Super Mario Bros. Wonder Could Be the Next Great 2D Mario Game

Every now and then, you play a game that reminds you more than anything of why and how you fell in love with the form in the first place. For myself and many others, the formative experience of our game-playing youths is more likely than not a Mario game. I can recall playing a number of different installments over the years, but the one that most sticks out to me is Super Mario World. It was wonderful, with weird, enchanting enemies and brilliant new mechanics, like Yoshi, that otherwise upended everything I’d known to be true about the games up to that point. As far as 2D Mario games go, the last real innovation to have spiced things up was when four-player co-op dropped more than a decade ago back on the Nintendo Wii. Super Mario Bros. Wonder might just be the next great step forward that enraptures a new generation of kids, all the while reminding some of us oldheads why we keep coming back to games and this series time and time again. 

I guess you might begin asking how Super Mario Bros. Wonder manages such a feat. Really, it’s in the name of the game. The wonder seeds, a new mechanic that figuratively turns the world upside down (and may even do it literally for all I know), breathes an exciting bit of life into the Mario series’ familiar stable of settings. The fairway, familiar green shrubbery, and mushrooms of 1-1—albeit this time around in the Flower Kingdom—just hit differently when the warp pipes all come to life and start wriggling around like worms. The world going wacky injects a kind of urgency that’s easy to get swept up in because you can’t help but be in awe of the things going on around you. It’s wild to have played these games all your life and have gone from simplistic plateaus to the otherworldly and bizarre rendered in such vivid detail. 

That’s another thing about Wonder: it’s simply gorgeous to look at. The logical endpoint of the 2.5D style, characters in Super Mario Bros. Wonder appear to nearly pop out of the screen thanks to shading and lighting that makes them look far more three-dimensional than they are, as well as animation work that makes the cast feel like real people rather than sprites and avatars. I can’t help but come back to the animation of Mario and Luigi using their caps to parachute, and how the cap brims flutter as they sail through the air. This is animation you can find in plenty of other games—even spin offs like Luigi’s Mansion 3, which might sport some of the best animation I’ve ever seen in a game—but is largely reserved for the 3D installments of the Mario games rather than the 2D ones.

On one hand, there’s design that feels somewhat familiar in Super Mario Bros. Wonder that’s clearly inspired by the biggest thing to happen to 2D Mario of late: the Super Mario Maker games. One level I was able to play had a wonder effect that made a stampede of charging bulls consume the stage, forcing me to ride on their backs and collect what I could without falling off or behind. It was incredibly reminiscent of the kaizo stages that rose to the top of the Mario Maker charts and were impossible to avoid on social media. One might be forgiven for thinking that after years of watching players invent their own rules, subgenres and game types in the framework of 2D Mario, Nintendo finally felt revitalized enough to get back on the saddle and start cooking. On the other hand, this game is taking steps to modernize the series, which has always felt caught in its own bubble and thus a little late, like the badge system and pushing it to new heights. Badges in this game more or less act like modifiers, impacting things such as whether or not you can parachute with your cap or if you can crouch to get an extra high jump. One even lets you wall jump vertically rather than horizontally, which sounds minor but drastically changes how you move through a level when you’ve been conditioned for decades to do things a certain way. Challenges littered throughout the worlds encourage you to equip these badges and use them to the best of your ability, and I can already see this feature inspiring a number of challenge runs we’ll likely be watching in the months and years to come.

A suite of quality-of-life changes to things like griefing in multiplayer (harder to do but not impossible as a Nintendo rep demonstrated by accidentally offing me), as well as the expected additions of fun new power ups like the Drill Hat and Elephant form, only further my guess that we’re looking at the next great 2D Mario game. A new but familiar set of worlds might keep things familiar, but it’s the wonder seeds and badge system that will really dictate whether or not Super Mario Bros. Wonder sticks the landing. It won’t be long now before we see for ourselves—it’s out for the Switch on Oct. 20—but for what it’s worth, I think we’re all about to be reminded once again exactly why Mario has persisted for so long and soared so far above the rest.

Moises Taveras is the assistant games editor for Paste Magazine. He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad about how that turned out.