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I beat the final bonus level of Mario Bros. Wonder today, and I just HAD to do a writeup on this gem:

Mario is the undisputed king of vidya, but when it comes to his trademark platforming games, the 2D and the 3D games have over the years definitely diverged in terms of quality. Mario absolutely DOMINATES when it comes to 3D platformers, with any sensible list of the genre’s all-time greats being dominated by the portly plumber (the Galaxy games and Mario Odyssey especially being God-Tier). When it comes to the 2D platformers though….sure, back when Mario Bros. 3 and Mario World were still hot, new releases, no other 2D platformers could compare. But later during the SNES’s lifetime, both the Donkey Kong Country games and Yoshi’s Island would in my opinion end up dethroning Mario World. And on the Game Boy, the Wario Land games would easily surpass Mario’s earlier GB efforts.

It got even worse when the “New” Super Mario Bros. games failed to really elevate 2D Mario in any meaningful way, instead sticking to the tried and true formula, as well as a healthy (?) dose of nostalgia. While this proved to be an extremely commercially successful approach to 2D Mario, it ended up producing a series of games that were merely good rather than truly great. Meanwhile, more and more of Mario’s competitors kept surpassing him on his 2D home turf, including the likes of Kirby, Rayman (poor guy, we were just talking about him in a far more unpleasant context…), young upstarts like Shovel Knight, and even arguably Sonic (due to Sonic Mania being so damn good). When Sonic has better games than Mario, you know something has gone horribly wrong!

Apparently Nintendo themselves agreed, because after New Super Mario Bros. U in 2012, mainline 2D Mario platformers went on a looong break. They did however put out Mario Maker in 2015, and a Switch sequel in 2019. These games, giving millions of people the world over the chance to create any kind of 2D Mario level they wanted, unleashed a crap-ton of, well, crap levels, but also thousands upon thousands of brilliant 2D Mario levels that were ridiculously creative, finding countless brand new uses for long-established mechanics and completely redefining what 2D Mario gameplay could be. For me at least, vanilla 2D Mario games seemed painfully basic and even boring when compared to the cream of the Mario Maker crop. Some people even started arguing that Mario Maker rendered regular 2D Mario platformers obsolete. I should know, I was Some people.

However, there was also the faint hope that all the amazing levels being crafted in Mario Maker would end up inspiring Nintendo to finally step up their game. After all, why can’t 2D Mario games have the same kind of passion and effort put into them as the 3D Mario games, when for example modern 2D Donkey Kong games *do* get that kind of royal treatment? Mario Maker also reminded us of just how FUN 2D Mario is at its core, especially with modern, refined controls – running and jumping, collecting coins, stomping on Goombas, crushing turts, bouncing from enemy to enemy, at its core it’s all just so. damn. fun! And Nintendo can basically make fun Mario levels in their sleep at this point – so imagine how good 2D Mario gameplay could be if they actually went all out?

Well, now we no longer have to imagine, because that’s EXACTLY what Mario Bros. Wonder is – a 2D Mario platformer that got the Top-Tier 3D Mario treatment, and which is very clearly a product of the post-Mario Maker era. The fantastic 2D Mario core is still here, pristinely preserved, but now surrounded by an absolute embarrassment of riches when it comes to new ideas, additions and improvements. This feels like a supremely luxurious, decadent 2D Mario platformer, and I mean that in the best way possible, as a food critic evaluating a delicious desert.

In fact, let’s stick with the food analogy for a bit longer, because Mario Wonder’s greatness is due to so many different ingredients, any one of which could have served as the sole foundation of and justification for a new 2D Mario game if Nintendo were in one of their lazier moods – the vastly increased characters roster, the great new Power-Ups, the radically improved presentation, a fantastic new Flower Kingdom setting, by far the best 2D Mario world map ever, so many brand new, stunning vistas and environments, a ridiculous number of new enemies, creatures and game mechanics, the brand new badge system, and of course, all the weird, wild and wacky Wonder Flower effects. Take them all together, and you get a 2D Mario that feels startlingly fresh and exciting.

Let’s start with the visuals – while I’m very much a gameplay over graphics guy normally, it actually makes sense to focus a bit on the shallower side of things in this writeup, not only because, as I alluded to earlier, 2D Mario gameplay is ALWAYS going to be good unless you actively screw it up, but because a game from a big developer suffering from a shoddy presentation is a clear sign of laziness, lack of effort and lack of passion. It’s for example no coincidence that the mainline Switch Pokemon games look like shit. And when New Super Mario Bros. U on a HD console didn’t look all that much better than NSMB Wii, which itself didn’t look all that much better than a DS game, which wasn’t even among the more visually impressive games on that handheld, it told you loud and clear that Nintendo wasn’t putting as much effort into modern 2D Mario games as they ought to.

Meanwhile, Mario Bros. Wonder is a straight up gorgeous game! It’s not just that Wonder is graphically far superior to something like NSMBU on an objective level, with DRAMATICALLY improved animations, backgrounds, attention to detail and the like; it’s just SO much prettier in terms of all the environments, which are incomparably more colorful, creative and straight up interesting than anything ever seen in NSMBU, save for maybe Painted Swampland (the van Gogh level). It’s not just that the game is extremely colorful either, it’s how strong, vibrant and beautiful the colors are, and how good the art direction is, with even the levels utilizing a far more restrained color scheme looking simply beautiful. The game is just loaded with pure eye candy through and through, even before taking you on all sorts of acid trips from heaven. Honestly, I find it almost shocking for a 2D Mario game to look *this* good, and no wonder, because given how Mario Wonder represents such a massive graphical AND artistic improvement over NSMBU, it’s kinda like going directly from Mario 64 to Mario Galaxy, with the two games somehow sharing the same system.

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