Super Mario Bros. Wonder has a wacky design compared to your average Mario game, and while the new Elephant power-up has been welcomed with open arms by fans, Mario's creator wasn't quite as convinced when he first saw it.
As part of the latest press rounds promoting this upcoming Switch exclusive, the game's director Shiro Mouri mentioned how there was an earlier phase during development where Shigeru Miyamoto questioned the look of Elephant Mario, but it was mostly because the design hadn't been finalised.
Mouri explained how Miyamoto sort of just showed up ahead of schedule and unfortunately, the first impressions didn't go down so well. In saying this, Miyamoto did offer some helpful feedback about the movement of the elephant. Here's how this moment apparently played out:
Shiro Mouri: “It was a phase where we still had tentative visuals for Elephant Mario, and we had plans to adjust the visuals already, but he [Miyamoto] had come and taken a look before that and he gave us the sharp comment that ‘This doesn’t look like a Mario character.’ Along the same topics, there was the idea of how Elephant Mario sprays water, he came and said that if an elephant was actually spraying water, it wouldn’t move that way, and that was an example of feedback he gave us.”
Fortunately, this was ahead of the completion of the new power-up, and the rest is history. Mario isn't the only one who can transform into an elephant in Super Mario Bros. Wonder and to top it off, the elephant version of any character can also ride Yoshi! You can learn more in our latest feature: