Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

YMMV / Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Go To

  • Alternative Character Interpretation: An extremely common interpretation among cynical adult gamers and streamers is that the various Poplins who ask for purple coins to "energize" themselves and destroy obstacles or create shortcuts in the overworld are lazy scam artists demanding bribes from the player with transparent cover stories.
  • Alternative Joke Interpretation: One promo short has Bowser trying to woo Peach with a flower, only for her to transform into Elephant Peach when an Elephant Fruit passes by. Bowser immediately swaps the flower with a bouquet. Is this because Bowser loves Peach no matter what shape she is, or is he more of a Chubby Chaser?
  • Anti-Climax Boss: With the exception of the final showdown with Bowser, the boss battles are regarded as a weak point of the game.
    • All the battles with Bowser Jr. are repetitive, for he is the only other character fought and only appears as the boss of four worlds through the entire game and largely has the same strategy each time, just twisted up a little with some different kind of Wonder Effect.
    • Each of the Airship levels ends with a pseudo boss battle against the factory production line itself: a very menacing-looking Bowser head that spits out obstacles down a conveyor belt. It has a very simple and linear way to defeat it: simply jumping over it and hitting the Big Red Button, once. Like with Jr., each of its appearances involves a different obstacle to slightly spice things up, but each obstacle is too simple to really change how the fight plays. Even worse, the production line fights are greatly overshadowed by the Wonder Effect of the airships, where Castle Bowser tries to kill you himself with his cannons.
  • Awesome Art: The game's art style is gorgeous, giving it a painterly direction while also giving Mario and his allies numerous expressions and tics that make them stand out.
  • Awesome Bosses: Bowser once again never fails to disappoint, this time delivering an epic Final Boss that serves as a culmination of the game's musical theming. You have to time your jumps in sync with the badass music track to land hits, while also dodging a barrage of fiery attacks and smashes from the Koopa King, with each phase escalating until you finally scale the arena and finish him off. After a series of lackluster battles against Bowser Jr., many players were delighted by just how much fun Bowser was able to bring to the table.
  • Awesome Levels:
  • Breather Level:
    • Deliberately Invoked with courses labeled "Break Time!", which are incredibly short courses that can be completed in mere seconds, typically with no way to lose a life either, giving the player an easy-to-obtain Wonder Seed.
    • World 3, Shining Falls, is comprised of only six main levels, with the rest being mini-stages. There is no palace or boss, the least amount of Wonder Seeds in any of the main worlds, and the secret exit to the Special World is unlocked simply by talking to an NPC. The entire latter half of the game opens up on its completion, so that may be why.
  • Cheese Strategy:
    • When playing online, dying will turn your character into a ghost that can freely move through the air. This can be used to skip sections of levels should another player or a conveniently placed standee be close by.
    • From the moment it was revealed, fans suspected that the Bubble Flower power-up could be used to cheese levels, and they turned out to be correct — while it does require practice to get the timing down, the fact that the bubbles you blow can be used as temporary platforms with almost no cooldown makes it entirely possible to skip over massive portions of many of the game's levels. It also can deal with many enemy encounters through walls, so you will not be in danger.
    • The Parachute Cap and Grappling Vine badges can be used to infinitely scale walls by wall jumping up them, allowing one to reach areas they're not supposed to reach or skip platforming segments if there happens to be a wall nearby. The latter even appears to be intentional, as the Grappling Vine section of "The Final-Final Test Badge Marathon" requires you do this at the end.
    • Using the emotes can let you see where your character is while they're equipped with the Invisibility badge. This makes the Badge Challenge levels using this badge much easier, especially the final section of "The Final-Final Test Badge Marathon".
  • Difficulty Spike: World 2 contains several levels that are a step up in difficulty:
    • Jump! Jump! Jump! requires perfect precision platforming for about a full minute relatively early in the game, and most methods for reducing difficulty such as rescuing ghosts or using an invincible character don't work at all.
    • There's also the devilish Badge Challenge Wall-Climb Jump II, which is a long vertical level almost entirely comprised of single block-wide platforms and the risk of falling all the way back to the start. Towards the end is a very unusual setup with rotating platforms, which must be pre-emptively wall-jumped off of while vertical in order to be caught by the flat side as they turn around.
    • The most infamous of these is Fluff-Fluff Peaks Special: Climb to the Beat. The platforming is now more precise and after getting the Wonder Flower, poison starts rising. One wrong move and the poison will instantly kill your character, forcing you to start from the beginning.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • The Talking Flowers are widely popular for giving often nonsensically silly commentary and being the butt of much of the game's slapstick. It helps that their dialogue doesn't disrupt gameplay, and the audio can be turned off in the settings if the player wishes. Most choose not to, though.
    • Babooms, a firework-like variant of Bob-ombs, became really popular despite only appearing in very few levels, thanks to their cute design and their unique mechanic that allows them to disassemble and launch fireworks upon being hit.
  • Evil Is Cool: Bowser once more fails to disappoint, with his new plan being the insanely awesome concept of him becoming Florian's castle. Reaches its peak in the final boss fight where he schemes to have the whole universe jam out to his (admittedly awesome) musical beats with this now being the fourth time he's planned to take over the universe.
  • Fanfic Fuel: As shown in the trailers, the Wonder Flowers can do anything, meaning that the possibilities for fan works based around it are nigh-endless.
  • Fan Nickname:
    • The game's title as a whole often gets shortened to "Mario Wonder" (most commonly) or Super Mario Wonder (less commonly), like how people shorten previous games' titles.
    • Due to the flower motifs and surreal imagery, it's not uncommon for people to call the game Super Mario Acid Trip. Others with a sense of the series' history have referred to it as Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy: The Game.
    • German Mario fans have taken to calling Elephant Mario "Benjamin Blümchen" due to looking similar to said children's audiobook character.
    • Some fans have been calling Prince Florian Kibidango/Haru, as he greatly resembles him design-wise and is also the prince of the Flower Kingdom.
    • The final world lacks a proper name in-game, being considered part of Petal Isles, but fans like to call it Factory due to Castle Bowser's domain being akin to that setting.
    • Fans often call Wonder Bowser Jr. Dark Bowser Jr. due to their extremely similar designs.
  • Fountain of Memes: The reveal of Elephant Mario inspired a cornucopia of jokes, memes, and fanart.
  • Fridge Brilliance:
    • A Talking Flower lets off a frantic Rapid-Fire "No!" when Mario hits a switch that darkens the level. Flowers thrive in sunlight, so of course they'd be scared of the dark.
    • Why is Yoshi invincible except for bottomless pits and lava? Because in Super Mario games where he is a Power-Up Mount, he's completely immune to damage when nobody is riding him, and in the Yoshi's Island series, he didn't die unless he fell down a pit or touched lethal obstacles such as spikes. Yoshi getting hurt only ever ejected his rider off his back.
    • In the airship levels, the Wonder Effect is the face of the airship appearing and attacking, instead of something random. Since these airships are summoned by Kamek, Kamek probably told Bowser that the heroes would be in the airship, and since Bowser has Wonder Power, he must have hijacked the Wonder Flower in an attempt to destroy Mario.
    • Being female, Peach and Daisy's Elephant forms and Wonder transformations give them more feminine features to distinguish them from the boys. Toadette's transformations lacking the feminine features despite her being a girl may seem a bit odd until you remember that the Toads weren't initially designed with gender in mind.
    • The Elephant Fruit being an apple seems like a weird choice, but it's likely a pun on a real-life fruit called the Elephant Apple.
  • Friendly Fandoms:
    • Despite the usual rivalry stemming between both fanbases and franchises, Mario and Sonic fans are both equally supportive of this game and Sonic Superstars, both of which were released within three days of each other. Both games are looking to be a very nice return to form after past controversial 2D game entries (New Super Mario Bros. 2 and Sonic the Hedgehog 4 respectively) with very beautiful and expressive animation and art-styles while also having completely new and unique looking environments and areas and multiple different playable characters (with Amy and Daisy being the biggest surprises). Plenty of crossover art celebrating both games were made within hours of the game's reveal.
    • Fans have noted that the game's release date of October 20, 2023 coincides with the release of Marvel's Spider-Man 2, which led to them affectionately imagining crossovers between the two, similar to the situation between Doom Eternal and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Bonus points, one of the badge power-ups for Wonder is a grapple vine, similar to Spider-Man's web slinging.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • The Drill Mushroom stands out for its hat being lethal to almost every enemy in the game, while drilling into the ground lets you avoid hazards (including bosses) and travel along ceilings. However, it is unavailable until after World 3.
    • Badges in general are Purposely Overpowered and make the game much easier.
      • The Parachute Cap badge. Unlike past gliding power-ups, it carries your momentum, so it can be used to cross almost any gap and easily slick through an entire level. But the real kicker is that you can alternately wall-jump and glide back into the wall to scale it, hilariously invalidating the Wall-Climb Jump badge. You get it after World 1-3, by the way.
      • The Boosting Spin Jump badge. This badge effectively gives you a double jump, not only trivializing numerous platforming challenges (vertical and horizontal), but 10-flower coins that are either above bottomless pits or just out of reach with a normal jump become much easier to get.
      • The Timed High Jump badge is essentially the Triple Jump from the New Super Mario Bros. series, except that it can be performed from a standstill and is much easier to time. It also goes about just as high as the Crouching High Jump badge, making it feel redundant by comparison.
      • The Dolphin Kick Badge makes every water level much easier, especially the Wiggler Race, so it's useful in Petal Isles.
  • Genius Bonus: The talking flowers dotting the levels as NPCs appear to specifically be a kind of Brugmansia and Datura, both members of a family of flowers known as Nightshades that is known to cause hallucinatory effectsnote  — tying into the game's whimsical, "trippy", and mildly Alice in Wonderland-inspired art direction.
  • I Knew It!: Upon the game's reveal in the June 2023 Direct, viewers noted that Mario sounded slightly different in the trailer than in previous titles, which led to speculation that Mario is voiced by someone other than Charles Martinet, who previously made public statements implying that his age was making it increasingly difficult to maintain the character's voice. On August 21, Nintendo announced that Martinet was retiring as the voice of the hero for the games and confirmed later that day he won't be voicing Mario and Luigi in this game.
  • It's Easy, So It Sucks!: The game's bosses (besides the Final Boss) have caught a lot of flak for this, as all four of them are all near-identical brawls against Bowser Jr. that can be beaten in four hits at most. Worse, his moveset is largely the same as it was in New Super Mario Bros., where he was merely a Tower mini-boss compared to said game's varied Castle bosses.
  • Just Here for Godzilla:
    • Many fans saw their interest immediately spike when it was shown that Daisy would be playable in a full-fledged 2D Mario game for the first time. And with Peach also returning as a playable character (for the first time in a mainline 2D game since Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Run), many fans are excited to be able to have the Princesses finally adventure together for the first time.
    • In a similar vein, the addition of Daisy left Luigi/Daisy shippers excited to be able to have the two playable together on an adventure for the first time ever.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Bowser once again aspires for universal domination. Merging himself with a Royal Seed and Prince Florian's castle, he sets up a barrier to ward off anyone from stopping him as he absorbs more Wonder energy, having Bowser Jr. and Kamek distract Mario and friends from getting the Royal Seeds necessary for destroying his barrier. Having finished charging his energy by the time they accomplish this, he throws them into multiple gauntlets made by him before revealing his grand plan to hypnotize the universe with his Wonder-powered music. Treating the final confrontation like a rock concert while nonetheless fighting to the end, Bowser comes a hair's breadth from turning everyone in the universe into his "captive audience".
  • Memetic Mutation: Now has its own page!
  • Memetic Psychopath:
    • A particular Talking Flower shown in the August Direct is shown to wonder what Goombas taste like. With the reveal that there's a wonder effect that turns heroes into Goombas, this has spawned plenty of fanart depicting a Talking Flower ominously staring at a terrified Goomba Mario whilst questioning what he tastes like. Became Hilarious in Hindsight upon the game's release; if you pass by it while a Goomba, it'll question what you taste like, though after getting the Wonder Seed, it'll state it hopes the Goomba made it. In fact, the Talking Flowers' status as a Memetic Psychopath only intensified further once players discovered even more quotes throughout the game that involve tasting things and other similarly bizarre statements. Fans would latch on to these to make out the Talking Flowers as depraved Nightmare Fetishists with a touch of Ax-Crazy.
    • Many fans compared Prince Florian to Kibidango/Prince Haru from The Great Mission to Save Princess Peach! anime film, leading to a ton of fan speculation (jokingly or otherwise) leading up to the game's release that Prince Florian would be secretly the real villain in some way. It didn't help when Kirby fans jumped in due to a history in their franchise of cute characters being introduced only to turn out to be Bitches in Sheep's Clothing. Once the game was out, Prince Florian was shown to be just as sweet as he appeared to be, and also not Prince Haru, and reception of him warmed up.
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • The "Wowie zowie!" that the characters let out when they turn into their elephant forms is always a delight to hear.
    • The sound of picking up a Wonder Flower, along with the accompanying voice that shouts "WONDEEEER!", which signifies that something awesome is about to happen.
  • Older Than They Think:
    • Many fans began comparing the game to an acid trip, but these references actually go back to the first game in the series. The mushrooms are based on the ones from Alice in Wonderland, after all.
    • This isn't the first time Daisy and Yoshi have been playable in a mainline 2D Mario game, because they already appeared in this capacity in Super Mario Run, with Daisy being added in its September 2017 update six years prior. If counting 3D Mario games as well, Yoshi was also playable in the remake Super Mario 64 DS.
    • While the concept of grabbing an item that turns the level into a trippier version of itself is a major focus of Wonder, something akin to that had been done in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island when touching Fuzzies. The parody series Normal Super Mario Bros., while not something sanctioned by Nintendo, similarly took this idea and ran with it.
    • This is not the first game to have Yoshi ride another Yoshi. Yoshi's Crafted World also allows Yoshi to ride another Yoshi in multiplayer.
    • The ability the Bubble Flower powerup grants technically isn't new. Bubbles that trap enemies and can be bounced on originated in New Super Mario Bros. U, where the player could carry Bubble Baby Yoshis that could blow bubbles to perform the act.
    • The gameplay mechanic of turning the entire level upside down seen in some Wonder effects isn't new to this game, that first appeared in New Super Mario Bros. on the final castle level of the game.
    • Yoshi carrying someone far bigger than he is (Elephant Mario in this case) isn't exactly new. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door had a freshly hatched baby Yoshi carrying Mario on his back despite Mario clearly being too large for him.
    • Singing Piranha Plants actually originated decades before Wonder, in a Japanese commercial for Super Mario RPG.
    • Grabbing an Elephant powerup isn't the first time Luigi has said "Wowie Zowie!", as he said the exact phrase upon seeing the (fake) Last Resort Hotel in Luigi's Mansion 3.
    • Those segments where a character turns into a slime ball (Wubba) that can stick to walls and ceilings? Already done decades earlier in Smart Ball.
    • Bowser using music to take over the world? He tried it before in an episode of The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 where he used a magic music box to make everyone dance.
  • Popular with Furries: Elephant Mario was instantly beloved by the furry fandom thanks to him being an anthropomorphic elephant rather than an elephant-themed costume like the Frog, Tanooki, and Cat suits. Predictably, he would very soon be subjected to furry fanart with even the other playable characters following suit by being designed in similar ways as Elephant Mario. And to no one's shock, Bowser's in on the elephant fun as well. This popularity expanded to the elephant forms of the other playable characters after they were revealed in the direct. Almost as if a nod to this popularity, a promotional short has Bowser try to woo Peach, only for her to use an Elephant Fruit. Bowser then replaces the single flower with an entire bouquet.
  • Quirky Work: The June 2023 and August 2023 trailers prove that the game is going to have a surreal atmosphere, and by picking up a unique flower, the whole area becomes even weirder, with psychedelic imagery that wouldn't look too out of place from a drug trip, including a warp pipe inching along like a caterpillar, rollerblading mooks, and Mario turning into an elephant and a giant spiky ball.
  • Questionable Casting: With Kevin Afghani's debut as Mario and Luigi, it can feel off after the three decades with Charles Martinet's voice, so that might be expected from some people. While he was received mostly positively overall and his take on Luigi was praised, his Mario received a more mixed response by fans for some hit-and-miss lines and a few times here and there where his voice cracks, like in the March 2024 Nintendo Direct, which led some to say that Mario sounds like he's going through reverse puberty. Of course, he just became Martinet's successor and he didn't have much experience in voice acting before that, so his Mario voice is still in its early stages.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: Getting all three 10-flower coins in one run of Fluff Puff Peaks Special: Climb to the Beat. As this is already considered one of, if not the hardest levels in the entire game, you'll need nigh-perfect timing on your turns and jumps to pull this off, as each 10-flower coin is placed in a way that forces you to lose your momentum to collect them. You can keep your speed intact on the first coin by wall jumping off of the one-block thick platform, but you'll have to collect the second and third coins the normal way, and the third coin comes right before the level drastically speeds up.
  • Shocking Moments: The Wonder Flower is all about surprises — and yet, few could've expected that the Metal Mario powerup would make a return as a Wonder Effect in the High-Voltage Gauntlet level, complete with a remix of its theme from Super Mario 64 and the ability to electrify yourself to magnetise coins. A powerup giving you another powerup not otherwise in the game sure is surprising!
  • Signature Scene: "Piranha Plants on Parade" became an instant fan-favorite thanks to its charm, catchy song and surprise Call-Back to the Japanese commercial for Super Mario RPG. Nintendo themselves must have been particularly proud of this level, as not only was it omitted from the demo to serve as a surprise, but the penultimate Special World level is a much harder take on the same concept titled "The Semifinal Test Piranha Plant Reprise".
  • Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • Tainted by the Preview: The August Direct revealing that the game would not have traditional online play (instead having a "Live Player Shadows" system) wasn't well received by the fanbase, due to Super Mario Maker 2 and the Switch port of Super Mario 3D World, released prior to this this game, supporting traditional online play (even if their use of delay-based netcode, which was responsible for online freezes/lag, wasn't particularly well received itself). Fortunately, the release of the game proved that, while not as much as the aforementioned games, the game's online play system still offers plenty of room to interact with others and is rather fun in its own right. The way it's implemented also helped it completely avoid the previously mentioned pitfall of online lag/freezes due to the use of delay-based netcode.
  • That One Level:
    • Fluff-Puff Peaks Special: Climb to the Beat is surprisingly difficult even among the Special World levels, as it requires a few quick and precise wall jumps near the end of the level. If you jump too slowly or too low, you'll be unable to reach the next wall in time. For the whole level in general, you'll have to perfectly time your jumps and keep up with the level's steadily increasing speed — adjusting time as you progress — in order to avoid losing a life and starting over.
    • The Final-Final Test Badge Marathon is widely considered one of the hardest levels in a Mario game by far. Consisting of a gauntlet of ten badge challenges one after another they will test your patience as much as your reflexes. Each section will force you to use a different badge to complete it, most of them require precision jumping and split-second decision making under time constraints and each one is hard enough that will take multiple sessions of trial and error to solve. And once you solve one good luck shaking the muscle memory for the next one, which will immediately require a different set of skills. Worst, you have only three checkpoints, so if you lose a life you'll have to redo all the previous challenges between the last checkpoint and the current section. To add insult to injury, the last challenge (and the one that has the flagpole to end the level) requires the invisibility badge, aka, the hardest one to hit the top of the flagpole with. Don't even think about starting this level with less that 99 lives.
  • That One Puzzle: Search Party: Puzzling Park's second Wonder Token is incredibly cryptic. To find this token, you'll need to go to the lower floor, push the leftmost pipe to the right by around seven spaces, and hit an invisible Yellow Toad character block. There is no indication that you can push any of the pipes in this stage, so players may not realize that they need to do this to reach the hidden block (assuming they can figure out one is there to begin with). Given that this is the first Search Party level in the game, it's hard not to imagine that the difficulty is meant to be incentive for engaging with the online multiplayer, as each Search Party level starts with a recommendation that they be done with local/online multiplayer if the player is having trouble.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The recasting of Daisy has been met with some backlash, but not mainly about Giselle Fernandez (who has been praised for being near-indistinguishable from Daisy's previous voice) replacing Deanna Mustard. Rather, it's the timing of the recast and Nintendo's handling of it. For the former, the recast happening the same time Daisy finally gets to be playable in a mainline console game can feel rather disappointing to some fans who were looking forward to hearing a new performance of Mustard's voice alongside the game. For the latter, while it's not known whether Mustard chose to retire, Nintendo gave no such advance notice about the recast, unlike the announcement of Charles Martinet's retirement from the series in advance of Wonder's release. While this isn't the first time Nintendo has recast certain characters between installments, fans felt the silently sudden recast was unfair to Mustard, as she had voiced Daisy since 2003note  and helped shape Daisy's personality the same way Martinet did for his roles. This has left some fans feeling conflicted, saying that at the very least, Mustard should have been given some kind of send-off (assuming the recast was Nintendo's decision and not hers).
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • Master Poplin in World 3, Shining Falls tasks Mario and his friends with completing his trials to test them. With this in mind, and the fact that Bowser Jr. isn't present in this world, one would expect him to be the boss as the final trial. But he doesn't show off any of his skills beyond poofing away and just gives the player the Royal Seed upon entering his mansion.
    • King Boo is a stage hazard specific to Wonder effects and not a boss. This is especially disappointing considering Bowser Jr. is the only boss in the game besides Bowser himself.
    • Kamek's only role in this game is summoning Battleships. He doesn't get a boss fight nor any lines of dialogue.
    • In terms of playable characters, many have questioned why Rosalina wasn't playable for this entry, as she had previously been playable in the main series in Super Mario 3D World.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Wonder Flower can do anything, so the possibilities for bosses are endless. And yet, every boss aside from Bowser himself is Bowser Jr. in his new Wonder Bowser Jr. form, only varying in Wonder effects. It would've been interesting to see other iconic bosses throughout the Mario series similar to the original New Super Mario Bros., how they'd be affected by Wonder energy, or at least see Bowser Jr. and/or the playable characters take on different transformations during the battles like in Wonder effects on normal levels. But instead, these battles don't play much differently from the Koopaling/Boom-Boom bosses in the New Super Mario Bros. series and prior games, though at least the ability to stunlock him after jumping on him has been removed. He (or any other boss) also could have been fought more times given that, despite being the only other boss in the game he is only fought four times throughout the entire game and airship levels lack a proper boss, unlike in previous games.
  • This Is Your Premise on Drugs: Many were quick to equate Wonder as being a Super Mario Bros. game if it were made while taking LSD, owing to how it not only has plenty of psychedelic visuals of its own, but also has Shout-Outs to other works known for having trippy visuals, including the title and talking flowers being indicative of Alice in Wonderland, and the level "Piranha Plants on Parade" directly referencing Dumbo (along with Mario actually transforming into an elephant).
  • Underused Game Mechanic:
    • The Dolphin Kick badge makes underwater movement a breeze, but there are only two dedicated water levels in the entire game (besides its own badge challenges) and very few pools, making this a near literal case of This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman.
    • Yoshi's spit mechanic has a number of unique effects, such as spitting Hammer Bro hammers in an arc, a three-way projectile spread when licking up burning or bony enemies, or a rapid-fire Bullet Seed from Melon Piranha Plants. This idea could be spun off into its own dedicated game, but the feature is generally treated as an afterthought; most enemies can't be spit or behave identically to being thrown, and the enemies that do have a spit effect aren't placed in ways that encourage making good use of the mechanic. The seed spit effect in particular — which is a cool Yoshi's Island reference — can only be used in exactly two levels and one KO Arena room, since those are the only places where Melon Piranha Plants show up.
  • Unexpected Character:
    • Very few were expecting Princess Daisy to be in the game, let alone playable, given that she's mostly been relegated to spin-offs following her debut, with her only other mainline appearance being Super Mario Run.
    • Even less were expecting Yoshi to be playable, as he's always been treated solely as a power-up outside of his own spin-off series, Super Mario 64 DS, and Super Mario Run.
    • Fans were not expecting the Wonder direct to reveal Toadette and Nabbitnote  as playable characters, since they weren't featured in the initial reveal trailer or on the game's key artwork.
    • While not confirmed to be playable, one shot in the Wonder direct shows that Captain Toad is an NPC in the game, which took many fans by surprise since he hadn't been featured in the 2D entriesnote  up until this game.
    • In terms of enemies, most of the returning ones are series mainstays, so it is a bit of a surprise to see Hothead from Super Mario World and Nipper Plant from Super Mario Bros. 3, both of which had been absent for over 20 years (counting ports and/or remakes of said games) outside of the Super Smash Bros. and Yoshi's Island series, as well as Super Princess Peach.
    • Aside from Daisy, there didn't really seem to be a lot of returning main characters that hadn't appeared before in 2D Mario titles, which makes it all the more surprising that when you collect the Wonder Flower in Light-Switch Mansion, you get the familiar laugh, followed by the appearance of none other than King Boo, in his first mainline 2D appearance!
  • Win Back the Crowd: Super Mario Bros. Wonder is considered an excellent return to form after past controversial entries in spite of any of its flaws. After many fans felt that the prior console 2D games, New Super Mario Bros. 2 and New Super Mario Bros. U, reused too many ideas from previous games and introduced too few new ones, not changing the core gameplay and aesthetics from New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Wonder introduces a plethora of new creative ideas with its Wonder Effects, vastly expands the gameplay with its Badges, has diverse Video Game Settings, features an entirely new artstyle and soundtrack besides intentional callbacks, excellent level design, and a diverse playable character roster.
  • Woolseyism: The Talking Flower dialogue in the English translation is generally well-received, with many glad that they're funnier than was expected. For one specific example, there's one Talking Flower from "Wavy Ride through the Magma Tube". Only appearing if you hit a Roulette Block cycling between it and the Wonder Flower, it just yells "WONDEEEEER!!" in the Japanese version. This would have come across as having a bit of an unclear punchline if translated literally; in the English version, they instead say "Look at me! I'm the Wonder Flower!", where the joke is a lot more obvious.

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top