Topic: Super Mario Bros Wonder

I've 100%'d the game a couple nights back, and gosh... this game is so good. It's right up there with Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World as among the best of the 2D Mario games. (Though World is my favorite of the two.) The Wonder Flower is really cool! I was always interested to see what it'd do next as I was playing through all the levels. It's easily the highlight of the game for me. I like the new power-ups too. They're all useful in their own ways of course, but I think I had the most fun with the drill form. The elephant form is such a goofy power-up (in a good way of course), and the bubble form is also quite cute. I mean, you're literally blowing bubbles... how can I not love that? <3

Overall a fantastic Mario game, I loved every moment of it.

Has anyone noticed that the sensor badge looks identical to the sheikah sensor?

@Martoit honestly I never got around to trying the sensor... it's pretty easy to find everything without it. I wish it did something more interesting in the post-game.

Now that I have done the endboss and most of the levels: It was a fun game, but hugely overrated. I mean, it looks amazing and has lots of fun ideas and lots of new enemies and lots of levels. But the levels are very short and to easy (even most of the 5 star levels). Collectables are very easy to find. Only a few bosses and they are almost all Bowser junior battles (they where better then the Bowser junior battles of the past though). New power-ups where fun enough (I liked bubble more then drill, wich surprised me).

Now if you take the New series: I was never a huge fan, but those had bigger and harder levels and much harder to find collectables. And more secrets.

I see Wonder as "my first platformer" game. Fun, but to easy.

The invisibility section right before the end of The Final-Final Test Badge Marathon makes me want to die.

@Ralizah Yup, I got to it this morning and that last section made me put down the game. I remember shouting at the monitor something like... "Nintendo you [bleep]ing sadists!!!", I legit cannot believe they'd make a section like that at the end after three really hard sections before, with clouds, and invisibility. I've never played a Nintendo game this borderline unfair before.

@TheJGG lol I couldn't bear to put it down. Took me about four hours of trying, but I finally beat the level and 100%'d the game.

I'm usually on an adrenaline high after 100%ing a Mario game, but I just feel sort of drained right now. I want to throw something at the person who designed the last section of this level.

Just be happy they didn’t swap the places of spin jump and spring jump

@Ralizah Proud of you man, I have way too much self respect and restraint to keep putting myself through something like that for more than half an hour. I nearly beat the level after twenty minutes but that last section tipped me over the edge lol.

Oh yeah, and I used Nabbit too. Even though I legit beat every other level before, and even though I used a cheat character I still couldn’t do it.

@TheJGG I know I wouldn't feel right if I didn't keep slamming my head into that particular wall until something broke.

Nabbit is one of the few characters I didn't use. Stuck mostly to Peach, Daisy, Toadette, and Luigi. What makes him a cheat character?

@Ralizah I used to be a rage quitter… I still am but instead of throwing a fit now I just calmly put down the controller… avoid the crippling urge to rip my hair out, and calmly turn off the game. That level’s absolutely awful, I actually beat the Wonder marathon stage second try and I thought that was the hardest level in the game lol. Ah well, one day I’ll find the motivation again but for now… 13 Sentinels more than tickles my gaming fancy

@TheJGG

I despise that power-up; it's basically a troll.When I beat that section after many tries I felt like it was effectively random chance rather than skill. It would have been 'a little' funny if there had been a checkpoint right before it but having to redo those 3 long sections over and over was just evil and not in a fun way. 😑 Honestly, the only level I didn't enjoy even if it was weirdly addictive.

Don't try a Yoshi or most Kirby games if you think this game was too easy. 😝 But, yeah, Mario was always intended to be fun by both 6 year olds and parents.

I would place the difficulty on par with most other 2D Mario games. It's very arguable, but I 100%-ed both smb3 and New Super Mario Bros U recently and I would rank Wonder slightly harder than both, largely because of the last level(s). And definitely harder than Mario World which is one of the easiest in the series. I would rank Wonder easier than the NSMBU DLC, but I'm hoping Wonder eventually gets similar DLC.

Basically, 2D Mario is not where you will find super hard Platformers. I do agree they made the collectables far easier to find — they clearly made a conscious decision to make finding collectables easy but satisfying rather than having to play the level over and over to search random corners. I did like how they made all the Captain Toad locations legitimately hard to find and the desert map had some good hidden things.

Surprisingly, I managed to do that last part of the final level after two or three attempts, upon getting there of course. (I think it was two attempts, actually.) And I got the top of the flagpole, too! So glad I'm done with this level.

Yea, the invisibility part seemed tough at first, but it only took me three tries, maybe?

Overall, I would put Wonder as an easier 2D Mario, but not a "baby's first platformer" like some of you guys are saying lol It was a nice romp, and some of the Special World levels made me lose a few lives, and the last two levels definitely gave me an hour-ish of tries.

I think there were more challenging levels in some of the NSMB games for sure, and I still say most people today would have a heck of a time beating the original Mario Brothers on NES without using save states or using the internet to get every hidden 1-up block along the way.

I also think some of us have been honing our skills in Mario Maker 2 for the last 5 years or whatever, so there was little chance Wonder was going to throw something at us that would feel "super expert"-level platforming tough.

@rallydefault It's honestly kind of hard to compare modern games to smb1 because the difficulty in smb1 is mainly the awkward physics which haven't aged well. The actual level design is not hard levels and the main non-physics difficulty is occasional hammer spam. Playing the exact same levels in e.g. Mario Maker physics is a 20 minute walk in the park even without extra lives.

That said, back when Mario 35 was a thing, I played Mario 35 for like 30 hours and then out of curiosity went back to the original game and it felt sooooo easy without spam constantly falling from the sky. 😝 I think it took me 2 lives because final Bowser killed me once.

As for Wonder, it took me maybe 50-70 tries actually at the invisible part. I feel like it is meant to be near-auto but if you don't happen to play exactly like Nintendo wants you to, it is essentially RNG. Not good level design in my opinion. So on the one hand for me it was the hardest official Nintendo 2D Mario level I've ever played, but on the other hand it was hard for kind of nonsense troll reasons. I'm sticking with almost all the 2D mario games have had similar difficulty even though the exact way that difficulty comes across has varied. But they're never particularly hard regardless.

You compared to mario maker — I feel like Nintendo tries for most levels in mario games to be 'Normal' with the occasional easier expert level thrown in and the even more occasional hard expert in special worlds.

@FishyS Didn’t get a notification, my bad. I did enjoy the actual invisibility badge test since I had a good idea about how to visualise where Mario was, funnily enough. But this one really grinds my gears and yeah, I spent 15 minutes on it! One solution is to spam X so the emoticon icon comes up above your character’s head, but the level’s still hot garbage and surprisingly unfair for it.

That said at first I thought the courses were too easy as well but I realised that I only meant that because I had managed to beat Celeste, one of the hardest platformer games on the market. The special world levels are a great challenge, and most of them were very fun to beat even though I lost a ton of lives. The Piranha Plant one was the one I liked the least though.

@FishyS
I agree and disagree. I have zero issues with the original Mario Bros. physics - even picking it up from time to time today, it feels pretty logical and smooth to me. I think every 2D Mario game is a tad different with the physics, honestly, and takes a couple minutes of adjustment.

The games that I think "challenge" me due to physics alone are actually the 3D Mario games. I was sour on Odyssey for my entire first playthrough because I just couldn't jive with the physics in that game. But I gave it many, many hours of playtime, and eventually I came to understand it and feel my hit detections with the cap and all that, and now I adore it.

I stick by my point that Mario Bros. 1 is a solidly challenging game. Physics may play a part of that, but the enemies and level design do, as well.

@NeonPizza
I do wish there was an unlockable harder difficulty once you 100% the game. The 100% badge is kinda funny for a few minutes and nowhere near the worst completion reward I've seen, but I was kinda surprised at how little content there was in the "end game." Odyssey and 3D World spoiled me when it comes to that, though.

@rallydefault smb-1 physics was fine for its time but hasn't aged nearly as well as the physics in 3 and beyond... one of the reasons 3 is still loved so much to this day. You personally may not find the game hard for physics reasons, but the reason people who have never played the game find it difficult is because they fall in a pit on what would be easy jumps in any other Mario game. That happened even in Mario-35. People would be dodging 98 enemies and then suddenly they would just fall in a pit because they forgot the physics don't allow modern-style Mario jumping. 😝 Or all the newer players who just constantly jumped into pits. I agree the 3D games have their own physics, but the 2D games have all felt pretty similar at least in the basic fundamentals since 3.

15 minutes is many times faster than me so good job. I thought about the emoticon tactic but the fact that in-game you can change some of the buttons but they specifically don't let you change the x button to a trigger button annoyed me.

World was such an easy game, it was actively difficult to game over. 😝 Plus Wonder just lets you buy 99 lives with a few coins...not to mention that you can easily farm 99 lives by jumping on a Koopa shell. Regardless, bringing back the type of mechanics which were originally created to consume quarters or to make very short games feel longer doesn't seem like a great modern approach to difficulty. But I agree a harder difficulty would be fun. I'm hoping for nsmbu deluxe-like DLC with new more difficult modes.

@FishyS
You're pretty much just telling me my opinion about physics is wrong lol so I don't really know how to constructively advance this discussion.

I'm sure I'm far from the only person who doesn't mind the SMB 1 physics at all, maybe even enjoy them.