Super Mario Wonder is a box full of tasty treats. It is a tin of Danish cookies, and you're like, "there's going to be sewing supplies inside, right", and you open it, and there's a half-knitted scarf just for you.
You start playing the game and you're like "there's no way a Mario game has like 6 or 7 worlds and not 8". You spend 2 hours finding every gift-wrapped present in World 1. World 1 is like three different groups of things, which your mind all identifies as "World 1", glued together. You start to believe the game.
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In World 1, you identify "Normal Platformer Level" and "Fun Diversion Level" as the two kinds of levels. New diversions keep getting added in later worlds, and you wonder when it will stop. You find the hide-and-go-seek diversion and you wish it would stop a little. Eventually the diversions start repeating, but it settles into a familiar rhythm.
You realize that, for how much you made fun of the preview for the game for extolling how you can explore The Desert, The Volcano, and The Water Level, each world in the game has a unique texture to its overworld that makes them feel distinct, even if you can feel the shortness of a few of them.
You hang out with some Ninji. Super Mario Wonder is a rhythm game.
You play as Toadette because she is a little goblin who has the fastest running stat in Mario Superstar Baseball. Toadette turns into an elephant and you realize that it was probably a good pick to choose a non-humanoid character because Elephoadette is not as unsettling as you would have thought.
The flower becomes your friend. You feel your worries about the flower potentially being too cringe become dust in the wind when you perform a really precise platforming section and a group of five flowers is there at the end to tell you how cool that looked. Later on the flower will get buried in snow. You will share laughs about it together.
You forgive the flower when you get turned into a slime out of a JRPG and he keeps asking for a taste. Everyone has their kinks and you'll teach him to respect boundaries. The next level you find out the pointy Thwomps that slide around on the floor have baby pacifiers and you immediately start looking for the exit.
You enter a level and are immediately greeted by the flattest fuck possible. You mentally count how many enemies this game invented just for one or two levels. The flat fucks, the toilet paper towers, the popcorn goombas, the dry bones wind-up car, weird fucked up balloons (still feels like a fetish thing), spinies that leap when you do, genderswapped bullet bill, thwomps that fall upwards. The upwards-falling thwomps can chase you sideways. No, don't call the regular cops.
When overturning every nook and cranny in the game for 100%, you find a level you missed. In the level is a mechanic where you can pick up a color-coded key and take it to a door. There are two such keys in the entire game, both in this level. You carry them each about a screen.
In world 6, you finally realize that hitting the top of the flagpole gives you a "Wonderful" because the game is called Super Mario Wonder. (It is actually called Super Mario Bros. Wonder, to be honest, but you won't correct this now.)
You appreciate the badge system more and more for what it is - not just player aid but also gamefeel customization. You can have a high luigi jump, spin jump, have a cape again, equip a mario 64 triple jump badge only to realize it's actually only a double jump. 99% of badges, to me, are cool but worse than just having the Luigijump. It is the Skyline GT-R of badges.
With every Expert Badge you unlock, you mutter "holy Shit the speedruns and superplays for this game are going to be the most ridiculous thing ever". The first one gives a super dash and coyote time so long that you can scroll a ledge almost off the screen before losing your ability to jump. It is the only way coyote time discourse should end.
You complete the game in one very satisfying Saturday, and 100% it by lunch the next day. It is probably one of the best 2D Mario experiences you've had since you started using the internet regularly, just a continually-surprising and smooth-tasting set of treats, never too long, rarely too short.
You think to yourself, "This is really good. It's almost as good as a Kirby game."
This is high praise for Mario, but higher praise for Kirby.
You write most of this review in your head while cleaning up the last few traces of Collectibles. 90 minutes later, you are mentally raising your review score and syncing your joycons so you can hotswap in Yoshi, because you're in danger of running out of the 99 lives you purchased earlier while muttering "wait you can just buy that many at once? lol".
You wonder if it's normal to spend like 10% of your entire playtime of a game in one level.
By a margin of 7 lives, you reach the bottom of the tin of treats. Beneath all the packaging, there's one more wrapped cookie, just like you thought. But how does it taste? You unwrap it and bite in to this parting gift.
It's a flavor you never would have guessed.
