Many enthusiastic responses greeted the June 2023 announcement of Super Mario Bros. Wonder; the game’s art style, soundtrack, and new enemies all seemed like enjoyable advancements of what fans had come to expect from the New Super Mario Bros. series.
However, the trailer’s concluding image, in which Mario transforms into a huge elephant version of himself after grabbing an odd-looking fruit, was what caused the biggest stir. Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s Elephant Mario, who appears enormous on our current cover art, quickly gained notoriety as one of the game’s most recognizable characters.
Elephant Mario can be played right away because it first appears in the stage Welcome to the Flower Kingdom. According to the trailer, the Elephant Fruit appears out of a block, and Mario changes into this new form.
Even though it’s not shocking—I’ve seen that reveal trailer more times than I can count—it’s still startling to see one of pop culture’s most recognizable figures change so drastically. While in this form, Mario can swing his trunk to attack enemies and smash bricks from the side. However, he can also shoot water to trigger reactions akin to those seen in unique flowers called Wow Buds that bloom and reward previously undiscovered items and collectibles.
In order to accomplish a specific moveset and present a fresh take on something Mario has been doing since the very first Super Mario Bros. game: growing larger, Elephant Mario was born, as director Shiro Mouri explains.
“When we’re talking about creating power-up items or power-up transformations, the first thing we start with is the gameplay experience: What kind of gameplay experience do we want to provide the player with?” According to him. “We wanted to enlarge Mario’s body as soon as possible. It is easier to stomp enemies, hit blocks, and grab coins when a character’s body is larger, which is why we wanted him to be bigger.
We believed that altering Mario’s core gameplay mechanics might provide players with a novel gaming experience. Another, less eye-catching example is that it’s simply simpler to land on a narrower platform when your body is larger. Being small makes it simple to overlook that.
Super Mushrooms, after all, have been making Mario bigger for decades. However, when the development team considered the other gameplay objectives it had for a power-up item in Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the decision became clear. “Being able to hit blocks from the side was the second thing we sought to accomplish.
You can access areas that are only accessible through that transformation if you can hit blocks from the side. We wanted to spray water as our third goal. For instance, let’s say there is a withered flower. That would be the reason we wanted to do that. Something strange might happen if you water it and let it bloom. After much thought, the only thing that really fit with these three concepts of having a large body, having the ability to hit blocks from the side, and then spraying water was an elephant.
Characters go through a significant visual transformation when they transform into their Elephant forms, but they still have enough of their original character design left over for people to recognize them. That was one of the initiatives that art director Masanobu Sato and his group undertook when developing these Elephant forms, he claims.
“We start by understanding the characters and their iconic features,” he states. “Mario, for instance, has a prominent mustache, a large nose, and red as his primary color. The transformation motif is first applied to a character while keeping a balance to ensure that the character’s iconic features are not lost.
Elephant Mario’s design appears simple in the way it achieves different gameplay objectives, but another significant power-up in Super Mario Bros. The inspiration behind Wonder, the Bubble Flower, came from improving upon the past.
“In New Super Mario Bros. U, there was the [Bubble Baby Yoshi],” Mouri explains. The fact that you had to hold down the Y button in order to use that character’s mechanics was one of them, and we felt that could be improved just a little. We created the Bubble Flower and eventually Bubble Mario as a continuation of our efforts to enhance that feature. The Bubble Flower has developed into a pretty interesting and alluring power-up because it allows you to A, defeat enemies, and B, also create platforms that you can jump off of.
Players can use a variety of new power-ups in addition to the Elephant Fruit and Bubble Flower, including brand-new ones like the Drill Mushroom (learn more about it here) and time-tested ones like the Super Mushroom, Super Star, and Fire Flower. Of course, it’s highly likely that Nintendo hasn’t yet revealed all of the power-ups we’ll be able to use in Super Mario Bros. Wonder when it launches on the Switch on October 20.