Super Mario Bros. Wonder | NSW | 20/10/2023 | 13.4 million units sold!

tfsthe wrote:This is my first post so go easy on me.

But I’m loving this game. I don’t have too much time ti play games and quick resume never works on Xbox for me, so I love that you can pick this up and just play a few levels in a break.

It can be frustrating at times but most of the time I’m just thinking about how fun it is

Welcome to the forum and glad you're enjoying the game!

Victor Mildew wrote:Tick means no, secrets left!

tfsthe wrote:This is my first post so go easy on me.

But I’m loving this game. I don’t have too much time ti play games and quick resume never works on Xbox for me, so I love that you can pick this up and just play a few levels in a break.

It can be frustrating at times but most of the time I’m just thinking about how fun it is

It certainly is fun. Most games you can find on the Switch are like that, just down to the ease of its sleep mode.

Welcome to GRcade. Hope you enjoy it here.

Welcome!

Victor Mildew wrote:Tick means no, secrets left!

Victor Mildew wrote:Tick means no, secrets left!

you sound ticked off

Thanks for the warm welcome!

Welcome to the party pal!

I’ve cooled off on this after the early surge in enthusiasm for it. I think it’s a solid 8-8.5 but it just never elevates itself to true best in class levels as far as I’m concerned. It’s nice to have fun ideas and new things peppered throughout but just the core platforming never really excels like the very best platformers out there. I’ve been clearing up the worlds and have blue ticks for everything up to W4 and passing the controller back and forth with a friend has been fun (because let’s face it, coop is just bad). I’ve got the the final stages now and will probably see it through and may even 100% it given how easy it is to do that. But yeh, I just continue not to ‘get’ the pants down praise for 2D Mario.

and finished special world

Not that anyone here needs to know whether it's a recommended buy, but I've now pushed out my review for this.

Tickgate is real!

I have 100%ed this.

It was pretty good!

The Wonder Flower bits were a bit hit or miss for me personally, but some of them were really clever. I especially liked the ones where you became an enemy, like a spiky ball or a slime blob or a Goomba.

the brief joy of doing the badge marathon challenge with all the purple coins was cut short when i didn't hit the top of the flag pole.

EDIT

done it. Almost missed the top of the flagpole again.

The invisibility bit of the badge challenge was so stupid. I can't really complain too much because it's a totally optional post game thing, but I was really enjoying the challenge until that point, and then Nintendo took it too far!

Taking my time with this and just got to my 4th world.

I'm loving every minute of it and surprisingly enough I'm adoring the online stuff. Helping other players is great fun and on more than one occassion I've kept pace with someone who is struggling, giving them that little life-line when they need it so that we both pass the finish together. Warm and fuzzies achieved.

There is so much in here from Mario Maker as well. It's a real tribute to the ideas the community had that have been given that Nintendo charm.

Now give us Mario Maker 3 you cowards!

Captain Kinopio wrote:I’ve cooled off on this after the early surge in enthusiasm for it. I think it’s a solid 8-8.5 but it just never elevates itself to true best in class levels as far as I’m concerned. It’s nice to have fun ideas and new things peppered throughout but just the core platforming never really excels like the very best platformers out there. I’ve been clearing up the worlds and have blue ticks for everything up to W4 and passing the controller back and forth with a friend has been fun (because let’s face it, coop is just bad). I’ve got the the final stages now and will probably see it through and may even 100% it given how easy it is to do that. But yeh, I just continue not to ‘get’ the pants down praise for 2D Mario.

I think I'm more in this camp

For me game is pleasant and breezy. But so far I haven't found the platforming that interesting or engaging (except for the Jump levels and the hard levels) and don't find the Wonder flowers that meaningfully exciting from a gameplay drama (compared with spectacle fun) perspective and haven't been particularly wowed by the music.

I booted up 3D-land again for a whirl and found the music immediately catchier and the gameplay (and aesthetic) more fun. I also re-downloaded Rayman Legends and find it still way more impressive to look at (that foreground parallax!) and listen to, and its gameplay and level design more exciting and surprising despite its age - though admittedly it's a personal all-time fave!.

Very glad this game is such joy for most though! Hoping there's more for me later on.

(Spoilered to not be a killjoy!)

Just finished this 100%. Switch not telling me how many hours (why does it do this lol). Mario Wonder has largely been pretty dull. As others have said, some nice ideas sprinkled few and far between, but they're just that. They're incredibly shallow and barely implemented, leading to monotonously easy gameplay. Much of the platforming/secrets are doing the same thing repeatedly just with a different coat of paint. Generally feels very repetitive in its design. Then it has the gall in like world 5 or 6 to start the level requiring a ground pound, and as soon as you step where you need to do it, the game tells you, as if it wasn't already obvious.

There are actually quite a lot of secret areas/spaces in the game; requiring some thoughtful platforming to reach that are somewhat out of the way. But in every single case, the only reward is pointless coins. In previous Marios, this would often be required to get one of the collectibles of the level, reach a secret exit, or even something like a warp zone. This is something I noticed with 3D World as well and other recent Mario games, but please... Coins are not an incentive. Stop. If you want to reward the player for finding an unconventional secret, give them an actual reward. Having nothing would actually be better; after the first couple of worlds I ironically no longer had any wonder left and no longer tried to go out of my way to find such secrets.

If a level is classed as 4 or 5 star difficulty, you might get something moderately fun with a little bit of challenge. The two 'final' levels of the game are probably the most fun levels, and even then they're nothing extraordinary. The badge challenges and search party levels are generally pretty solid as well. If a level is 3 stars or less, it's almost assuredly not worth playing. In general, levels are short, repetitive, and barely scratch the surface on the new gimmicks they frequently introduce. Even when they revisit some wonder concepts, you just end up doing more of the same shallow things. It is very much a quantity over quality kind of game.

And to be clear, just because a game is easy doesn't mean it's not fun. What makes it unappealing is it's just not interesting. It's more of a spectacle than an engaging game. Many wonder flower segments render you invincible as you just hold forward without much thought. But sometimes the concept pays homage to a classic Mario game so I guess it makes it excusable. In all seriousness though, this game is a case of just being too easy where you can very quickly jump and skip through 80% of a level without any kind of obstacle to stop you. And this is without the even easier Yoshi/Nabbit mode. The elephant power is probably the best and most fun in the game, aside from the classic fire flower. The bubble power is the most interesting but doesn't make full use of it. And the drill power makes it even easier to skip parts of the game, and when used as implemented, is just really boring. Hold right to access a collectible? Now you have to press down first! Woah!

All in all, it's not a horrible experience, just not a particularly interesting one. And for a game like Mario Wonder that was advertised as being full of whacky and crazy gameplay elements, the gameplay unfortunately does not match the visual enthusiasm on screen.

P.S. strawberry float the life of a goomba level. Playing as a goomba is incredibly sluggish and this contrast to usual gameplay is probably exactly what they're going for, and it's a well implemented gimmick. Thankfully it's only used in 2 levels because it has absolutely no replayability given it's painfully slow controls. But the life of a goomba level ends with a jump that seems very RNG, based on the bubbles and how they float up. Multiple times I would try to jump on one bubble and end up popping the one below AS WELL, leading to my death. This wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to go through the entire slog of the level again just to have another go. And with goomba's limited movement you just have to jump and pray the bubbles align just right for you, where you pop one after the other rather than two at the same time.

Well only got two purple coins left. Think I might leave it at that

Just entered world 3, the empty plaza one was a bit tedious, a lot of jumping around to hit the invisible blocks.

Yeah, I’m not a fan of the hidden block levels, they aren’t much fun tbh.

I’m on World 4 now but not played for a few days, I’m still enjoying it a ton though.