for all the other main worlds. This game absolutely has fun with its world map but it still feels somewhat restrained from what SMW pulled off. Secret exits are still there and they're a lot of fun to find, but compared to SMW they're few and far between. And on a similar note the special world is nothing too special. The levels within are decently challenging relatively speaking and I think it's kind of cool how they tease you with the final challenge until you've found enough of the entrances throughout the other worlds. But it's ultimately pretty isolated, just there to host a few more challenging stages and your reward is simply the stages themselves. I really wish it wasn't so common for platformers to give you absolutely no reward whatsoever for 100% completion...BUT I liked the levels and finding them for what it's worth.
Only other thing that was a tad disappointing is that there's a few references to older Mario games' music. And hearing them put a smile on my face, but that's the only reason they're here. Considering there's a decent amount of music-themed stages, it feels like a waste for all of the reference music to be in 10 second long mini-stages. I can respect not wanting to rely on nostalgia bait, so in that sense it's cool they had restraint I guess. But it would have been cool to see levels designed around the old music instead of just single rooms where you go I recognize that! and move on. A handful of Rayman Legends style music levels using the reference songs they picked would likely force my hand to give a perfect 5 star.
But yeah big picture this has been my favorite 2D platformer in quite a long time. And just as Mario Odyssey did for 3D mario, Wonder did for 2D. Which is to say, brought me back into the series excited for its future for the first time since the NSMB era took me out of it. I definitely see myself wanting to play through this again, which is something I couldn't say for even really good modern platformers like DKC Tropical Freeze for example. The badge system that alters your moveset is really cool and I found all of them had valid utility. The bubble power-up especially has a surprising amount of utility as well. Looking forward to seeing and doing speedruns. And I'm curious how an exclusively offline playthrough would feel.
Also special shoutout to the huge amount of really good animation work they put in. The core concept behind the project is incredibly ambitious alone but to back it all up with such expressive animation the whole way through, on top of having multiple playable characters is insane. And then you realize the Elephant power-up functionally doubled the amount of animations they had to make and it's very evident how much care they put into this. Shoutouts to the new voice actors too. He had some huge shoes to fill after Charles Martinet retired but he did excellent. Luigi's spot on. And while Mario is at times clearly a different guy, it reminds me of the early days back when Mario's inflections would be a tad different between games as Charles himself grew into the character over time. I really like how he sounds here and I wouldn't be opposed to this just being his new voice moving forward. Less talked about is that Daisy's got a new actor as well and she does a great job, wouldn't have even noticed it was a different person. (Really happy she's playable in a major platformer for the first time too. Never been a huge Daisy fan necessarily but I'll take anything that's even technically Super Mario Land rep) And I'm glad they got a sizeable amount of lines in too. Featuring at least over 4 minutes of wahoo's and context sensitive yahoo's for every character.
Wouldn't be surprised if after sitting on it for a while if I bump this up to a perfect 5. But I could also see the very safe level design and game structure dropping to a clean 4 over time. Either way, I can't imagine a Mario fan not at least getting something out of this if not love it. Even as someone who's so cynical about style vs. substance level design that I don't even care for the galaxy games, this one's won me over. After each level the game shows you a random screenshot of your run through it. The fact that just about every single one is full of enough life to put on the back of the box shows how much personality is oozing out of every corner.