2023-10-28 06:40:02
Super Mario Bros. game news Wonder: how 3D games like Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Odyssey allowed Nintendo to reinvent its 2D platform game
Published on 10/28/2023 at 08:40
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With Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Nintendo can breathe. Still, the mission of giving a nearly 40-year-old series a makeover wasn’t easy on paper. To achieve such a feat, Mario’s dads decided to think outside the box… all inspired by the plumber’s three-dimensional video games.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder: the challenge of surpassing yourself for Nintendo
Prodigious, marvelous, dazzling… There is no shortage of superlatives when it comes to describing Super Mario Bros. Wonder, released on Nintendo Switch on October 20. At JV, we consider it to be the best since New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Released 14 years ago, the latter had already managed to refresh a formula that was losing momentum by integrating local multiplayer. A challenge that quickly imposed itself on them again. New Super Mario Bros. U and New Super Mario Bros 2 fail to appeal. Nintendo arrives with Super Mario Maker: a community title where players create the Mario Bros.-style levels. A sort of title derived from the series (it does not bear the name) which allows the company to give itself time to look for new ideas.
It took time to find ideas that surpassed those of players with Super Mario Maker 2. Many considered that the latter had made the Super Mario Bros. series obsolete. In an interview published on the official Nintendo website, it was Takashi Tezuka (producer of Wonder, involved in the development of Mario games for 39 years) and Koichi Hayashida (director of Super Mario 3D World and producer of Super Mario Odyssey) who are talking about it.
Tezuka: At the time, some journalists and gamers said that Super Mario Maker eliminated the need for another 2D Mario game. But I kept saying that the next Mario game would be completely different from Super Mario Maker, so there was no need to worry. Looking back, maybe it was those kinds of feelings that pushed me to come up with ideas for this game.
Hayashida: Players have created so many different courses in Super Mario Maker and Super Mario Maker 2 that I wondered if we could do something new that would go further. …But apparently Tezuka-san thought it would be perfect.
Hayashida can now breathe: Super Mario Bros. Wonder succeeded in his mission. That of bringing the philosophy of discovery and exploration into a platform game accessible to all. A recipe that seems perfect and one of the main ingredients was time. Already during the development of Super Mario Maker 2, several managers were talking about the future of Mario Bros. And for this next opus, the priorities were clear: favor the content of the title over respecting the schedule. Don’t rush and take your time. A commodity that seems rare these days. Once this was granted, the project was slowly set up, initially with a small team dedicated to development. And from the first moments, it shows that we have to go big. We need a new graphics engine that can serve as a “foundation” for the next games in the saga. Something that could especially surprise old and new players.
Search Mario games “idea box”
With this in mind, it was Shiro Mouri who decided to call on other licensing minds. The director (often director of the programming part) decides to go see Hayashida to ask him his way of doing things. Here is his response:
Hayashida: 3D Mario games are sometimes described by the media and gamers as a “box of ideas.” So I decided to apply some of the ideas used to create 3D Mario games to a 2D Mario game.
With this principle in mind, Nintendo decides to screw everyone up. All staff involved in the game participate: sound managers, level designers, artists, etc. Everyone can suggest ideas through sticky notes, whether or not related to their areas of expertise. Enough to have… up to 2,000 suggestions to process! It’s Koji Kondo, Nintendo’s essential composer, who speaks about it very well:
Kondo: I always wanted to try to make the whole game come to life like a musical. To start, we tested this idea by making the Piranha plants come out of their pipes in sync with the music, and the Level designers have created a course where pipes and platforms move. The development team liked this, and we adapted it so that various enemies and stage elements move to the beat of the music. But the level designers didn’t know much about pacing or metering, and the sound team wasn’t familiar with level design, which didn’t make things any easier. We held briefings for both parties, and the sound team had the opportunity to participate in the level design. By putting ourselves in each other’s shoes, we deepened our understanding of our respective areas of expertise.
On this subject, Takashi Tezuka even specifies that the health crisis had a major impact on the development of the game. Since everyone was working from home, space was no longer a problem to accommodate everyone during the meetings! A great way to illustrate the company’s adaptation in difficult times. So everyone went with their own idea. To return to the influence of 3D games, we see that certain mechanics from previous games have found their way. The spirit of Super Mario Sunshine lies in the elephant’s ability to water flowers with its trunk; certain prodigy flowers modify gravity or the way of moving directly evoke Super Mario Galaxy; it is sometimes possible to play other characters (like goombas or giant spiked balls) as if Cappy from Super Mario Odyssey had burst into Wonder.
What are prodigy flowers?
This is the great novelty of this Super Mario Bros. Wonder. When Mario collects them, the level changes in substance and form. The colors change but also the gameplay of the character. Each “big” level has its own magical flower, making exploration more than addictive!
Thanks to this approach of infusing 3D game ideas into 2D, Nintendo is pushing the limits of its possible creativity. In addition to additional features, it is also liberating in terms of philosophy. Each three-dimensional episode (with the exception of Super Mario Galaxy 2) breaks with the previous one. Very strong were those who could predict the gameplay innovations between Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy and finally Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Odyssey. Something that Wonder manages to do perfectly with the old episodes of the series, without betraying its spirit, with the prodigy flowers. In the Ask the Developers, the interviewees illustrate this by talking about pipes. This is the first time we’ve seen them twist in this way in a Super Mario Bros game, but that doesn’t mean they’re completely different. Masanobu Sato, design leader since New Super Mario Bros. U., talks about it:
Sato: Yes, there are some deviations from the Mario World rules we’ve seen in the past. For example, we all know that pipes are strong, and so we are confident that projectiles we hit will bounce back if they hit one. We also know that we can jump on the pipes safely. It was essential to maintain that feeling of confidence in a 2D side-scrolling Mario game.
Buy Super Mario Bros. Wonder on Nintendo Switch on Amazon
When 3D is used in gameplay but also for characters
There are plenty of character animations to discover. Plus, we never get tired of it!
Besides the gameplay ideas, Super Mario Bros. Wonder also uses three dimensions for its new aesthetic. The latter is in line with the animated film Super Mario Bros released earlier this year. An almost simultaneous release for the plumber and that’s why, according to Nintendo, it was necessary to pull out all the stops: not disappointing the film’s viewers who wanted to play this new episode was essential. Something which, as we have said, led to the creation of a new graphics engine and also the optimization of the Nintendo Switch. It should be remembered that Wonder is the first new episode to be released on the hybrid console! Something that can be paradoxical when we know that it came out more than six and a half years ago.
Hayashida: Additionally, thanks to Nintendo Switch technology, we were able to make movements and facial expressions more dynamic than before. The number of joints (12) has also increased significantly. The more joints there are , the greater the amplitude of movements, the greater the variety of movements that can be expressed.
To Hayashida’s comments, Sato adds that character animations have the responsibility of communicating the character’s state to the player. An aspect that we notice immediately from the first steps of our plumber… which we did not fail to highlight in our test. The animations are much more varied than in previous episodes. This has the double advantage of better understanding situations while making the adventure more intense.
Super Mario Bros has not aged a bit, a second youth is expected
If we didn’t have a shadow of a doubt after our test of Super Mario Bros. Wonder, this very interesting interview makes things certain: Nintendo has no shortage of ideas and this new episode on Switch is only the beginning. The prodigious flowers constitute the promise of a pool of experiences, each more dazzling than the last. If we only regretted their linearity in Wonder, this is something that could well change in the years to come. By the next episode of the license, other thousands of ideas will undoubtedly flourish in the minds of the developers. In any case, they already imagine the impossible
Mouri: Tezuka-san first asked me if we could place a bar on the screen to adjust the difficulty level on the spot. I told myself that it wasn’t possible… (Laughs)
Interviewer: You mean the difficulty level of the entire course would change in real time? Indeed, it is difficult to imagine. (Laughs)
Tezuka: Well, you never know, right? Maybe it will be in the next game.
A nice way of implying that impossible is not Nintendo. And that, even after almost 40 years of existence (an eternity in video games!), Super Mario Bros has not aged a bit. Nintendo manages to renew the adventures that propelled the plumber to the rooftops of the world. By not being afraid to change their approach with fresh blood, it is also by looking at 3D that Big N makes Wonder a must-have platform game…but above all the promise of a second youth for Super Mario Bros. We can’t wait!
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