Here we go: all the news about Super Mario Bros. Wonder

When a Super Mario game gets really good, you can’t help but move around in your seat. I find myself leaning into jumps as if it’ll give me an advantage and ducking my head down to avoid flying enemies. Even after a few decades of playing these games, it’s an instinct I can’t seem to avoid — and I was never sitting still while playing Super Mario Bros. Wonder on the Nintendo Switch.

Wonder is the first brand-new side-scrolling Mario game in over a decade and the first mainline entry in the series since Super Mario Odyssey in 2017. It’s also one of the best titles in the franchise to date. 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. Wonder, it turns out, is a very fitting name. It’s a feeling that you’ll experience plenty of while playing.

The world of Super Mario is a dangerous place. In the games, the plumber falls off cliffs, gets jabbed with spikes, and has everything from wrenches to fireballs hurled at him. But he always gets back up and goes again, which raises an important question: does Nintendo’s hero actually feel pain? According to Takashi Tezuka, who has worked on the series since the original Super Mario Bros. (including serving as producer on last year’s Wonder), there isn’t really a clear answer. “It may be that Mario does feel pain,” he tells me.

But that ambiguity may be because I was asking the wrong question. The important part, he explains, is the emotions players experience when Mario plummets to his death or is fried by Bowser’s breath. “If the player feels that Mario is feeling pain, that’s a better experience, rather than talking about whether Mario actually does feel pain,” Tezuka says.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a game filled with oddball ideas. Thanks to magical flowers that, once collected, introduce some unexpected new element, players experience everything from a bunch of Piranha Plants simultaneously bursting into song to Mario turning into a sentient pile of goo. It has so many ideas, in fact, that director Shiro Mouri wasn’t sure the team could pull it off. “At first when I heard that we’d be creating one wonder effect per course, and that all of the courses are going to have different wonder effects,” he tells The Verge, “I thought: ‘That’s stupid. That’s impossible.’”

As it turns out, the problem wasn’t so much coming up with ideas. The developers at Nintendo brainstormed a lot of potential powers — around 2,000, which were jotted down on sticky notes and placed on a big board in the company’s Kyoto office for everyone to see. According to producer Takashi Tezuka, who has worked on the franchise since the original Super Mario Bros., the game had not only a large development team but also an extended ideation process for coming up with those different wonder flower concepts. During this time, no idea was too out there. At one point, Koji Kondo, the famed composer behind the iconic tunes of Mario and Zelda, pitched a flower that would turn Mario into a human-size live-action version of himself. “They had an environment to think freely in and come up with ideas,” Tezuka says of the process.

My mission to 100 percent Super Mario Bros. Wonder officially started a couple of weeks ago, but really it began in the late ‘80s.

As a kid, I was certifiably bad at Mario. We didn’t have our own Nintendo console, so any time I spent playing Mario prior to that was at a friend’s or cousin’s house. I’d hold the second controller and wait my turn, marveling at how they just knew where the hidden boxes were, where to jump to the top of the screen and skip ahead three levels, and how to get to the very top of the flagpole every single time. As I struggled to clear the first few stages before running out of lives, it seemed obvious to me that I lacked some instinct that made my friends good at Mario and made me objectively terrible.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s online multiplayer keeps making me think of Elden Ring.

Nintendo’s latest Super Mario game has a clever online multiplayer mode. When you connect online, you’ll see near-invisible versions of other players throughout the game’s islands and levels as they also travel the Flower Kingdom. It’s a lot like how you see the outlines of other players as you traverse the Lands Between, and in Wonder, Nintendo created some smart ways for your fellow compatriots to help you out.

When it comes to difficulty, most games like to put you in a bucket. At the start of the experience, you have to choose whether you want to play on a hard or easy mode, and usually, over the course of the game, you can move between these as you see fit, which is good because it’s hard to really know what mode is right for you at the beginning. Super Mario Bros. Wonder doesn’t force you to make this decision. It doesn’t have traditional difficulty settings at all. And yet, its approach to difficulty is one of the most refreshing I’ve ever seen — it’s both subtle and powerful and as playful as the rest of the game.

The most obvious form this takes is in the characters you can play as. The main cast of Mario and friends are all basically the same, but there are a handful of characters — Nabbit and all the various flavors of Yoshi — that serve as a default easy mode. None of them can be damaged, and in the case of Yoshi, you also get a better jump and an additional attack thanks to his extendable tongue. Other characters can ride on a Yoshi; I used this to great effect to piggyback my eight-year-old kid through some of the more perilous platforming sequences.

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.”

There’s a very good chance that this will be the last year where the Switch is Nintendo’s main piece of hardware. While rumors of a Switch successor have persisted for years, recent reports suggest that an upgraded device is not only coming but will be here relatively soon, with a potential 2024 launch. If that is indeed the case, it seems that Nintendo isn’t content to let the device go out with a whimper — in fact, 2023 has been one of the Switch’s strongest years to date.

Just look at the company’s biggest properties. This year, we have both a new mainline Zelda in Tears of the Kingdom and a classic Mario title with Super Mario Bros. Wonder. The last time the company released a major Zelda and Super Mario in the same year was 2017, which just so happened to be when the Switch debuted. (Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey have since gone on to sell more than 50 million combined copies.) Tears of the Kingdom, in particular, really feels like it’s pushing the upper limits of what the Switch is capable of — just look at some of the physics-defying creations players have come up with inside of its giant open world.

After months of speculation, conspiracy theories, and false alarms, we finally know the name of Mario’s new voice actor: Kevin Afghani. On Friday, Afghani announced the news on X (formerly Twitter), saying, “Incredibly proud to have voiced Mario and Luigi in Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Thanks to Nintendo for inviting me into the Flower Kingdom!”

Nintendo confirmed the news in an email, saying simply, “The voice actor’s name is Kevin Afghani.” The news comes after iconic voice actor Charles Martinet stepped away from the role in August to become a Mario ambassador.

After weeks of wonder (heh) and speculation, Nintendo is finally giving longtime Mario voice actor Charles Martinet a proper send-off. Nintendo released a short video featuring Martinet and Nintendo executive Shigeru Miyamoto in which the pair take a fond look back at Martinet’s time in the role.

It’s a short, sweet video, Martinet is his typical enthusiastic self, dropping iconic lines from the Mario characters he voices. He also finally explains exactly what the hell a Mario ambassador is (something he apparently wasn’t too clear on himself not that long ago, based on comments he made at a convention.)

Nintendo’s going to let us figure out who the next voice of Mario is on our own. In an interview with IGN, Nintendo of America’s president, Doug Bowser, said that the company doesn’t plan on revealing Charles Martinet’s replacement until folks roll credits on Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

“I think people have recognized this when they see Super Mario Bros. Wonder, they’ll hear a different voice,” Bowser told IGN. “And we’ll let that play out and that’ll be within the credits, and people will learn who the new person is at that point in time, but we don’t plan to make any announcement in advance of that.”

As people eagerly await Starfield reviews and rev up their Xboxes for the game’s early access opening, Nintendo decided that it would not be left out of today’s video game news. During today’s interestingly timed Mario Direct presentation, Nintendo shared roughly 15 minutes of gameplay from Super Mario Bros. Wonder and announced a new Mario-themed Switch OLED.

Despite Nintendo’s traditional wholesomeness, I cannot shake the feeling that the thesis of Super Mario Bros. Wonder is just, “What if this time, Mario and all his friends just got super high?” In the gameplay presentation, the flowers talk now, the new Flower Kingdom seems a bit more wacky than other Mario locations, and with the power of the Wonder Flowers, Mario can get up to all kinds of interesting, mind-bending shenanigans.

At its most recent Nintendo Direct, the company showed off some fresh gameplay for the upcoming platformer Super Mario Bros. Wonder. But we also got a look at some new hardware — or, at least, a new color for the OLED version of the Nintendo Switch.

The tablet is getting a Mario makeover to coincide with the game, with a slick red color scheme, complete with a Mario silhouette and some coins hidden beneath the back panel. It’ll be available on October 6th, just ahead of Wonder’s launch on October 20th, though it’s already available for preorder from Amazon, Nintendo, and Best Buy.

Charles Martinet, the voice of Mario for over 25 years, will no longer be voicing the iconic character, according to a tweet from Nintendo. Martinet has voiced the character since the ’90s, appearing in mainline Mario titles like Super Mario 64, Super Mario Odyssey, and Super Mario Galaxy as well as countless spinoffs.

“Charles is now moving into the brand-new role of Mario Ambassador. With this new transition, he will be stepping back from recording character voices for our games,” Nintendo’s statement reads. “It has been an honor working with Charles to help bring Mario to life for so many years and we want to thank and celebrate him.”