Super Mario Bros. Wonder Does What the New Super Mario Bros. Series Never Could

There has never been a truly great New Super Mario Bros. game. That’s not to say that they haven’t been worth playing, or that they brought nothing to the table. New Super Mario Bros. Wii is a blast when you’ve got three pals to sow chaos with, and that idea was genuinely new for Mario at the time of release. For how uninspiring review scores were for New Super Mario Bros. 2, the concept of collecting as many coins as possible, and designing both the levels and new items around that concept, at least made for a fascinating and wildly different feeling side-scrolling Mario game. New Super Mario Bros. U was too often a hollow-feeling chore to play by yourself, but New Super Luigi U, its DLC that was then included in the Switch’s Deluxe release of the game, was genuinely special thanks to its focus on strict 100-second time limits without checkpoints that forced you to balance speed and exploration. New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS is one of many videogames available for that system. See? They all have something to offer.

The reason that New Super Mario Bros. Wii worked as well as it did was that, in essence, it was a 2D Mario’s Greatest Hits collection that added some new wrinkles and the multiplayer, and let you and your nostalgia run wild in well-designed stages. Besides the multiplayer, it wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, however—it’s not like it was the first side-scrolling platformer that supported four players, nor even the first Nintendo one to do so—and none of the other New Super Mario Bros. titles did much in that realm, either. They were designed to invoke a specific feeling in players, and that feeling was, “Hey, remember 2D Mario?” They served a purpose and mostly served it well, but that purpose lacked the ambition it needed to be special, and the kinds of creations made by players in the two Super Mario Maker games only further emphasized this issue, as well as the soullessness of the New Super Mario Bros. art style in comparison to Mario’s sprite-based past. 

There are many differences between the New Super Mario Bros. game and 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Wonder, but the greatest of them is this: whereas the former titles were obsessed with reminding you of the games played in your youth, Wonder aimed to recreate the feelings those games elicited from you. The awe, the newness, the—I’m so sorry for this—wonder. “Remember when you got to do that cool thing in Super Mario Bros. 3?” does not carry nearly the joy or ceiling of “Remember how Super Mario Bros. 3 made you feel when it surprised and delighted you again and again?” And it’s about time that Nintendo recognized that one is a vastly superior goal to achieve than the other. 

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a delight. It’s one of the best Switch games released in 2023, and one of the best on a system already jam-packed with greatness. And it managed this by learning a few key lessons that moved it all beyond the errors of New Super Mario Bros., with clear influence from the imagination on display in Super Mario Maker levels, as well as more contemporary and original platformers like Celeste. Super Mario Bros. Wonder isn’t merely Mario: Now With Celeste Wall Jumps, though. That use of Wonder in the title has a purpose, and it’s the Wonder Flowers you find in each of the game’s standard stages. They’ll completely change how you’re playing not just a level, but sometimes also the ideas about how you’re supposed to play Mario at all. They’re reminiscent, to a degree, to how the powers worked in games like Wario Land 3: temporary shifts in how you can achieve a goal, new controls and abilities and maneuvers to consider and deploy, and all in the service of keeping everything feeling fresh and cycling contexts. Combining elements of modern classics with the spirit of both Nintendo’s greatest 2D side-scrolling Mario and the company’s best-ever 2D platformer? Mamma mia. 

For the first time in literal decades, a side-scrolling Mario game is full of genuine surprises that makes it difficult to put down. The New Super Mario Bros. games never felt like that: even when they were good, they too often felt like a slog that went on, that were as long as they were because that’s how many levels Mario games used to have, not because that’s how many good ideas existed for the present-day Mario games. It’s not that Nintendo was bereft of high-quality Mario games in those aforementioned decades: in the years since Super Mario World, the last traditional 2D side-scrolling Mario released before New Super Mario Bros., there was Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, and Super Mario 64, and Super Mario Sunshine. And after the introduction of the NSBM games came Super Mario Galaxy, and Galaxy 2, Super Mario 3D Land and 3D World, as well as Super Mario Odyssey. Both Super Mario Maker games, too, if you want to toss those on the pile. Nintendo hadn’t forgotten how to make a killer Mario game by any means, so much as the intention never seemed to be to push their best ideas for a Mario game into the side-scrolling space anymore. Everything—from the best abilities to the best music and art and level design—was reserved for the 3D space.

Here, though, the animation and sound are excellent, the enemies adorable and enjoyable to watch. Super Mario Bros. Wonder actually looks just alright in screenshots and stills, but in motion, it’s surprisingly gorgeous, with both the art design and the look of it all wowing in a way that the NSMB games did not. It all looks and feels so new and so full of an infectious energy that compels you to seek out the next secret, the next surprise, the next moment of wonder, and the introduction of the new items—the elephant, the bubble flower, and the drill—and their incorporation into the level design was a treat. None of them are quite on the level of Cat Mario, no, but what is? They at least managed to rise to the level of joy and utility that 3D Mario’s inventive items have, and that’s more than you can say about its post-Mario World 2D cousins.

And maybe most important of all is that Wonder doesn’t play like it’s begging you to make some friends and play with them in order to enjoy yourself. If you want to play with your family, it’s great for that, especially with damage-impervious characters designed specifically for the less experienced or younger players in the mix. The excising of a level timer works splendidly as well, both for that and for those who just want to look around to see what they’re missing. If you want to play online, you can find the chaos you crave from the days of putting four people on a couch and playing Mario that way, and if you’ve got three real-life friends to actually do that with, even better. But if you want to play solo? Wonder still feels special, instead of like it was designed for anything but the way you want to play it. I’ve been playing with my kids in their saves if they ask me to, and went through the entire game solo whenever I got the itch, and the experiences were excellent in different ways.

Now, if you put me on the spot, Wonder is not as good as Super Mario 3D World, which blended the side-scrolling sensibilities and level design with those of Mario’s more 3D-specific adventures to create something as good as basically anything in that catalog from either perspective. And the lack of a true postgame full of challenging levels that push its design elements even further for the true Mario sickos is a disappointment, as existed in games like 3D World and Galaxy 2—just having a few optional, more difficult levels to unlock is basically the only real holdover from New Super Mario Bros. here, and it wasn’t a great choice for those games, either. Those are nits being picked, though. What is included within Super Mario Bros. Wonder is stuffed full of joy, surprise, and a focus on creating entirely new experiences and memories rather than attempting to recreate or recall old ones. It feels nothing like the Mario games that came before, and yet is so clearly a Mario game: that’s the kind of treatment that 3D Mario games have been getting for decades, so it’s about time that the 2D titles started being developed with the same goal in mind.

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.