In Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Mario’s personality finally comes through
By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.
Even though he doesn’t speak, in Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Mario says more than he ever has in any game previous. Beyond his “wahoos” and “okey dokeys,” this Mario has a real personality, facilitated by a suite of power-ups and Nintendo’s meticulous attention to detail. Though we’ve seen a bit of this new personality in the movie, the Mario in Wonder is the most expressive I’ve ever seen him, reinventing a character that has largely remained a blank-ish slate for the last 30 years.
Wonder’s positive reviews will undoubtedly make it a staple on every game of the year ballot. As my colleague Andrew Webster wrote, “Wonder manages to pull from classics like Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3, while firmly updating the formula with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of wild new ideas.”
Some of those “wild new ideas” take the form of the various power-ups Mario uses to traverse the Flower Kingdom. While the super mushroom and the fire flower remain fixtures on Mario’s power-up roster, new abilities like the elephant fruit, bubble flower, and drill mushroom give Mario incredible amounts of flavor expressed with all the different animations he goes through when he uses them.
Before, when Mario used a power-up, he flashed for a few seconds, either getting bigger or changing color depending on what he picked up. In Wonder, though, in picking up a super mushroom, Mario doesn’t simply get bigger but you see him grow. Each inch he gets bigger is timed to the classic sound bite.
Each of the other power-ups, like the fire flower or the drill mushroom, has unique animations when you
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