Of course, the gameplay is exceptional too – after playing it safe for so long, Nintendo this time decided to fill seemingly every level of Mario Wonder with new ideas, enemies and mechanics, to the point where you just never know what to expect, only that it’s bound to be great – it’s like being a kid again, with each new level you try out being like unwrapping a present on Christmas Day! Before its release, Nintendo claimed to have come up with more than 2000 new ideas while brainstorming for Mario Wonder, and after nearly hundred percenting the game, I believe them – not since Mario Galaxy 1 have I been this blown away by the level of creativity on display in a Mario game. That’s not to say that the game doesn’t blatantly steal ideas from other 2D platformers – in fact, it proudly steals from the best, as I saw various ideas and mechanics from the likes of Donkey Kong Country Returns, Rayman Legends and the 3D Kirby games popping up here and there, not only being brilliantly utilized, but expanded upon and taken to the next level.

Like in Yoshi’s Island, practically every level in Mario Wonder is so unique, beautiful, clever and well-designed that it almost feels like a miniature work of art. The levels are meticulously, painstakingly crafted, as you keep seeing great new mechanics be introduced, utilized in various fun and interesting ways, expanded upon and reinvented within the span of a couple of minutes, time and time again. Each enemy, each platform is placed with a purpose, creating levels that just as fun to carefully explore as they are to speedrun. One obvious example of this design philosophy at work is any level that requires you ride a platform (which in Wonder can take a great many different forms) – normally in 2D platformers, these kinds of levels are pretty boring due to being slow-paced, but Wonder is excellent in terms of constantly coming up with interesting obstacles and challenges to keep the experience fun and engaging. But what if you *still* don’t feel like riding the platform? Every time I decided to test it out, it turned out that precise platforming and lengthy leaps achieved by bouncing off various enemies would enable you ignore your intended ride altogether! You DO miss out on a bunch of secrets by playing such levels in this way, but it’s really cool nonetheless that you turn out to have that option.

I haven’t even mentioned that Wonder Flower, the defining feature of Mario Wonder. Touch a Wonder Flower, and something WEIRD will happen, taking the rulebook of the game and throwing it straight in the trash. Nintendo seemed to show off a great many bizarre, baffling and glorious Wonder Flower effects in the lead-up to this game’s release, so I was worried about them having done the same thing they did with Mario Odyssey back in 2017 – Spoiling the majority of the game’s great surprises way ahead of time. Thankfully, they seem to have been a good deal more disciplined when it came to their promotion of Mario Wonder, as I hadn’t even gotten past the 2nd level before I was hit with an incredibly cool Wonder Flower effect that I never saw coming. Despite how many Wonder Flower effects Nintendo showed off pre-release, we didn’t even see the half of it.

The levels in Mario Wonder already tend to be so good that they didn’t strictly speaking *need* the Wonder Flowers to complete them, but what they often do is taking already great levels and make them truly amazing. The actual Wonder Flower effects tend to range from “oh, that’s neat I guess” to “HOLY SHIT, THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME!”, with only a couple of actual duds. Some effects do get re-used, but they’re usually recontextualized in such cool ways that these instances of flower recycling rarely feel disappointing.

In addition to these “traditional” levels, Mario Wonder also has plenty of shorter gimmick levels, which can involve everything from killing a bunch of enemies as quickly as possible to sniffing out hidden blocks, or Break levels that feature nothing that can kill you, but which can still involve neat ideas, like rhythmically timing your jumps to help play a classic Mario song. Most notably, there are Badge Challenge levels that require the use of specific badge abilities to complete them. These are really great, because they mean that even people like me, who generally shy away from using the badges to make the game more challenging, still get the chance to play around with all the cool new badge abilities within settings tailor-made for them.

And really, all the different types of levels really bring home just how inspired Wonder has been by Mario Maker – there is so much here, from speedrun levels to musically themed levels, that I really can’t imagine Nintendo leaning so heavily into unless they’d seen how well-received such levels were in Mario Maker. Same with the more puzzle-heavy levels, and levels focused more on spectacle than traditional 2D Mario platforming. As a huge Mario Maker fan, it’s great to see so much of not only the creativity, but the richness and versatility of the 2D Mario setting be so well reflected in an actual flagship 2D Mario game.

Another really pleasant surprise was this game’s world map, which is the best of both worlds – specifically, the best of Mario World and Mario 3D World. Like in the SNES Mario World, you can at various points unlock alternate paths that can prove very rewarding, and take you to some cool and unexpected locations. And like in 3D World, there are various parts of the map that you can freely walk around in and explore. But it all works better than it did in either of those games, because compared to SNES Mario World, there are just so many more meaningful alternate paths to take and unlock, and there are many levels (and even some worlds) that you can tackle in whatever order you choose. And unlike in Mario 3D World, exploring the map is actually *rewarding* in Mario Wonder, to the point of enabling you discover a significant number of secret levels. Additionally, there are sometimes NPCs to interact with on the world map, other, more minor secrets to find and other good stuff. For me, it was just really satisfying to finally see the underlying potential of 3D World’s explorable world map be fully realized in this way.