Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a side-scrolling platform game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch, released worldwide on October 20, 2023.²¹¹³ Announced during the June 2023 Nintendo Direct, it is the twenty-seventh installment in the Super Mario series and the first entirely new full-fledged 2D Super Mario game in almost 11 years, following New Super Mario Bros. U in 2012.²¹³ Its central novelty is the Wonder Flower, an item that, when collected, transforms a course and its gameplay in unpredictable ways.³ Nintendo billed it as “the next evolution of 2D side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. games,” a description echoed across its marketing.³⁸

The game is set in the Flower Kingdom, a land near the Mushroom Kingdom where Mario and his companions are invited by Prince Florian for a diplomatic ceremony.¹⁴¹⁵ Bowser interrupts the gathering, seizes one of the kingdom’s Wonder Flowers, and merges himself with Prince Florian’s castle, becoming a living, spiky fortress bent on unleashing Wonder across the land.¹⁴⁴ Florian joins Mario and his friends to stop the Koopa King, with Bowser aided by his minions Kamek and Bowser Jr..¹⁴¹⁵ The Flower Kingdom is organized around a central hub, the Petal Isles, with six worlds circling it — including Pipe-Rock Plateau, Fluff-Puff Peaks, Shining Falls, Sunbaked Desert, Fungi Mines, and Deep Magma Bog — giving players seven areas to explore.⁴¹⁵ Players move between courses on world maps in the traditional fashion but also encounter open areas where levels can be tackled in any order, and a dedicated Courses Menu lets players quickly return to levels they have already visited.⁴ Reviewers noted that the story is unusually dynamic for the series, with vocal Flower Kingdom residents and Prince Florian’s dialogue lending it a flavor closer to a Paper Mario game.¹⁴

Gameplay

The game offers the largest playable cast in a side-scrolling Mario game: Mario, Luigi, Peach, Daisy, two Toads, and Toadette all handle identically, discarding earlier distinctions such as Luigi’s higher jump or Peach’s float.⁴¹⁷ Yoshi and Nabbit play differently in that they cannot take damage, making them suitable for beginners, and Yoshi retains his flutter jump and ability to eat objects.⁴¹⁹ Four differently colored Yoshis are available.¹⁷ The game removes the countdown timer from each level, allowing players to progress at their own pace, and does away with the triple-jump that had become a staple of modern 2D Mario.¹⁴ Talking Flowers scattered through the levels greet players and offer hints, ranging from motivating advice to darker musings such as wondering what Goombas taste like.⁴¹⁶

The Wonder Flower is the game’s defining mechanic. Touching it triggers a “Wonder Effect” unique to that course — pipes may come alive and wiggle like an inchworm, the screen may tilt, hordes of enemies may appear, or Mario may transform into a Goomba.⁶⁴ Director Shiro Mouri and producer Takashi Tezuka decided that every main course should contain a Wonder Flower and effect, roughly doubling the design work since each course had to function both with and without the transformation.⁶ The Wonder Flower is optional to collect, which initially made Mouri question the decision to build an alternate version of every course, but he concluded that filling the game with a sense of discovery required the effect to appear in every main level.⁶ Alongside the returning Fire Flower, the game introduced new power-ups: the Elephant Fruit, which turns characters into an elephant that swings its trunk and sprays water; the Bubble Flower, which blows bubbles to trap enemies or bounce on; and the Drill Mushroom, which lets players burrow through ground and ceilings.⁴¹⁹ The Elephant transformation, available to Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Toad, drew particular fan enthusiasm after the game’s reveal.⁴ Badges provide an equippable perk system, granting abilities such as Safety Bounce, Coin Magnet, and Jet Run, one at a time.⁴²⁰

Super Mario Bros. Wonder – Overview Trailer – Nintendo SwitchNintendo of America

The game supports four-player local co-operative play, and an online mode in which players see near-invisible versions of others traveling the same levels in real time.¹⁷⁵ Players can revive fallen compatriots — who briefly become ghosts — and place cardboard “standees” that others use as revival points or to signal hidden secrets; reviewers likened the design to the asynchronous player interaction of Elden Ring.⁵ Online play, offered through Nintendo Switch Online, allows up to 12 players in a Co-Op Room with up to four on a single course.¹⁹ One reviewer described watching a spectral player figure out how to reach an out-of-reach purple flower coin, then following the same path to collect it.⁵

Development and lineage

Development followed four New Super Mario Bros. games, the last of which was built on recreating the 1985 Super Mario Bros. experience in a modern form.⁶ Wanting something fresh, Mouri and his team returned to what made the original game distinctive, which Mouri characterized as its being “filled with secrets and mysteries” — the hidden pipes leading underground, the vines to secret areas, the mushroom that made Mario grow.⁶ He took the basic idea of grabbing an item to warp to a new area and, at Tezuka’s prompting to change the current area rather than teleport, evolved it into the Wonder Effects.⁶ Mouri’s team generated what he described as thousands of ideas for these effects.⁶

The production team drew on decades of Mario experience: Tezuka, who joined as producer, had worked on 2D Mario games for 39 years and had directed Super Mario Bros. successors such as Super Mario World and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, as well as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.¹⁶ Mouri had served as programming director on New Super Mario Bros. U and director on its Deluxe re-release before directing Wonder.¹ Game designer Koichi Hayashida brought experience from 3D titles including Super Mario 3D World and Super Mario Odyssey, applying it to a 2D game, while composer Koji Kondo, involved with Super Mario since the first NES game, served as sound director.¹ Art director Masanobu Sato drew on the pixel art of past Super Mario Bros. games, updating details that earlier hardware constraints had forced artists to omit.⁶²³ The game’s expressive new art style, resembling 2D illustrations, was among its most striking departures.⁶

The Super Mario series itself descends from the platforming template established by Shigeru Miyamoto in Donkey Kong and the 1983 Mario Bros., where the plumber occupation and green pipes with turtles emerging from them originated.²⁴ Some observers noted that Wonder’s inventive levels evoked the user-created stages of Super Mario Maker, though reviewer Jordan Biordi argued the game exceeded what players had built in that toolkit.²²¹⁴

The game was a critical success, praised by outlets including CGMagazine, which scored it 10 out of 10 and called it “one of the best 2D Mario games ever made,” and CNET, whose reviewer highlighted its warmth and helpfulness.¹⁴¹⁶ The first game to feature Kevin Afghani as the voice of Mario and Luigi, succeeding Charles Martinet, it was released on the aging Switch hardware that had by then crossed 125 million lifetime sales.²¹⁷ It arrived close on the heels of the box-office success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and the opening of Super Nintendo World theme parks, at a moment when the characters had rarely been more prominent.⁷

An enhanced version for the Nintendo Switch 2, titled Super Mario Bros. Wonder – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup in Bellabel Park, was released on March 26, 2026, as part of the Super Mario Bros. 40th Anniversary celebration.²¹¹² It adds a Game Room Plaza with six attraction minigames playable by up to 12 people, a Camp Central training area where the Toad Brigade offers challenges, the Koopalings and scattered Bellabel Flowers, and Rosalina as a playable character, alongside three new Wonder amiibo.¹² In co-operative play, a second player can control a Luma as a co-star, and the edition supports the Switch 2’s Mouse Mode.¹²