One of the highlights of seeing Super Mario Bros. Wonder is that it is rather unique in comparison to its predecessors. Other than a pair of Super Mario Maker games that Nintendo has released in recent years, 2D Mario releases have been mainly New Super Mario Bros. titles. Super Mario Bros. Wonder, however, has gone a significantly different direction. This topic is something that game director Shiro Mouri and producer Takashi Tezuka discussed when speaking with The Guardian recently.
Mouri said that “I’ve been creating side-scrolling Mario games for many years now, but the goal this time was to create a 2D Mario that was fitting for this day and age – with mysteries and secrets for the time that we live in. The first Super Mario game felt full of surprises: Mario getting taller if you eat a mushroom, or discovering that you could go inside the pipes and be transported underground. As time went on, these ideas became normalized. We got used to them. So the development team took this on as a challenge. Until now I think we’ve been cleverly reusing our surprises, but we didn’t want to depend on that this time.”
Now the title “Wonder” makes all that much more sense to me. The game is literally about surprising the player and instilling a sense of wonder, and I like that a lot!
I get why they don’t want to reused stuff from previous 2D Mario games. They want to create something different and create something more interesting and challenging for players to explore. Super Mario Bros. Wonder does make good sense and it’s full of surprises.
Well, too bad that you showed us most of those surprises. Now they are no surprise anymore facepalm Sometimes, I hate the Internet and how much info you can find. Too many damn spoilers to step into.
I mean, you can also just step away from the internet. Don’t watch the Treehouse Live segments, stop watching the trailers, take a break from twitter, etc.
It’s what I’ve done, and it works wonders to keep myself surprised. Pun entirely intended by the way