by Jed Pressgrove
Since the release of Super Mario Bros. during the 1980s, Mario games have moved away from hard-nosed platforming and aesthetics that elicit a mixture of emotions, morphing into a franchise that peddles a smarmy brand of joy. Super Mario Bros. Wonder doesn’t alter this business plan. It frequently reflects the series’ evolution toward back-patting game design.
The pandering in Super Mario Bros. Wonder is over the top, like a person who compliments you 30 times within minutes of meeting you. When you stomp an enemy, text like “Good” and “Great” explodes into existence near your mind-blowing (read: largely routine) actions. After entering a new world, you get a Wonder Seed — an item you collect to open up paths in the world map — handed to you. Some stages amount to excuses to give the player more Wonder Seeds, offering no resistance, no adversaries, no puzzles, no thinking. At no point did I lack lives, flower coins (used to purchase badges, extra lives, etc.), or Wonder Seeds. There’s an abundance of riches, a dearth of obstacles to progress, a feeling nothing can stop Mario. The tech industry might label this a streamlined, optimized user experience.
If you have difficulty, you can wear a badge for various advantages. One badge triggers an alarm when you’re near important items, another adds extra blocks throughout a stage to make platforming easier, and so on. Forgive yourself for assuming that some badge abilities, such as the parachute hat and grappling vine, might need to be strategically selected to complete mandatory segments of the game. The powers are optional and only necessary for the Badge Challenge levels, all of which pose little issue and allow the player to die without actually losing lives.
Nintendo plays it safe with the curveballs in Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Every main stage contains a Wonder Flower that, when touched, turns the game wacky for temporary thrills. Placing all Flower-induced quirks aside, Nintendo’s telegraphing of any incoming weirdness robs the proceedings of awe. One might even predict a twist based on a level’s enemies, structure, and title. Like Doom (2016) and its suspense-killing Gore Nests, Super Mario Bros. Wonder announces and warns us of its craziness. (Readers who complained about Wonder Flower twists being spoiled by reviewers fail to realize a lot of things, including the truth that Super Mario Bros. Wonder dampens its own potential irony, as well as minor facts of Western society life such as freedom of the press and the right to critically talk about specific parts of a game without including a warning for people who constantly bombard themselves with information, who never think that perhaps NOT CONSUMING any written or audiovisual material about Super Mario Bros. Wonder could result in a more surprising experience when they finally play the game.)
The Wonder Flower dynamic nods to the Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy level in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, the kookiest Mario title of them all. The distinction between touching Wonder Flowers and touching Fuzzies is illuminating. In Yoshi’s Island, the Fuzzies populate the environment as a menace. You avoid them and their disorienting consequences unless you want to be deviant. Unless you want to get messed up and stumble around. The Fuzzies are the most compelling drug in video game history (even Jet in Fallout 2 can’t compete), backed up by a wonky, mind-in-the-gutter aesthetic. Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy has reverse-psychology genius, a superego-versus-id truth.
The Wonder Flower has no psychological or philosophical whimsy to it. We are encouraged, instructed, even mandated to find the flowers, consume them, and have our high. Nintendo fulfills its promise of gameplay wrinkles to the consumer, stage by stage. The player, even the dunce in many instances, gathers the rewards (Wonder Seeds). The Wonder Flower, this engine of innovation, becomes part of a familiar cycle. I began taking for granted the short musical bridge initiated by the collection of the plant, that sonic reminder of one’s entry into wonderland. But in Yoshi’s Island, you’d have to be numb to listen to that demented horn sound upon colliding with a Fuzzy and not be struck, or tickled, by the absurdity.
The magical effects of Wonder Flowers vary. They transform enemies, platforms, Mario, and more. The game repeats some of these ideas to capitalize on untapped hijinks, only to the further detriment of surprise. In World 1, the Bulrush Coming Through level boasts a mostly innocuous stampede of bulls. This is followed later by the more challenging Bulrush Express, but the conceptual repetition prevents astonishment. Similarly, every battleship stage leans on the same predicament: Bowser targeting the player via a reticle. The significant delay on the villain’s explosive shots undercuts any sensation of danger. These episodes amount to dull bureaucratic formalities.
At their best, Wonder Flowers provide an abrupt break from the standard platforming (as when Mario is controlled from a topdown view) or provoke us to believe a particular type of Mario could punctuate an entire game. Wubba Mario, or Red Goo Mario as I like to say, epitomizes this latter possibility. Wubba Mario slides along walls and ceilings with marvelous, slimy tactility. This version of Mario is not merely fun to control. It’s placed in environments and situational drama that push us to immerse ourselves in a different style of play. Too many other times Mario’s transformations register as gimmicks as opposed to exciting fragments of a hallucination. Rolling around as a spiked ball is a hollow God Mode. Scooting about as a spongy platform in confined spaces leads to unimaginative solutions. Hiding behind trees as a Goomba is Metal Gear Solid for dummies.
The criticisms above may embolden the Nintendo fans — or, worse, those “it’s not made for you” people who would struggle to criticize a McDonald’s hamburger — with their digital water pistols. The aggressive accessibility and cheeriness of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, these ingenious folks would argue, is there for the kids, as if:
- Five-year-olds didn’t fall in love with the less patronizing original Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System.
- Children only gravitate toward the lighthearted, gentler things in life.
- Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s invincibility options aren’t enough — every player, no matter their age or brain development, needs to be showered with infantilizing yelps of praise and gifted scores of Wonder Seeds.
- Sharing a personal opinion on a game is committing a grave crime against mass marketing and consumerism.
BUT IF I HAD CHILDREN!
Sure, not going to lie, I would jump at the chance, jump like Mario, to play Super Mario Bros. Wonder with my hypothetical kids, because I was married once, for four years, with a stepdaughter and stepnephew and stepniece, and a sister-in-law and brother-in-law, and we would convene to play Nintendo games, my personal favorite being Bowling from Wii Sports, because I had this wrist rotation that guaranteed a strike, and I love being the winner, doesn’t matter if my opponent is a seasoned veteran or a child not old enough to sniff high school, does not matter, my self-esteem needs victory and praise, as well as irritation and frustration and indignation from my competitors, ANYWAY, we all played New Super Mario Bros. Wii one time, and even though I consider the New Super Mario Bros. series to be profoundly unessential, just an excuse to say you’re playing a traditional Mario game in the 21st century, I got a kick out of hearing my sister-in-law remark about her fumbling throughout New Super Mario Bros. Wii while her son tried to show her the ropes, and it was a blast guffawing with my family members while hopping around and dying as Mario and Luigi and Toad and blah blah blah, hell, I was a kid once and would play the battle mode in Super Mario Bros. 3 religiously with my younger sister, yes, little girls play video games, it’s not a big deal you conservative and liberal and moderate reprobates, so yes, indeed, Super Mario Bros. Wonder is most likely fun for kids, who also hold McDonald’s in high regard, thanks for the revolutionary and enlightening thoughts, you insightful scholars of media markets!
The second half of Super Mario Bros. Wonder flirts with excellence.
The better half couldn’t have come at a better time: World 3, Shining Falls, is the nadir of Super Mario Bros. Wonder. The locations in Shining Falls are more like amateurish demos than fully realized stages. The Sugarstar Trial: Across the Night Sky features the worst Wonder Flower effect of the game: a constant flow of shooting Super Stars that allow the player to mindlessly run through everything. Similarly disappointing is Hoppycat Mario. This form revolves around a great idea (ultra high jumps), but multiple levels do nothing remotely intriguing with the ability. World 3 defines anti-climactic with its final stage, which features basic follow-the-coins jumps. The least Nintendo could have done is transcend a moderately interesting Super Mario Maker fan creation.
World 4 saves Super Mario Bros. Wonder by giving the game a compelling sense of place. The map for World 4 evokes desert mirages and teases hidden corners of ancient architecture. The best level, The Desert Mystery, has Mario ripping the bandages off mummies and pulling cords to manipulate stage elements like platform height and item placement. These mechanics enrich the setting’s personality, inviting you to engage in a sensational type of archaeology. The level climaxes with the task of chasing a rogue Wonder Seed to foreboding techno music. Finally, Super Mario Bros. Wonder subverts its cautionary, ingratiating tendency of handing everything to the player.
The last two worlds, Fungi Mines and Deep Magma Bog, continue to push the exploratory inventiveness of World 4. They deepen the feeling that Mario could get lost. They highlight the difference between manufacturing content and designing environments as convincing illusions, vessels of atmosphere, and lived-in habitats. They have unforgettable identities, just like Pipe Land did in Super Mario Bros. 3. They’re quirky, precarious, and foreboding. Matter-defying rifts, collapsing columns, fossilized dragon bones, moving doors with monstrous jaws — such characteristics vivify these places given to ruin, corruption, and destruction.
Different factors water down the immersive spells of these worlds. Nintendo packs in far too many levels like the Badge Challenges, KO Arenas, and Break Times, these feeble and emotionally inert odes to tutorialization, stat-based achievement, and designated relaxation. The graphics, while full of neat details, look like what we should expect from Mario, especially if earlier this year we walked out of a theatrical showing of The Super Mario Bros. Movie. As surreal as Super Mario Bros. Wonder strives to be, its rounded aesthetic is so carefully processed and on brand that the darker moments of the game pull their punches, akin to brothers facing off in a mixed martial arts contest who can’t help but think about their worried mother.
There is no truth in advertising: The concept of “wonder” should entail the exact opposite of the foreseeable, the explainable, and the comfortable. As with the last two Legend of Zelda games, Nintendo neither redefines nor refines its intellectual property. It reinforces its myths and upholds its by-committee values. Super Mario Bros. Wonder achieves an appreciable number of impressive moments because child-like experimentation remains a talking point for the company. If only Super Mario Bros. Wonder could let go of the Pavlovian design strategies, it’d be a near masterpiece.
Game Bias 