Super Mario Bros. Wonder borrows FromSoft’s best idea

polygon.com:

Nintendo is a unique game developer — sometimes to a fault. Over the years, much of its genius, and the timeless brilliance of its games, has rested on the fact that it operates in a bubble, designing games unlike any others and influencing only itself. It’s immune to fashion and can be very innovative in its own, off-the-wall ways. But it has also sometimes been left behind by seismic shifts in gaming that barely caused a ripple within the serene white box of its Kyoto HQ.

There’s a sense that this is changing, however. Slowly, and with enough delicacy not to disturb the mysterious, alchemical processes of Nintendo’s closeted design teams — but changing nevertheless. There’s evidence of a new generation of designers rising through the ranks at Nintendo EPD (Entertainment and Planning Division, the in-house software development arm) who are more receptive to ideas and trends from the outside world, and who have been able to incorporate them into their work in surprising and uniquely Nintendo ways.

And it’s working — it’s really working. The Splatoon series, which was born of a skunkworks project for younger Nintendo designers, reinvented online team-deathmatch shooters — of all things — both stylistically and mechanically with its paint-the-map concept. It’s been a solid hit. And, of course, The Legend of Zelda series has been propelled to a new stratosphere of popularity by the wayBreath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom fold everything from Skyrim to Halo to Minecraft into their bold reinvigoration of open-world games.

Now it’s Mario’s turn. Most of Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s inventiveness is the old kind of Nintendo inventiveness — a torrent of subversive ideas that turn the design of a 2D Mario game inside out and