Post Script

Is it time Nintendo left the Mushroom Kingdom behind forever?

To anyone who’s been playing Mario games for a long time, Wonder’s cheerfully subversive spirit might not come as too great a shock. Certainly, it is far from the first Nintendo game to take a sideways look at the conventions of the series. The Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario RPGs, for instance, have regularly poked fun at the plumber’s platforming adventures, offering irreverent commentary on ideas that might make sense within the games themselves but have little truck with real-world logic. Yet they do so from a position of relative safety: as spin-offs, they’re not bound to the same kind of restrictions we associate with mainline entries, and are thus free to take as many liberties as they like. In other words, they’re not proper Mario

games, and as such, all bets are off.

Then again, we only need to look back a little more to discover a Mario platformer that achieved similar results, albeit via different methods. The rebellious, verging on mutinous, nature of 1989’s Super Mario Land

can be largely attributed to its stewardship: taking charge of Nintendo’s mascot for the first time, the veteran R&D1 team conceived a villain in Wario who was the anti-Mario, as a way to reflect their feelings towards a character who wasn’t one of their own. True, its distinguishing features were in part determined by the limitations of the technology of the day. Even so, its world and enemies are practically unrecognisable from what we expect from a Mario game; likewise its soundtrack, Hip Tanaka’s themes entirely distinct from the work of Koji Kondo.

With that in mind, it’s hard not to wonder what might have motivated the key figures behind Wonder

to similarly indulge in such creative iconoclasm. Shiro Mouri has served his time at Nintendo: since 1998’s F-Zero X he’s largely been involved in programming Mario and Zelda games. Mouri’s last project at the helm was New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe, an enhanced port of the Wii U game and its Luigi-starring spin-off, hardly the most creatively fulfilling of directorial debuts. Producer Takashi Tezuka surely needs no introduction; perhaps, after close to 40 years of Mario – and with former development partner Shigeru Miyamoto occupied with expanding the Mario brand into theme parks and films – he’s all the more prepared to cast out the old and bring in the new.

Regardless of who’s chiefly responsible – and, in all likelihood, it’s a collective effort – there’s something telling about Wonder’s desire to properly escape the Mushroom Kingdom. It’s not simply that the environmental features and inhabitants shared by these two principalities are so often twisted in some way or other, but that the range of new elements and enemies is so vast. We struggle to think of a recent Mario game where quite so much feels quite so new. It makes for a refreshing change, both of scenery and of approach to design. For all their undoubted qualities, the New Super Mario Bros games felt staid, as if hemmed in by the need to conform to the unspoken rules of their setting.

True, the Mushroom Kingdom’s appearance and topography isn’t consistent on a game-by-game basis – you need only set Super Mario Bros 3 next to, say, New Super Luigi U to see that it’s flexible enough to accommodate multitudes. But it’s quietly revealing that all the best Mario adventures involve getting away from it all. Super Mario World’s Dinosaur Land is a big part of the reason why it still feels somewhat out of step with the rest of his 2D adventures (setting aside Doki Doki Panic, hastily reworked into Super Mario Bros 2,

which it hardly seems fair to count), even after Wonder.

As for the 3D games, it says much that almost all of them take place elsewhere – from Sunshine’s Isle Delfino to the interstellar voyages of the two Galaxy

games, 3D World’s Sprixie Kingdom to Odyssey’s

globe-hopping journey. The latter game (as well as Galaxy 2’s tellingly titled Throwback Galaxy) perhaps proves the notion that the Mushroom Kingdom is best reserved for nostalgic cameos. Consider, too, the fact that Super Mario 64 constantly encourages you to leave it behind, the paintings in Peach’s castle providing warp points to entirely different realms. In some way or other, those in charge of Mario have been giving him excuses to leave the place for decades. (Talking of the princess, it’s something of a relief that in space year 2023 she’s no longer forced to spend an entire game as a hapless damsel, twiddling her thumbs waiting for a moustachioed knight in shining dungarees to come to her rescue. It feels about time.)

Of course, you could always argue that, in a series which – like The Legend Of Zelda – demonstrates Nintendo’s utter lack of interest in narrative consistency, there’s no need for something quite as drastic as waving goodbye to the Mushroom Kingdom for good. Why not take cues from those RPGs and (as Wonder does on several occasions) find ways of confounding our preconceived notions of its identity as a videogame setting? But then again, with such a cornucopia of brand-new discoveries in the Flower Kingdom alone, why bother going back at all? As long as there is a castle and a princess with extremely lax security, the Mario

series perhaps risks falling back into old habits. The proof that the plumber, his brother and his friends are better positioned than ever to expand their horizons – and Nintendo’s designers to likewise stretch their legs and redefine what a Mario game can be – is right here, and it’s a persuasive case indeed.

The New Super Mario Bros games felt staid, as if hemmed in by the need to conform to the unspoken rules of their setting