Media in Review: Super Mario Wonder
Before I dive into this, I want to delineate between Mario Wonder: The Game That You Play and Mario Wonder: The Concept, because those are two very different things for me.
Mario Wonder: The Game is a very well made platformer with solid level design, a fresh aesthetic, and generally an apology for everything in the NSMB era. They do a lot of really cool stuff with Wonder Flowers, the badge system is neat, and it's really fun to just play. It is arguably a little easy; even accounting for Special World levels, I don't think anything took me more than about 20 lives to clear, but Mario is a game for children and it's hard to be too disappointed here. Admittedly, I did not clear the super secret final level because I could not be assed to go do all the search levels, but I assume it is as difficult as Champion Road levels tend to be, so maybe there's something there. I've seen a take that calls Wonder "the real Super Mario Bros 5" and while I think that discards NSMB Wii and U unfairly (U especially), it's not really wrong.
Mario Wonder: The Concept fares a little less well. For a game that is so bursting with ideas, remarkably few of them are actually new ideas. The game's primary inspiration was clearly Rayman Legends, but almost everywhere you look, you see something done first (and a lot of times done better) elsewhere. You like music levels? Boy do we have some music levels, both in the Rayman variety and the "jump to the beat" Galaxy variety. There's silhouette levels from modern DK (and that one specific level from DKCR where you ride the giant egg and then have to jump inside it once it breaks open shows up twice), a ton of stuff from Galaxy including where the floor falls out and you walk on the background, a badge that is functionally Spring Mario, speedrun levels, Shadow Mario levels, etc etc. And to be clear, this isn't a bad thing - almost all of these gimmicks are well executed and play well. It just feels less like "look at all our wild ideas!" and more like "Mario is playing catch-up to what the rest of the industry has done with platformers since 2012 or so."
Wonder is a solid 8/10 game on its own merits. If you truly disliked the NSMB era, then yes, this game is what you've been waiting 30 years for since Yoshi's Island. For everyone else, it's a hodge-podge of ideas from the last 10-15 years of mainstream platformers, filtered through the Mario lens. It's fine, but it didn't wow me, nor do I think it ever really could have in the grand scheme of things.