#i wasn't expecting essentially a rhythm game but it's fun ^^

[violetsareblue-selfships]

good morning! <3

[bainhardt]

They should've called it Super Mario Bros Autoscroll

Mario Wonder was good. I can't really knock it any harder than that, but I feel like it was just "good." Not great, not one of my favorites, nothing beyond "good" feels accurate. And that's not to say there's anything wrong with that, either.

I wouldn't say the gameplay was all too impressive. I like the idea of the badges and they're fun to collect, but as a result it sometimes felt like Mario didn't have as many moves as you'd expect because some of them are locked behind badges one at a time. The parachute one was nice though because it was basically a mini Cape effect from SMW. And the power ups were fun enough. The Bubble one was kinda forgettable, though. Somehow it feels like too few to only have four total, but I think in reality most other games don't have many more than that, so it's fair.

My main complaint is the Wonder seed stuff didn't get as weird as I was expecting it to? For the "weird" game where anything can happen, it didn't feel very weird in the end. Almost too restrained somehow. They had a couple fun ideas and then a lot of it felt recycled after a while. My favorites were when you'd stretch out, and then any of the transformations like the Goomba, the rock ball thing, those couple of times you were a slime. But even those are reminiscent of the transformations in Yoshi's Island (like the helicopter and all).

A lot of stuff in this game felt strangely like it was designed more to be visually striking than actually fun to play in the moment. The Wonder events really drove this home with how many of them ended up being either literal autoscrollers or essentially autoscrollers for some other reason. When you work hard making something look spectacular, you end up wanting to force someone to stop and soak it in. I feel like that was the philosophy for many of them, style over substance. But again, they weren't all like that. It just felt like most, or maybe that's most of the ones I remember.

On the topic of visuals, I enjoyed the style of this game a lot. The art was colorful and plasticky in a way that evoked toys come to life, and the sound effects and music and all were nice too. Very plucky.

My other favorite Mario world-progressing platformers are Super Mario World on SNES and 3D World on the Wii U and I dunno that I'd say this game was more fun than either of those. It didn't have enough challenge, and the stage designs kinda feel repetitive compared to either of those. Champion Road in 3D World took me over 1000 lives to clear my first time, and the finale in Wonder maybe 1/10th of that at most. 3D World had too many mini-boss fights though, which Wonder held back on, thankfully. Not all the bonus stages were really worth anything, though, like the enemy arenas. Total waste of time imo.

I don't know what was with the half-baked rhythm game type stuff in Wonder, either - maybe a full game like that could've been better. Like, why was the final boss a rhythm game thing if that wasn't the whole game? It was pretty fun which is the worst part, because it was only implemented in a couple memorable stages and that was all.

Took a couple days of play to 100%, and maybe the multiplayer would've been more fun, but I think I'm gonna try to bring it back. I don't really see myself wanting to play it in the future, and in fact, it made me "wonder" if I should've just played 3D World again lol.