Regular readers of TheGamer may remember that four of us recently playedSuper Mario Bros. Wondertogether, andit was carnage. Not the fun sort of carnage though, just a very disorganised exercise in avoiding playing the game as it should be to cater to specifics of the multiplayer challenge. But after finally trying local multiplayer, I take it all back.
Online multiplayer is a waste of time in Mario Wonder. Once you get around the slightly convoluted online connectionNintendouses, and make peace that you can only go as far as the person with the least progress, well, it still kinda sucks. You all float lifelessly through each others’ levels, and anything each of you do (like hitting switches or activating Wonder Flowers) doesn’t impact the rest of the bunch. Add to that the necessity for outside voice chat, and you’re not really playing together at all. You’re playing, together.
The worst part of all this is how the game forces you to abandon anything interesting about it. The only way to play with friends in any tangible way is to race each other by clicking a red and white box at the start, which looks more like a leftover dev tool than a whimsicalMarioitem.
Racing in this way encourages ripping through levels while ignoring any interesting quirks, and avoiding the slow Wonder Flower at all costs. Later levels, where you clamber through set pieces, may be more enjoyable in this way, but early on when everything is linear, it feels like you’re getting the worst version of the game by turning it intoSonic.
Local multiplayer flips all this on its head. Despite seeing the adverts of the two girls bonding over skateboarding and Mario, I had written off Mario’s multiplayer. I didn’t review it so had no obligation to test it out, I’d been soured by online multiplayer, and while my wife does play games occasionally (shejust reached act threeofBaldur’s Gate 3), I was cautious. Getting her to play video games is like feeding a feral cat - try too hard and you set your efforts back months.
I had mainly played Mario in handheld mode, so it wasn’t until I recently switched to docked that my wife could watch, and that got her interested. I zapped back to the first world so as not to throw her in at the deep end, and away we went asDaisyandPeach. Playing local multiplayer feels like a completely different game to online multiplayer.
Local multiplayer has already gotten rid of the potentially annoying collision, so why does online multiplayer reduce this even further by making you all ghosts who have no impact on each other’s level? Playing together locally, you may travel to secret areas, activate Wonder Flowers, and need to ensure you’re both on the screen at once - you’re actively playing together, unlike online multiplayer’s insistence on competition in a game not built for it.
Local multiplayer is a joy in Super Mario Wonder, but this is nothing new. The game has been out for over a month and many people have already discovered this. I’m aware I’m late to the party. What surprises me is not that it’s good or that it offersa quick and easy way to playwith my wife alongside the time commitment of Baldur’s Gate 3, but that it offers such a contrast.
With the online multiplayer, I had just assumed Nintendo couldn’t get multiplayer to flow properly in a game with as many quirks as Wonder. Now it’s clear that was always possible, and it makes my experience with the online multiplayer feel worse. It’s themost varied 2D Marioin years, withbouncy secrets bursting out from every corner. But if you’re planning on playing with gran and grandad over the holidays, just make sure they’re in the same room.
