New Super Mario Bros is for many out there, the pinacle of the 2D Mario games, while I think it´s totally the opposite, as the way I see it, that´s when 2D Mario games went downhill in terms of creativity and design levels of course, I don´t consider the New Super Mario Bros games bad by any means, they could get repetitive really fast though, more if we take into account that they released a lot of games with the New badge, it´s for this reason that I wasn´t hyped for Super Mario Bros Wonder, I couldn´t care less to be honest.
The game released past years and still I wasn´t that interested, but people over the internet kept saying that Wonder was the definitive 2D Mario game ever, I thought it was because of the hype but I can´t deny my interest did grow up. Finally, I decided to give it a try and invest myself for what the game had to offer and I must say I´m quite delighted that my worries were just that, worries. In the end, I faced myself agains´t a game which I was expecting to be totally different.
The game has 7 worlds to explore, everyone of theme with its correspondent biome, as usual, these worlds are filled with bunch of levels, our main goal is to get to the last level, defeat the boss, and move on to the nest world. At the end of every level, there will be a Wonder Seed waiting for us, in a fewer words, our job is to collect as many Wonder Seeds as we can, since many levels or segments of the game are unlocked through Wonder Seeds. You can just speedrun the levels, collecting the one Wonder Seed which is always -almost- located at the end of the level, but the magic of these games is to explore every level as much as you can, because there´s usually 2 Wonder Seeds per world, sometimes even three. Like I said, you could just speedrun the level, but it´s even more enjoyable if you take your time exploring everything since you wouldn´t be able to see the whole package.
The overworld is just fine, it´s exactly as you could expect from a Mario game and the worlds itself are pretty cool, I felt like most of these worlds had more levels than usual, not a bad thing though. The levels are what this game has to offer and they are genuinely amazing, firstly because Mario Wonder is more like an experimental game, so they weren´t afraid of just screwing up something, the developers did what they felt was correct and it´s pretty cool, it doesn´t feel just as a copy of another Mario game or another 2d Mario game. The levels brim quality and creativity everywhere, levels which you can see there is a lot of love behind them, each one of them marked with a strong personality, totally crazy levels where everything could happen.
In every single level, there is an ¨item¨ which is called Wonder Flower. The Wonder Flower is one of the reasons why I think this game drew so much attention, anything can happen when touching these items, it´s a madness festival which you don´t know what to expect, the good thing is, the unexpected turns out to be great, sometimes it´s just the level that can suffer changes or you could be the one changing its flesh, like becoming into a goomba, changing drastically the way the level is going through, for example, the level turns itself into a stealth game, which is hilarious, although I think it´s better if anyone find these cool things by themselves.
There are only two worlds which I found to be deficient compared to the rest of the game, these being Subaked Desert and Jewel Block Cave, I don´t feel like they are entirely bad because some levels are pretty cool but some others are meh, in Jewel Block Cave feels like they ran out of ideas to be honest, which is fun to think about because the sixth and seventh world are fine, I don´t know, Sunbaked Desert and Jewel Block Cave are the lowest point of the game, and again, I´m not saying they are bad perse, but compared to the rest of the game, they are indeed defficient, or that´s how I felt playing these worlds.
There is one Search Party level per world and those are the kind of levels I liked the less in this game, they are absolutely boring, the idea is to find secrets inside the level until you get the Wonder Seed, my problem with it is that finding these secrets can get way too cryptic, as there is no way you should know where all of the secrets are, and trust me, it´s not fun to do this. I understand it was supposed to be fun with other people around I guess but it gets tiring really fast, at the point I used guide for every one of them, if Search Party levels didn´t exist, this game would be peak, just saying.
One thing I do say is pretty bad no matter how you see it are the bosses, what happened here? Every boss in this game is literally the same, excepting the final boss. The bosses are literally jumping on Bowser Jr three or four times, that´s it, or should I say boss and not bosses because Bowser Jr is the same you are going to agains´t with, jumping on its head until he´s defeated, the only thing that changes is the scenario, just a little bit. New Super Mario Bros from the DS had this problem and they solved it by bringing back the Koopalines on New Super Mario Bros Wii, a problem which was solved more than five years ago, why didn´t they do that? I don´t even care if Bowser Jr is the same boss but give him variety between his fights, while playing a Mario game I´m not expecting a challenge, the less I´m expecting is variety and not even what was present here, seriously, what happened here?
Through the game you´ll be able to collect a number of badges, these badges allows Mario to earn a new ability, you could say it´s kind of an upgrade, for example, if you equip a badge regarding water, you´ll be able to swim faster while getting through your way defeating aquacitc enemies. At first, I though of it as a great idea, because it could give another layer of depth to the game, sadly, it´s nothing like that. Every badge is almost the same, the allow your character to jump higher to a certain height, but most of them jump as high as Luigi would jump in past games, this is understandable because it´d broke the game if doing so, but at the end of the day, because of the day, most badges are pretty useless, the only badge I found useful is that one your character uses their cap as a paraglider, or another one which lets you jump higher, but that´s it, you could even complete the whole game without badges, it´s not like the game makes you to use badges, they are kinda useless, a shame because I like the concept, too bad the execution is not as good as I thought it´d be.
Last thing I would like to talk about are the Special Worlds, hidden levels which are supossed to be the hardest level in the game, a challenge if you are a person waiting for more, I only had problems with one level, but the rest were pretty easy, I was genuinely disappointed, I was expecting a challenge and even the last Special World is disappointing, I´m talking about the dificulty only, the levels are pretty cool and fun, not as hard as I thought they would be. Special Worlds are a thing since Super Mario World I think and those levels were harder, even from the New games were harder.
In conclusion, I love Mario and this game was phenomenal, had a great time with it, it gave me Super Mario World vibes and that alone would be enough to tell you the game is great, visually speaking is beautiful and the animations of every character are amazing. I had problems with the game, the ones I mentioned earlier, but they weren´t the big ideal, they didn´t ruin my experiences, they are just things that I think they can be better, my expectations were over the top and it didn´t disappoint me, I don´t want to see New Super Mario Switch 2 or Mario Maker 3 or etc, I think this is the way, I just hope they don´t get stucked like they did with New.
All of the screeenshots were taken by me
