Video Game / Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Expect the unexpected.

"Life's full of surprises."

— Talking Flower

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a 2D Platform Game in the Super Mario Bros. series for the Nintendo Switch. It is the first new full-fledged 2D mainline installment since New Super Mario Bros. U, almost eleven years prior, and the first 2D entry to utilize a new visual style since the inception of the New sub-series. It was released on October 20, 2023.

Mario and friends are invited by Prince Florian to visit the Flower Kingdom, a not-so distant kingdom beyond the Mushroom Kingdom. Their friendly visit is cut short once Bowser arrives and takes a hold of the Wonder Flower, using it to merge himself and Prince Florian's castle to become a Mechanical Abomination, causing chaos across the land and trapping all of the kingdom's Poplin citizens in their own homes. It's up to Mario and company to put a stop to Bowser yet again, traveling through the Flower Kingdom and adapting to its wondrous environments.

Branded as the next evolution of 2D Mario platforming, in addition to featuring new power-ups, Wonder builds off the gameplay and multiplayer of previous 2D games and has some 3D Mario DNA brought into the game in a myriad of ways such as numerous openly-traversable world maps. Its main feature are the newly introduced Wonder Effects, which allows unique level-changing stages triggered by collecting Wonder Flowers, and can feature anything from a choreographed dance sequence to completely new gameplay styles like walking on walls in a top down perspective. It notably has one of the largest casts of any mainline Mario game, featuring Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Princess Daisy, Green/Red/Light Blue/Yellow Yoshi, Yellow/Blue Toad, Toadette, and Nabbit as playable characters.

It also is the first mainline Mario title since the introduction of voice acting in Super Mario 64 in which Mario (and later Luigi) are not voiced by longtime voice actor Charles Martinet, who stepped down from his Mario voice roles in 2023 and into a new role with the company as a "Mario Ambassador". Beginning with this title, Kevin Afghani takes over as the voice of both brothers. Other characters have received new voices as well, such as Giselle Fernandez taking over for Deanna Mustard as Princess Daisy and Dawn M. Bennett replacing Nintendo staff member Natsuko Yokoyama as Nabbit.

• Trailers: Reveal Trailer, Super Mario Bros. Wonder Direct, Treehouse Gameplay, Overview Trailer

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Onward and upward!:

Tropes #-E

• 100% Completion: Medals are used to indicate completion in a save file. A completely cleared game has six medals: beating the game, collecting every Badge, all Wonder Seeds, all 10-flower coins, all Standees, and reaching the top of the Goal Pole in every stage (only once per stage — secret exits are exempt). The game makes it easy to track by denoting a fully completed stage/shop/etc. with a green checkmark in its progression checklist, and on the world's name on the map screen if all its content is completed, and finally on the save file for 100%.
  • When all the Wonder Seeds in a world have been claimed, their counter changes color from white to green.
  • Regular stages can sometimes have their checklist filled out, but lack the checkmark. This is your hint that the stage has a secret exit.
  • Shops also get the checkmark. Regular shops lacking a checkmark means there's a Wonder Seed or Badge you haven't bought there. (Note that additional badges are unlocked after beating the game, which will uncheck any shops that previously had checkmarks until they're all bought.) In the case of the Special World shop, lacking a checkmark means you still have Standees to get.
• 2½D: Several courses allow the characters to go into the background and even the foreground, causing them to become relatively smaller or bigger as they do so.
• Absurdly Short Level: The "Break Time!"-Levels are all relatively short, but its music stages such as "Wonder Token Tunes" take the cake. You get in, collect five Flower Tokens right next to another, listen to a jingle, done.
• A Cappella: The reward for beating The Final-Final Trial is the "Sound-Off? Badge", which replaces all the usual sound effects with people imitating them instead.
• Acid-Trip Dimension: Downplayed, because even though the Flower Kingdom is usually a pretty normal Mario world, once Mario gets the Wonder Flower, things can get weird. The ground can rapidly move up and down, pipes can come to life and slither like snakes, Mario and friends' torsos can grow really long, they can turn into Spiked Balls, they can hop on a flock of Bulrush, and more.
• Acrofatic: Being turned into an elephant doesn't keep Mario and friends from running at high speeds and jumping high.
• Action Girl: Peach, Daisy, and Toadette are playable, with access to the same power-ups as everyone else.
• Affably Evil: Bowser once again. Even as he's oppressing the Flower Kingdom, he makes sure to compliment Mario and co. when they beat his traps and politely asks the audience to make their way to the front stage as he jams out his Wonder tunes for universal conquest.
  Bowser: Ahem. Thank you all for coming... SORRY FOR THE WAIT!
• Airplane Arms: The playable characters spread their arms out while running at top speed, taking a page from Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World.
• Alliterative Name: Many stages bear alliterative names. In order of appearance: "Piranha Plants on Parade!", "Scram, Skedaddlers!", "Pokipede Pass", "Puzzling Park", "Cloud Cover", "Watery Wonder Tokens", "Pipe Park", "Revver Run", "Fungi Funk", "Raarghs in the Ruins", "Maw-Maw Mouthful", "Missile Meg Mayhem", and "Bowser's Blazing Beats".
• All the Worlds Are a Stage:
  • Bowser's Rage Stage, Special World's Wonder Gauntlet as well as the credits mini-game borrow Wonder Effects from all across the game.
  • The final final level of Special World, Badge Marathon, is a Marathon Level that tests your mastery of badges, including expert badges, with 10 consecutive badge challenges.
• Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: The castle and airship levels just before the final boss, such as "High-Voltage Gauntlet" or "Evade the Seeker Bullet Bills!", have a dark green industrial milieu.
• Amphibian Assault: Maw-Maws are tadpole-like creatures who have very large mouths to eat and swallow objects. They only hurt the player normally, but under the Goomba Wonder Effect, they can swallow the player whole for a instant K.O.
• Animal Stampede: The Bulrush can charge in huge numbers under a Wonder Effect, which can summon a stampede of them onto the level, while more can be seen running past in the background and foreground. They can potentially bulldoze the flagpole when this happens.
• Animate Inanimate Object: In certain courses, a Wonder Effect causes pipes, platform hills and other potential things to gain eyes and move around.
• Animorphism: There is a new power up called the Elephant Fruit that can transform Mario and the gang into elephants. This is notably a change to their actual bodies, rather than them wearing magical costumes as with most other animal-themed powerups like the Tanooki Suit or the Cat Suit.
• Anthropomorphic Food: The level "Hot-Hot Hot!" features Kerpop, enemies that resemble kernels of corn with shoes. If they touch the hot magma in the level, they pop — and appropriately enough, start bouncing around like freshly-made popcorn.
• Anthropomorphic Shift: Inverted with Yoshi, who has a more slanted, dinosaur-like build which hearkens back to his earliest appearances, rather than using the more upright design established by Yoshi's Story. Koopa Troopas and Dry Bones also have a more hunched-over stance recalling their early quadrupedal appearances, though they are still bipedal.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Any collectibles will remain in your possession even after losing a life before clearing a level, preventing the headache of collecting them again in areas you're having trouble in. Losing all your lives before clearing, on the other hand, will cause you to lose them. Badge Challenges are an exception where you do have to recollect items upon failing, but in exchange they don't cost lives.
  • Grabbing a Super Star will now cause nearby coins to be pulled towards you while active, making it much easier to blast forward with it as intended without missing collectibles.
  • The Grappling Vine will fire in a straight line from the point where you pressed the button, ignoring your vertical velocity. This prevents near-misses from occurring in situations where the head of the vine will miss because you didn't lead your target.
  • Dying in a Badge Challenge stage won't cost a life, so you can try as many times as you need to learn the mechanics of the ability.
  • If you ground pound a block that contains a Super Mushroom, Elephant Fruit, or a Drill Mushroom, it will stay in place for one second before moving, giving you more time to grab it before it runs the risk of moving over an ledge.
  • Bottomless Pits are now identifiable by a soft shadow at the edge of the screen. Helpful to keep in mind as the game isn't short on hiding secrets offscreen.
  • Hitting the top of Goal Poles is tracked for completion, but for stages with multiple exits, you only need to top one of them. It also doesn't matter which one.
  • The Final-Final Test Badge Marathon is both a Brutal Bonus Level and a Marathon Level that will seriously test your patience. While far and few in between, the course does offer some checkpoints to alleviate some of the pain. Likewise, each segment of the course has a handful of coins to collect so that you can still earn some extra lives every time you restart from losing one.
• Arc Symbol:
  • Flowers. The game takes place in the Flower Kingdom, its main gimmick is the Wonder Flower, the Poplins are all flower people, and the newest playable character is Daisy.
  • Curved four-pointed stars (✦) are a prominent motif in the game. Wonder Flowers and Wonder Seeds incorporate them in their design, and they surround the screen during Wonder Effects. These stars also appear in the soil texture of the first world, in decorative flowers, on some trees and palm trees, etc. The empty points on the world map also have this shape.
• Arc Words: "Wonder" and its variants. "Wonderful" is the highest rank of a combo or getting on the very top of the goal pole. There's a power-up known as the Wonder Flower which triggers a Wonder Effect, players collect Wonder Seeds to unlock new levels and purchase badges, and the world is portrayed as a Wonderland. Mario will even say "Wonderful!" after collecting a Wonder Seed. The final message displayed to you after clearing the Special World is "YOU ARE A SUPER WONDER!"
• Art-Shifted Sequel: This game marks a significant change in art direction from the previous 2D installments. It still uses 3D models, but they are now heavily stylized to better resemble the series' 2D artwork drawn by Yoichi Kotabe and Shigehisa Nakaue, as well as evoke the classic sprites. The whole game is crisply shaded in a Painted CGI style, characters are always depicted at a three-quarters angle, and the animation is a bit choppier and more cartoony, with references to classic Mario artwork seen in places such as Mario's jump poses and his running animation (which features smear frames on his feet). The expressive animations were also partially inspired by The Super Mario Bros. Movie; the developers mentioned that players who have seen the movie first would expect the game to animate similarly.
• Auto-Revive: Standees can be placed in levels to revive other players online when their ghost touches them.
• Auto-Scrolling Level: Few levels are autoscrollers from start to finish, but many times there is an autoscroller section triggered by a Wonder Flower. The most prominent examples are the music stages such as "Piranha Plants on Parade" and the castle levels.
• Bait-and-Switch: The beginning of the final level has Bowser Jr. in his Wonder form intercepting you ready for one more fight, only to end up being sent flying by his own Wonder-amplified traps with a panicking Kamek diving down trying to save him.
• Band Land:
  • Fluff-Puff Peaks' "Jump! Jump! Jump!" and "Climb to the Beat" have you jumping from disappearing platform to platform to the rhythm of the beat after getting the Wonder Flower. The background has music note-shaped clouds to show you what kind of challenges these are.
  • Bowser's castle is a cross between this and Eternal Engine. The first couple of levels are factories producing munitions and electricity, but by the fourth, massive speakers and screens are set up while Goombas dance in the background, culminating in the final clash on Bowser's performance stage. Additionally, he introduces each level as if it were an act put on by his minions.
• Barefoot Cartoon Animal: All of the playable characters' shoes disappear when using the Elephant Fruit.
• Be the Ball: A Wonder Effect-exclusive form turns Mario and his friends into a Spike Ball that breaks down Brick Block walls, complete with a bowling pin sound effect.
• Big Bad: Unsurprisingly, Bowser is the main antagonist once again, having invaded the Flower Kingdom instead of the Mushroom Kingdom this time around. By using Wonder, Bowser has merged himself with Prince Florian's castle to become Castle Bowser, and is preparing a big Wonder that will hypnotize everyone in the universe with his music.
• Big Boo's Haunt: The level "Light-Switch Mansion" combines this with Blackout Basement and takes place in a haunted mansion full of Boos. The level also features light switches which turn the light on temporarily (and kills the boos inside the light). Lastly, you'll be on the run from King Boo, who performs a musicalesque stage play.
• Big Storm Episode: "Downpour Uproar" is a beach stage where the player traverses across large storm cloud platforms that rain down a heavy downpour (to the point where you can actually swim in it). The sky gets greyer as they proceed in the stage, culminating in a Wonder Effect where the player is blown upward in a hurricane where they have to avoid lightning strikes and Koopa Troopas who are carried in the storm.
• Bleak Level:
  • Fungi Mines (World 5) is a swampy forest area with a lengthy underground section. With the exception of the brightly-colored Upshroom Downshroom, most of the levels in the world are dreary with a subdued color palette. Fungi Mines contains the only Ghost House in the game, before going into the underground area, which contains abandoned ruins.
  • The Muncher Fields is noticeably bleaker than anything else in the game. It's a gloomy late-game rainy level with the same dreary music as the one heard in Fungi Mines and it's on the island right in front of Castle Bowser, meaning you also have a rather huge castle fusion staring at you menacingly with demented swirly eyes from the background.
• Blind Bag Collectables: You can buy a random Standee from Poplin shops for 10 Flower Coins, which unlocks a new one or a duplicate of one you already own. The Special World has a unique shop which sells specific character Standees that you don't own for 30 Flower Coins.
• Blob Monster: Wubbas, blob like enemies with eyes make their debut in this game. Players can also turn into Wubbas in some levels through the use of Wonder Flowers.
• Blown Across the Room: In Elephant form, Mario and friends can send enemies flying by swiping them with their trunks.
• Bonus Stage: "Bonus: Coins Galore!" is a level that only appears after a Game Over in any world or clearing "The Final Battle: Bowser's Rage Stage", and consists of a short auto-scrolling course with yellow and flower coins galore. The level disappears again after you've beaten it.
• Book Ends:
  • The first Wonder Effect you get to see in the game is the Inchworm Pipes, Green Pipes brought to life that you can ride as they crawl around. The final Wonder Effect before you reach the final boss has you ride them again.
  • Piranha Plants on Parade, the second level of the game, starts the titular Wonder Effect with seven Piranha Plants introducing the song, four appearing from pipes on the ceiling, followed by three from the ground that get out to walk at you. Their appearance in Bowser's Rage Stage has them perform the exact same intro.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Yoshis and Nabbit are incapable of using the many fun powerups that you can obtain throughout the adventure, but the fact that both of them are invulnerable to everything except Bottomless Pits and similar terrain hazards makes them the most optimal choice in practically every level, Nabbit more so than Yoshi as he doesn't suffer knockback.
  • Most of the passive Badges don't enable any fancy new movement tricks or anything that enables creative play, but offer abilities that are still quite useful.
    • The Auto-Super Mushroom Badge merely grants a Super Mushroom at the start of each level or after dying. Simply starting with an additional hit on entering a level or respawning is extremely useful, and it also makes it easier to gain powerups since you now only need to find one power-up box rather than two.
    • The Sensor Badge alerts you when certain items are nearby, such as 10-Flower Coins and Wonder Flowers. Not very useful if you're just running to the end of a level, but it's invaluable for 100% Completion, Search Party mini-levels, and the rare few regular levels which require you to collect their Wonder Flowers to beat them.
    • The Add ! Block Badge is a soft easy mode, as the added ! blocks can do everything from creating larger platforms, blocking enemies, providing powerups, and even unlocking unique hidden areas.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy:
  • The battleship levels end with the heroes confronting the main engine producing the ship's weapons, which all have a glowing red switch on top that basically causes it to self-destruct.
  • Played with in the final battle against Bowser Jr., which goes nowhere since he automatically knocks himself out with the arena gimmick.
  • Bowser would be unbeatable if the floor of his arena didn't power up the characters when they jump in time with the beat.
• Boss Corridor: All battles with Bowser Jr. have a corridor with nothing in it leading to the boss arena.
• Bottomless Pit Rescue Service: The Safety Bounce badge allows the wearer to bounce out of Bottomless Pits, lava, or poison swamp one time per fall.
• Bouncy Bubbles:
  • The Bubble Flower powerup allows the player to blow bubbles, which they can bounce off of as one-time platforms.
  • The Wonder Effect of Blewbird Roost causes the titular birds to blow giant bubbles that can also be bounced off of, tending to carry the player toward the top of the level.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • Historically, Yoshi has either been a Power Up Mount (Super Mario World, Super Mario Galaxy 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, New Super Mario Bros. U), or an independent playable character (Yoshi series, Super Mario 64 DS, Super Mario Run), but never both in one game. In this game, Yoshis are both fully playable and rideable by other characters.
  • In previous Mario titles, the second world was typically a desert area, with the ice world coming adjacent to the halfway mark and a mountainous/sky world as the penultimate area. In this game, the second world is the ice-covered Fluff Puff Peaks (which also features sky levels), while the desert area comes later.
    • Similarly, the second level of most Mario titles would be the first underground level, or at least somewhere in World 1. Here, the first true underground level doesn't appear until the Petal Isles segment between Worlds 1 and 2. ^note  The underground theme is used for two levels of World 1, but these appear to take place under a thick forest canopy.
  • Speaking of world themes, the 2D games have usually been limited to grassland, desert/ruins, snow, beach, jungle, mountain, sky and volcano for general themes (besides the requisite castles and ghost houses, and on two occasions, pipes, with autumnal forests also appearing once). Wonder has savannahs, a Wutai-themed waterfall, areas made of food, factories and music stages.
  • In most previous games, worlds are usually progressed through in a linear order (though some can be skipped via hidden shortcuts). In Wonder, after obtaining the first three Royal Seeds, Worlds 4, 5, and 6 all become accessible at the same time (provided the player has the required number of Wonder Seeds for each) and each world's Royal Seed is needed to access Castle Bowser.
  • Unlike all prior mainline games, the game lacks a proper final world, as the factory-themed world inside of Castle Bowser is not labeled as its own separate course in-game, instead being considered part of Petal Isles, which acts as the central level hub of the game.
  • Two worlds do not culminate in a traditional Boss Battle: World 3's Royal Seed is given by the Master Poplin for completing the world's trial levels, while World 5's Royal Seed is given by the Poplins after rescuing them from being trapped in a cave.
  • While Bowser is up to his usual kingdom-invading shenanigans, this is the first game in the main series where his plans don't involve any kidnapping, even with a new royal getting introduced. Instead, Bowser steals the royalty's castle and Prince Florian tags along with you during the adventure and holds onto your badges, granting you the magic needed to use them. Also for the first time in a while, the final boss fight against him never has Bowser become a giant, instead fighting you as an Andross-like head and hands.
  • Bowser's villainous aesthetic has long been established—dark grey stone and red-orange lava, something especially consistent within the 2D Mario games. Wonder shakes it up, with the dominant color of Bowser's Wonder-infused evil aesthetic being a vivid sinister green, and much emphasis on metal and machinery for a more edgy, less medieval-influenced style to his paraphernalia. Wonder also marks a break from the lava world also being Bowser's world in the 2D series—here, the lava world is the world preceding Bowser's small section of castle levels located in the connecting hub map.
  • Time limits aren't present (except for a couple notable exceptions), allowing players to take all the time they need to beat a level. The scoring feature is also no longer present, replacing points from defeating enemies with Idiosyncratic Combo Levels.
  • The game is noticeably more focused on narrative, with significantly more dialogue on the overworld, distinct sub-plots in each world which have their own narrative progression, and talking NPCs in levels themselves. The game still has an Excuse Plot, but the way the story is presented has a lot more personality compared to the rather minimalist New Super Mario Bros. games as well as earlier 2D Mario games, instead feeling closer to the style of the 3D Mario games.
  • Ever since New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Mario powerups have largely followed one core pattern for their "main" powerups: Super Mushroom, Fire Flower, a flight powerup,^note i.e. Propeller Mushroom, Super Leaf, Super Acorn, and the Super Star, with other powerups generally being secondary to them. This game eschews the flight powerup archetype, which significantly reduces players' ability to skip past platforming challenges in open-air levels.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: In the demo version of the game only, after beating the first course, Prince Florian will excitedly exclaim that "this demo has even more courses for [them] to play".
• Brutal Bonus Level: All Special World courses have five-star difficulty, but the final course in the game, The Final-Final Test Badge Marathon, takes the cake.
• Brutish Bulls: Bulrushes are buffalo-like creatures that charge after the player on sight and knock each other out when they collide. They're prevalent in the levels "Bulrush Coming Through" and in "Bulrush Express" where numerous ones appear in a stampede during Wonder Effects.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: The first part of Fungi Mines has a few swamp levels like "Beware of the Rifts" and "Taily's Toxic Pond".
• Bubble Gun: One of the new powerups in this game is the Bubble Flower, which grants players the ability to shoot bubbles to trap enemies within. These bubbles are surprisingly powerful, as they can defeat enemies that are normally invincible like Dry Bones. Players can even bounce off of them to reach higher areas. During a Wonder Effect, Blewbirds can do the same as well.
• Bullet Seed: A new variant of the Piranha Plants, the Melon Piranha Plants, make their debut in this game. They spit out watermelon seeds just like Yoshi when he ate watermelons in the Yoshi's Island series — and as a fun Easter Egg, if Yoshi eats a Melon Piranha Plant, he regains the same watermelon seed spit.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • Princess Daisy is playable in a mainline game again. Since her playable debut in Super Mario Run, she's disappeared and hasn't shown up in the two mainline installments between then and now.
  • Nabbit returns to a mainline game for the first time since his debut in New Super Mario Bros. U (and its Deluxe Updated Re-release), retaining his characteristic enemy invincibility and inability to use power-ups.
  • The Li'l Sparkies and Hotheads make their return after previously being overshadowed by the Amps from Super Mario 64, only seldom appearing in spin-offs and in Super Princess Peach until this game.
• Busman's Holiday: Mario and Friends are invited to the Flower Kingdom to celebrate with Prince Florian. But Bowser (as usual) shows up to spoil the proceedings, stealing the Wonder Flower and merges with Prince Florian's Castle. Now the gang have to stop Bowser and return peace to the Flower Kingdom.
• By the Lights of Their Eyes: Several areas take place in silhouette, with certain elements like the characters' eyes being the only visible part of their bodies.
• Call-Back:
  • Bowser once again invades a kingdom or kingdoms that are not the Mushroom Kingdom, as was previously the case in Super Mario 3D World and Super Mario Odyssey. Like in Odyssey, the Kingdom's local currency — flower coins — is purple and distinctly shaped from the standard currency.
  • The villain takes over somebody else's castle and warps it into one of his own, with the goal for the heroes to take it back. This was the case for Wario taking over Mario's castle in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins.
  • Bowser Jr. (in his Wonder form here) being a Recurring Boss and running away after being defeated was previously the case in New Super Mario Bros., unlike it however, the game lacks other unique bosses and he's the only boss besides Bowser himself.
  • The color scheme of Bowser Jr.'s Wonder form is similar to that of Dark Bowser.
  • One of the Wonder Effects has characters in Drill form outrun a Wonder Konk, a la Yoshi's New Island's Jackhammer Yoshi.
  • Just like in Super Mario 3D World, the major collectables open new levels by destroying the impediments that block them, though in Wonder's case, it's the Wonder Piranha Plants, black Piranha Plants with thorny vines, rather than Bowser Statues.
  • Several badges borrow abilities from past games. The Crouching High-Jump badge allows the player to charge power while crouching to make a high jump, a mechanic that originally appeared in Super Mario Bros. 2. The Timed High-Jump badge gives players more height by consecutively jumping, like the triple jump from Super Mario 64. And the Boosting Spin Jump badge turns the mid-air twirl from a weak momentum-halting move into an impromptu midair jump, like the Spin Attack from Super Mario Galaxy.
  • Certain Wonder Effects summon Mario ghosts that duplicate your moves with a slight delay, similar to the Cosmic Clones introduced in Super Mario Galaxy 2. The music that plays when they appear is even a remix of the Cosmic Clones' theme.
  • The Bone Dragonyard's dragons are a big Yoshi's Story reference in their designs, which is even more pronounced when a Wonder Effect lets you bring one back to life and ride one.
  • A Wonder Effect turns you metallic, with the music being a remix of the "Metal Mario" theme from Super Mario 64.
  • The Special World is a throwback to many secret worlds from previous 2D Mario games. The hidden entrances call back to Star Road from World, the name and final message homage the Special Zone from the same game, and there being one level unlocked from each of the other worlds is taken from World 9 in both console New games.
  • The sound effect of filling the elephant form's trunk with water is the same one that plays when collecting a water bottle to fill up F.L.U.D.D.'s tank in Super Mario Sunshine.
  • The presence of the Green, Red, Blue, and Yellow Yoshis directly calls back to the species' debut in Super Mario World, which had the main Yoshi (green) and three other Yoshis that Mario could discover in Star Road (Red, Blue, and Yellow).
  • The secret exit in Hot-Hot Hot! is a callback to Subspace from Super Mario Bros. 2, with players entering through a door that takes them to a silhouetted version of the level they just played through.
• Canon Discontinuity: One of the loading screen tips talks about Toads, and states that "those are their heads — not big hats!", alluding to their mushroom caps. This is a direct contradiction to The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! and The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, in which Toads' caps are treated as like removable hats.
• Canon Immigrant: Handheld red POW Blocks reappear here after deputing in Super Mario Maker 2, using the same mechanics.
• Cap:
  • As with most 2D Mario titles, lives cap at 99.
  • Flower Coins max out at 999, and any collected past that are lost. This can be frustrating if you suddenly lose a bonus sum of Flower Coins by doing something special (like finding all the Wonder Seeds in a World), which is why Prince Florian nudges you in the loading screen to buy things if your wallet gets too fat.
• Cash Gate: Certain areas on the world map are blocked by a rock or the bridge is broken. A nearby Poplin wants to clear the obstacle, but needs some flower coins for an energy boost.
• Cave Behind the Falls: A sandfall in the Sunbaked Desert overworld hides a cave with the Ninji Dance Party level in it.
• Character Customization: Specific abilities that characters previously had in Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario 3D World and Super Mario Run return with a twist; instead of being character specific (such as only Luigi being able to use his characteristic Floating High Jump), they now are completely separate from the characters and can be equipped into anyone using ability badges, allowing each character's active and passive abilities to be customized to one's desire. For instance, equipping the Floating High Jump badge will cause everyone to jump similarly to Luigi as he did in all aforementioned games and New Super Luigi U.
• Cheated Angle: The characters are always shown from a three-quarters view to make their expressions more visible, one of many stylistic choices that harkens back to the series' older 2D platformers.
• Chest Monster: Noknoks are teal door-shaped enemies who mimic the appearance of actual doors in an attempt to lure you close so that they can attack. They are still functional doors, though, and can be defeated and used by jumping on them to stun them and then opening them.
• Chrome Champion: The Wonder Effect in High-Voltage Gauntlet turns you into a metal version of yourself that is immune to electricity and can absorb it to illuminate dark areas, as well as giving your character's voice a reverberating tone similar to Metal Mario's.
• Chubby Chaser: One promotional short has Bowser try to woo Peach with a flower. When she uses the Elephant Fruit, Bowser momentarily stares at her before giving her a bouquet of flowers.
• Circling Birdies: Stunned enemies have stars orbiting them.
• Co-Dragons: Bowser Jr. and Kamek serve as this to Bowser. Jr. guards the captured palaces while Kamek summons flying battleship levels to stop Mario and his friends.
• Collision Damage: Curiously downplayed. For instance, if you bump into a Goomba from behind or if they're asleep, they will bounce away in surprise before walking towards your direction, and you'll also receive knockback if you aren't running at full speed but take no damage. They will still hurt you if you touch them from the front because they will bite you.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • All of the playable characters have a distinct color scheme that make it easy to visually tell them apart from their similarly-designed counterparts. The Toads and Yoshis (besides the green one, which is the actual character himself) are outright named after their colors this time.
  • The Wonder Seeds have different colors in each world:
    • Pipe Rock Plateau: Blue
    • Fluff Puff Peaks: Cyan
    • Shining Falls: Pink
    • Sunbaked Desert: Yellow
    • Fungi Mines: Green
    • Deep Magma Bog: Purple
    • Petal Isles: Orange
    • Special World: White
• Combat Resuscitation: When playing in multi-player, defeated characters don't lose a life instantly, but instead are put into a ghost state, in which they can wiggle around freely across the screen. They now have five seconds to touch either another player or a standee before they die for real and lose a life.
• Comedic Underwear Exposure:
  • Peach and Daisy's Elephant forms are too big for their dresses, resulting in their thigh-length pantaloons being constantly visible.
  • The same thing happens with the Wonder Effect in Bloomps of the Desert Skies that turns them into floating balloons.
• Conjoined Eyes: The Hoppo, Smogrin, Bulrush, and Sugarstars all feature their sclerae joined together to create stylized butterfly shapes.
• Conspicuous Electric Obstacle:
  • On one of the clouds levels, there are clearly electrified dark clouds during the Wonder Effect.
  • High-Voltage Gauntlet is full of yellow boxes with lightning bolt symbols on them. These shoot out electric lightning bolts to a direction marked by little ball-shaped electrodes on them.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In addition to the classic yellow Mario coins, the game also features flower-shaped purple flower coins that allow you to buy things from shops—much like how Super Mario Odyssey showed that all the different kingdoms have uniquely-shaped purple coins that serve as their own special currency, which were necessary to buy things unique to each kingdom.
  • Four Yoshis, (Green, Red, Blue, and Yellow) all appear as playable characters, but use different gameplay mechanics from the plumbers, princesses, and Toads. Like in Yoshi's Island they are invincible to enemy damage, but will lose a life if they fall into bottomless pits, touch lava, or get crushed. Likewise, Nabbit handles just as he did in New Super Luigi U. The Necessary Drawback is the Yoshis and Nabbit can't use any power-ups.
  • Badges make their first main series appearance, after being constrained to RPGs such as Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi. Like those games, they're used to grant Mario and co. exclusive abilities when equipped, such as improving their platforming skills, drawing in coins, or sensing hidden items. Notably however, Prince Florian is the one wearing the badges instead of any of the playable cast.
• Co-Op Multiplayer:
  • The game supports four players simultaneously. This time, players don't bump or bounce off each other, in contrast to previous games which supported this mechanic.
  • Playing online works similarly. The player can see the ghosts of other players in levels and the world map in real time, and while they can't bounce off the player's head or defeat enemies for them, they can still be interacted with as you can give power-ups or use them to revive yourself like in local Co-op. The player is also able to challenge up to three others to races where they compete to finish a level or an objective as fast as possible. You can play with passers-by, or with up to 12 players in a Co-Op Room, with up to 4 players simultaneously on a single course.
• Corridor Cubbyhole Run: In the level Maw-Maw Mouthful, its Wonder Flower transforms you into a Goomba. You are subsequently constantly chased by the hungry Maw Maws and have to avoid them by using safety zones, such as hiding behind trees.
• Cosmetic Award: Getting the final Badge requires you to complete the game 100%, that is, collecting all the Wonder Seeds, 10-Flower Coins, Badges, and Standees, and reaching the top of every Goal Pole (including secret ones). After which, you also must clear the final Brutal Bonus Level in order to get the Badge. It replaces all the sound effects with A Cappella ones.
• Cowardly Mooks: One of the game's new enemies are the Skedaddlers, chipmunks wearing a shell similar to that of Rocky Wrenches in their debut and early Mario media, that flee when an enemy or danger is near, sometimes with items on hand, though they will spit Birdo Egg-like acorns before running.
• Cranium Ride: In two levels, you ride on top of a big stampede of Rhinoes. In one of them, you even ride them beyond the initial flagpole, leading to a secret exit.
• Cumulonemesis: Smogrins are cloud enemies that also appear in larger sizes. They don't really do anything except float in the way.
• Cute Creature, Creepy Mouth: The Hoppycats are fairly cute for the most part...until they reveal the retractable jagged teeth on their undersides, making them look rather off-putting, especially with the way their bodies bend. It gets even more off-putting when Mario and crew, turned into Hoppycats, display the teeth in the moments before they bounce off enemies...as if the Hoppycat's instincts have become their own.
• Dance Battler: The final battle against Castle Bowser adds Rhythm Game elements, with Bowser (as a floating head and set of hands a la Andross) vibing and attacking to the EDM background music, and the heroes having to attack to the beat as well to successfully hit his weak points.
• A Day in the Limelight: Fitting for the Flower Kingdom's overall theming, Piranha Plants get more focus than usual. In addition to being frequent enemies, they have new variants like Melon Piranha Plants, Trottin' Piranha Plants, and Trottin' Bone Piranha Plants, Wonder Piranha Plants guard levels with Wonder Seed requirements and Castle Bowser is protected by Cloud Piranhas, and Bowser can summon Piranha Plant-like notes made of fire during his boss fight.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: A Game Over results in the player getting booted out of the stage, and the player loses up to 50 flower coins. However, a special bonus level opens up on the World Map, where the player can gather coins and flower coins. Exaggerated even more in Multiplayer, where players can die and revive countless times as long as their ghosts can touch other players or standees, effectively making lives infinite.
• Denser and Wackier: This might just be the wackiest Mario game yet. Mario and friends can turn into an elephant, ride on Yoshi while an elephant, and turn their feet into a drill to dig through certain objects. The plot is similarly wacky. Bowser uses a Wonder Flower to fuse with Prince Florian's castle and his Koopa Clown Car into Castle Bowser, a giant living airship that can control Piranha Plants to cause havoc. Piranha Plants and even Boos sing.
• Deranged Animation: The game goes for a decidedly more surreal and trippy art style than past games, but this really applies to the crazy ways levels change during a Wonder Effect. A lot of squash and stretch occurs, such as Mario stretching to several times his normal height (with the background stretching to match), Warp Pipes crawling around like worms, and Hoppos being used as boulders.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • In World 4's Rolling Ball Hall level, it's possible for the player to access the area where the final three Wonder Tokens are hidden before activating the Wonder Flower's effect. If you do, you'll find that instead of the tokens there will be Talking Flowers chastising you for not doing things in the proper order. In addition, if you open the way to this area then use it to skip the second token, when you reach what would be the final token, the Talking Flower there will lament that you didn't get them all, leaving the seed unobtainable for that run.
  • It’s possible to skip the Wow Bud on the first bone raft that causes the poison to rise in Fungi Mines's "A Final Uncharted Area: Poison Ruins" by using the Bubble Flower power-up to hit the Wow Bud above. If you do that and end up falling down the pit on the right that would normally be filled up by the poison, another Wow Bud will appear on a bone raft in the pit, which also causes the poison to rise so that you aren't forced to retry the course.
  • In the final castle level against Bowser, if playing as Peach, Bowser tells her that he loves her and mentions that she gets captured by him.
  • While other characters speak English like every other entry, the talking flowers talk in the corresponding language the game is set aside from English instead of speaking only in that language.
• Dinosaurs Are Dragons: One of the Deep Magma Bog levels features a number of fossilized skeletons depicting some serpent-like creature. The Wonder Effect of the level revives them, restoring their draconic appearance.
• Disconnected Side Area: Throughout each world, there are hidden pipes that take Mario and co. to a disconnected area in a new location where they encounter Captain Toad who gives fifty flower coins to assist them.
• Divergent Character Evolution: Inverted; all the characters except the Yoshis and Nabbit play identically to each other, meaning Peach doesn't have her ability to float and Luigi doesn't have higher jumps. Instead, they can be customized to your liking using badges.
• Double-Edged Buff: The Expert Badges specialize in this:
  • The Jet Run Badge lets you run faster than normal and allows one to briefly run in the air and jump off of it, at the expense of not being able to stop outside of ground pounds or crouching.
  • The Spring Feet Badge lets you jump extra high, but you cannot walk or run, as you'll be constantly bouncing nonstop.
  • The Invisibility Badge lets you be undetectable by enemies that would normally attack if you're in their line of sight at the cost of, well, being invisible, as Visible Invisibility does not apply; you'll have to rely on other cues to see where you are, like dust clouds and motion lines.
• Dowsing Device: The Sensor badge alerts you when you're close to certain collectibles, such as Wonder Flowers or 10-Flower Coins.
• Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer: You can press L and R buttons to turn your character into a ghost, at which point they will disappear after five seconds. They can instantly revive into the game but at the cost of a life.
• Early-Bird Cameo: If you manage to reach the Special World's Final Test before entering Castle Bowser, you'll encounter a couple of Wonder effects before they're properly introduced.
• Easy Level Trick: The Invisibility Badge renders Mario and his friends completely invisible - including for you, the player. However, this is averted when you're playing in multiplayer, as the leading player's crown is always visible just above their heads, making all invisibility stages a cakewalk.
• Easter Egg:
  • There are a number of pipes on the overworld map that are obscured behind foreground objects. Enter them, and you'll be taken to a different world, with Captain Toad there to greet you — and give you a couple of Flower Coins for finding him.
  • If you're wearing the invisibility badge when confronting Bowser Jr or Bowser, their dialogue will change.
  • Before the final boss begins, Bowser has unique dialogue if you confront him as Peach, where he refers to her as "MY BELOVED!"
  • Pressing A on the loading screen will cause Prince Florian to jump.
  • Talking Flowers will have unique dialogue on certain occassions. For example, at the end of Gnawsher Lair, a Talking Flower will warn you not to hang around because the Gnawshers will eat the stairs leading to the goal. If you allow them to eat the stairs, the Talking Flower will say "I told ya."
  • If you finish a level in Elephant form with water in your trunk, the character will sprinkle the Poplin with the leftover water, causing the Poplin's bud to bloom.
• Editorial Synaesthesia: Wind gusts are depicted with white lines.
• Eggshell Clothing: When turned into Goombas, characters retain accessories from their main forms (such as Mario's hat), but since Yoshi doesn't wear any accessories, he gets a broken Yoshi eggshell as a hat instead.
• Elimination Platformer: The K.O. Arena levels task you with defeating all enemies in an enclosed area as fast as possible, in a nod to Mario Bros.
• Emote Command:
  • When holding down the run button, your Player Character switches from a happy expression to a determined glare.
  • A more traditional system of emote commands are available to all players while online, with four to choose from that'll display the appropriate emoji over the player's head with which to communicate with.
• Eternal Engine: Many levels from the final part of Petal Isles fit this trope, with many conveyor belts, electric circuits and other factory elements.
• Ethereal Choir: A choir of disembodied voices can be heard shouting, "WONDER!!!" at the beginning of a Wonder Effect.
• Evolving Title Screen: Getting 100% completion turns the white background of the title screen black.

Tropes F-L

• Faceship: Castle Bowser has Bowser's face on it, which can still emote and laugh.
• Fatal Fireworks: There's a new Bob-Omb-like enemy introduced in the first battleship level. Resembling a firework fountain, it launches three explosives upwards when it's ignited before completely falling apart. These explosives can hurt enemies.
• Feathered Fiend: One new enemy is the Condart, a dart-like bird that will fly at you beak-first but get stuck when they hit terrain. Another new Koopa Troop minion, the Blewbirds, make their debut as well, attacking Mario and his friends by shooting their beaks at them and during a Wonder Effect, can blow bubbles from their beaks just like the Bubble Mario transformation.
• Fictional Currency: Introduced in this game, Flower Coins are purple coins that are used to purchase items like 1-Ups and badges from shops. The Poplins get an energy boost from them, which encourages them to perform heavy-duty tasks.
• Final Boss, New Dimension: Once you defeat all of Bowser's Cloud Piranhas, you can enter the central area of Petal Isles - where Bowser has prepared his "Big Wonder", aka a new dimension full of Amazing Technicolor Battlefield elements.
• Final Exam Finale: Done in multiple forms. The last level of the main campaign, "Bowser's Rage Stage", features the level quickly morphing between previous Wonder effects to keep the player on their toes and remember previous gameplay gimmicks, and then two bonus levels end the Special World with their own combined tests of previous gameplay mechanics.
• Fisher King: After Bowser touches the Wonder Flower and fuses with Prince Florian's castle, he changes not only the castle but various other parts of the Flower Kingdom to match his aesthetic.
• Flame Spewer Obstacle: Airships have fire traps that regularly shoot out green flames. The game also has a 5-way flame emitter on rails that can be moved around using pullable handles.
• Flower Motifs: The setting is the Flower Kingdom, talking flowers are everywhere, the kingdom's unique coins are shaped like flowers, Princess Daisy (named for a flower and long using a flower as a personal emblem) is playable, the collectibles this time are Wonder Seeds (which are usually given by Poplins, a Toad expy with a flower bud for a head), and Prince Florian is a Wiggler-like ally with a flower on his head.
• Flying Seafood Special: Flying balloon-like fish called Bloomps and leaping pointy fish called Anglefish make their debut in game.
• Forced Perspective: In Shining Falls, the mountains are made up of rhombohedra that are foreshortened into a fake Isometric Projection view.
• Forced Transformation: Some Wonder Effects turn Mario and friends into a different form, such as a defenseless Goomba or a Spike Ball that can roll into enemies.
• Foreshadowing: Whenever Castle Bowser starts powering himself up with Wonder power, he does it with a noticeable rhythm. This foreshadows that the battle with Bowser involves timing your jumps with the rhythm.
• Funnel Cloud Journey: The Wonder Effect in "Downpour Uproar" sends Mario and friends flying through a hurricane. During the hurricane, lightning strikes and red Koopa Troopas serve as obstacles.
• Furry Female Mane: Inverted — the Mario brothers keep their mustaches while transformed into elephants, while the princesses are totally hairless, instead having inner ears that match the color of their hair.
• Fusion Dance: In the opening cutscene, Bowser, in his Koopa Clown Car, fuses with Prince Florian's castle into Castle Bowser after the former touches the Wonder Flower.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Yoshis and Nabbit are incapable of using powerups, but have different interactions with them. Yoshi takes powerups and puts them in his reserve item slot, enabling him to be helpful to Mario & friends by giving them his powerups, which is in line with how Yoshi usually behaves in Mario media. Nabbit does no such thing, turning powerups into flower coins for his own convenience; he's stated to not be an ally of the Bros., after all.
• Galactic Conqueror: Like in Yoshi's Island DS, Super Mario Galaxy, and its sequel, Bowser intends to rule the universe. This time by enforcing it into his concert rhythm to make it "a truly captive audience".
• Gelatinous Encasement: In World 5's An Uncharted Area: Wubba Ruins, Badge Challenge: Grappling Vine I, and KO Arena: Fungi Funk, the player can walk on the firm surface of the goo and can ground-pound through it and wade inside the goo itself. The player can also begin wading through the goo if entered from underneath or from the sides. The player doesn't sink through the goo on their own and must deliberately act to move downward through it. Fireballs from the Fire Flower move through the goo as normal. Later on in Wubba Ruins, the player can pick up the course's Wonder Flower, transforming the player into a goo-like Wubba, which can swim inside the goo much more effectively (as well as move on the goo's surface itself).
• Genius Loci: Bowser used a Wonder Flower to perform a Fusion Dance with Prince Florian's castle and his Koopa Clown Car, becoming Castle Bowser, sentient floating castle. He is so gargantuan, the Clown Car part of him is too enormous to fight. Mario and friends instead confront the transformed castle on top of the castle as it serves as Bowser's one and only weak spot.
• Giant Mook: In addition to the returning Big Goombas, Big Goombrats, Big Piranha Plants, and Big Fire Piranha Plants, this game introduces Big Trottin' Piranha Plants, first seen in Piranha Plants on Parade.
• Graceful Loser: Wiggler doesn't get upset at all if you beat it in a race. Instead, it cheerfully gives you a Wonder Seed as your reward.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: The Grappling Vine Badge allows the character to throw a vine (matching the design of ladder vines thst pop out of blocks) that can latch onto walls.
• Gravity Screw: One of many ways the Wonder Flower can mess with the world. Certain areas cause players to walk on the walls from a top-down perspective, like in The Legend of Zelda.
• Greek Chorus: The Talking Flowers comment on certain things like you doing a badge challenge, completing a KO arena, or activating a Wonder Flower.
• Green Hill Zone: The first world, Pipe-Rock Plateau, is the typical green hill zone with lots of greenery and trees and a generally low difficulty.
• Green Thumb:
  • One badge gives your character the ability to grapple onto walls with a flower vine.
  • Bowser gains the ability to control Cloudy Piranhas upon fusing with Prince Florian's castle and his Koopa Clown Car.
• Grind Boots: Mario and friends can grind along zippy platforms with arrows, which come in orange and blue colors for opposite directions. These platforms can be mounted on the walls and ceilings as well and will carry the player in whichever direction indicated by the arrows upon contact. Jumping on the ground platforms does alow you to break the ride, and you can get a tiny bit of ground to jump in the opposite direction, which is required for the Wall-Jump Climb Badge's second challenge level.
• Hailfire Peaks: A number of worlds have multiple themes instead of having one theme per world. Pipe-Rock Plateau not only features the usual grassland but also contains a forest level and a rocky mountain area, while Fluff-Puff Peaks feature ice and sky-themed levels. Petal Isles, the connecting hub world, features mostly beachy theming, but also features a tiny Level Ate segment of dessert-themed scenery. Deep Magma Bog is a Bubblegloop Swamp crossed with a Lethal Lava Land, where ashen plants and twisting vines thrive in the volcanic heat; Fungi Mines instead crosses the swamp theme with an Underground Level, with giant mushrooms thriving in the deepest reaches of the earth.
• Halloween Episode: The Wonder Effect in the level "Upshroom Downshroom" fills the stage with giant Jack-o-Lanterns and plays a spooky tune called "Pumpkin Party". This may be a reference to the game originally releasing in October.
• Handy Feet: Popping the Parachute Cap while holding a shell will have the character hold the shell with their legs while they glide.
• Happily Ever After: Said by a Talking Flower at the end of The Stinger:
  [Bowser, Kamek, and Jr. fall from the sky and crash into a hillside]
  Talking Flower: "And we all lived happily ever after."
• The Heavy: While Bowser is busy using the Wonder Flower to create his Ultimate Wonder, Bowser Jr. heads around to the different areas of the Flower Kingdom and uses the Wonder power himself to cause some sort of mayhem. The only areas where he doesn't do this are in Shining Falls and Fungi Mines, which feature no boss battles at all.
• The Hedge of Thorns: To incentivize more thorough play, some levels are blocked by Piranha Plants ensnaring them with their thorny vines until the player has collected enough of the area's Wonder Seeds to dispel them.
• He Knows About Timed Hits: A few talking flowers mention in-game controls in a few cases. Prince Florian also sometimes does this in the loading screens.
• Helpful Mook: With so many new enemies and gimmick mechanics therein, at least a few had to end up with helpful aspects.
  • Blewbirds spit out their beaks and create temporary pole platforms in the wall, helping the player navigate. Under a Wonder effect, they instead spit huge bubbles to bounce on as platforms for a similar utility.
  • Smackerels and Konks both break objects they strike, allowing the player to lure them and get some pathways open and items set free.
  • Hoppycats will mimic the player's jumps, jumping whenever they do. The level design takes advantage of this to place them beneath switches, item blocks, breakable terrain, etc. so that their spiked shells will activate/destroy anything in their path whenever the player jumps, sometimes to their advantage. The Sharp Trial: Launch to Victory in particular orients itself around moving platforms that contain a sideways-jumping Hoppycat, which the player must keep alive in order to access 10-flower coins.
  • Bloomps can be bounced off to reach new platforms as well as some 10-flower coins and flagpole toppers.
  • Any shelled enemy that can be picked up as an item is often useful or required for collecting items and breaking brick blocks that can only be struck from the side. "Armads on the Roll" even has some scenarios that require you to toss the rolled Armads upward to obtain items out of reach.
  • Bullrushes will destroy certain blocks Mario has no other way to get through and they can be mounted to go over dangerous terrain that'd be otherwise impassable.
• High-Tech Hexagons: The mechanical Castle Bowser has hexagons absolutely everywhere, and when fought as the Final Boss, glowing pink hexagons serve as weak points.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • In elephant form, a character can knock a Spiny right back into the Lakitu that threw it.
  • Bowser Jr., just before he confronts you in the final stage, doesn't realise that his boss platform can also be hit by the giant fists he summoned, meaning he gives himself a One-Hit KO.
• Holler Button: In the online multiplayer, there's a dedicated button to enable limited communication with other players. It has a smiley face, megaphone, music notes, and a question mark; choosing one will make the corresponding icon appear over your character, or show up on their icon if you're offscreen to other players.
• Honorable Elephant: Mario and his friends become this once they acquire the Elephant Fruit. Being turned into elephants, they retain their heroic nature and just as dedicated to stop Bowser.
• Hub Level: Unlike previous 2D Mario games, the worlds aren't a linear chain from one to the next, and instead, a separate world, the Petal Isles, links the main worlds together as a ring they branch off from. The Petal Isles have several stages of their own, and chunks of the Isles serve as interludes between the main worlds to open the paths to the next world. Only by progressing through the levels and the main worlds does the full loop path of the Petal Isles get unlocked for the player, but then, the player can run around the map with total freedom to reach the worlds however they like.
• Huge Rider, Tiny Mount: Any playable character can ride a Yoshi (including other Yoshis), even if they have a power-up. This can lead to a scenario where Elephant Mario rides on a visibly struggling Yoshi◊.
• Huggy, Huggy Hippos: Hoppos, rotund hippo-like critters that are (presumably) docile, can roll when kicked by Mario and can take out a row of enemies like that of a Koopa Shell.
• Idiosyncratic Combo Levels: Unlike previous titles, the game no longer keeps score, but comboing enemies with stomps or a shell instead utilizes this, starting with "Good" and ending with "Wonderful". By exceeding "Wonderful", a player can obtain 1-Ups.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: To an extent, as while there is no proper difficulty level system per se, the characters themselves serve as this. The main cast of characters (Mario, Luigi, Peach, Daisy, and the Toads) act as the "normal" difficulty, while Nabbit and the Yoshis are "easy" difficulty, being invincible to enemy damage (though not Bottomless Pits or lava) in exchange for being unable to use power-ups. The Yoshis in particular can also be seen as being Easier Than Easy on top of this, as they maintain their ability to eat objects and flutter jump as usual. On the flipside, the game can be made harder by turning off the helpful perks of online mode, and "expert" type badges grant special abilities but require the player to learn a more advanced or unusual way of handling their character.
• Improvised Parachute: The Parachute Cap Badge allows you to float using a large hat. While Mario and Luigi use their own hats, everyone else pulls their own color-coded hats out of nowhere.
• Indy Escape: Rolling-Ball Hall's Wonder Effect tilts the stage and releases huge Spiked Balls which the player must outrun.
• Indy Hat Roll: When Mario and Luigi run into sideways pipes, their hat gets left behind, and they'll reach their hand out of the pipe to grab it.
• Inflating Body Gag: The Wonder Flower's effect in Bloomps of the Desert Skies causes Mario and friends to inflate like balloons, similar to the P-Balloon item from Super Mario World.
• Interface Spoiler: Zigzagged. Some stages have secret exits that are worth an extra Wonder Seed. On one hand, this extra Wonder Seed will not be on the stage's progression tracker until after you find it. On the other hand, if a stage's progression tracker is filled out but there isn't a check mark denoting its completion, a missed secret exit is the only possible explanation.
  • Whether it's via seeing them for yourself or being placed by other players, the various standees can reveal future power-ups and Wonder-related character transformations early on in the game, before you experience them in person.
• Invisibility: The Invisibility Badge makes the character completely invisible to enemies, as well as the player since there's no Visible Invisibility. At most, you'll have to look at the dust clouds the character kicks up while moving, though, the situation-dependent strategies of picking up an item or riding a cloud can allow you to easily track the character by the position of either. This badge won't work on Bowser, whose Wonder power allows him to see you.
• Iron Butt Monkey: Whenever a level calls for physical humor, the Talking Flowers are usually at the butt of the joke. Getting attacked by giant Smackerels, smothered under heavy snowstorms, falling from great heights, and getting seasick from a rocking platform are just a short list of the misfortunes they suffer. They don't actually get hurt by any of this, and won't come off any worse for wear.
• Irony:
  • In this game, Mario has the ability to turn into an elephant. Elephants are some of the only animals who are unable to jump. What is the main thing that Mario excels at? (Elephant form does not take away or impede the jump ability, either!)
  • The Flower Kingdom, with its flowerlike inhabitants, is ruled by Prince Florian, who is a caterpillar — the kind of creature known for eating flowers.
• Journey to the Sky: The level Cosmic Hoppos has Mario and his friends climb a very tall landscape that reaches the high skies. Its lower part shows a structure made of standard grassy rock, but the higher ones show it covered by cloudy matter. And the exit's location isn't the highest part: If the characters continue climbing upward, they'll reach a wall that hides the Wonder Flower; and touching it will send them all the way up to outer space, where they move in a floaty manner similar to the Space Zone levels of Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins.
• Jump Scare: Light-Switch Mansion has a couple of innocuous-looking doors in it. Approach them, and they might let out a high-pitched cartoon scream, then grow teeth and start running towards Mario, which can prove to be quite the startle if you're not expecting it.
• Kaizo Trap: Would you believe you can die in the end credits?! Just be careful not to be crushed by that dragon...
• King Mook: King Boo makes his first appearance in the 2D games in "Lightswitch Mansion", although the end of his Wonder Effect implies this one is actually just a regular Boo transformed by the Wonder Flower.
• Knock Back: Neither Yoshis nor Nabbit will get hurt by enemies, but Yoshi will be bumped away from danger (and potentially fall into lava, pits, or anything else that can actually defeat them) while Nabbit simply sweats and flickers to indicate he hit something that would damage most of the characters. The knockback is the Yoshis' tradeoff for being able to flutter jump and eat objects.
• Later-Installment Weirdness: There's no printed strategy guides for this game (Prima Games switched to online only in the mid 2010's) and as such, many enemy names only come from in-game (e.g. Skedaddlers, Missile Megs) or trading cards (Trottin' Piranha Plants).
• Last Chance Hit Point: Dying in Multiplayer turns you into a ghost, but you can revive by touching another player before the 5-second timer runs out, without losing a life.
• Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid: The Wonder Effect in "Pull, Turn, Burn" lets you swim through the magma and the lava geysers in the ruins like they're water. You can even use the Dolphin Kick badge to swim through them faster.
• Leaning Tower of Mooks: A new kind of enemy is a type of green, bamboo-like creature that sometimes appear in stacks which can be taken down en masse with a ground pound, similarly to Goomba Towers.
• Lethal Lava Land: Deep Magma Bog is an underground lava world where the local Poplins study the geothermal energy.
• Level Ate:
  • Sunbaked Desert is a desert that looks a lot like a giant cake, with the sandstone walls appearing similar to cake cross-sections, the white sand on top looking like white cake frosting, and the dunes resembling dollops of cream and icing.
  • "Maw-Maw Mouthful", as well as "Petal Isles Special: Way of the Goomba", take place in a dessert-themed plain.
• Limited Animation: To a small extent, the game's animation mimics the more limited sprite-based animation from early 2D titles. The traditional gold coins, for example, do not have the smooth rotation that they had in modern 3D games, instead mimicking their sprites from 2D games such as Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World. Their animation cycle consists of quickly snapping to a keyframe depicting their face, then pausing very briefly before moving once more.
• Living Ship: Bowser turned into a living, flying castle after he fused with Prince Florian's castle.
• Logical Weakness: The Bubble Flower can trap enemies in bubbles to instantly defeat them... unless they're The Spiny, in which case the bubbles just harmlessly pop against their spikes.
• Lost in Translation: Downplayed; the joke about Talking Flowers wondering what Goombas taste like is a bit less of a Non Sequitur in Japanese. Goombas are called Kuribo, which contains kuri, the Japanese word for "chestnut". This part of the joke is lost in areas where they aren't named after chestnuts.
• Lovely Angels: Two players can go through the game as Peach and Daisy, the franchise's quintessential Tomboy and Girly Girl pair. This marks the first mainline Mario game in which the two princesses can adventure and kick butt together as a duo.

Tropes M-Z

• Macross Missile Massacre: One late level has players dodging a shower of Missile Megs, Bullet Bill-like missiles. Unlike their smaller brethren, they can be ridden on but landing on them weighs them down and puts them into a slow descent. The Wonder Flower-boosted ones have no such issue and maintain altitude and trajectory while ridden.
• Magic Music: Certain levels, and certain Wonder Effects within levels, are choreographed to musical scores. Some levels cause enemies to start singing and platforms to arrange themselves to the beat, and "Ninji Jump Party" features a stage-wide Wonder effect where jumping on the beat keeps the party lively and opens access to some collectibles. Taken to a crescendo in "Bowser's Rage Stage", where jumping with the eight-count beat of the floor (one-two-three-RED-one-two-three-BLUE) is crucial to activating jump platforms that let you strike and defeat Castle Bowser.
  Talking Flowers: One! Two! Three! Jump!
• Magic Pants: The characters' clothes expand to fit their elephant transformations (though their shoes disappear entirely).
• The Many Deaths of You: The characters have different Death Throws animations depending on the situation, like getting singed and grabbing their backsides when falling in lava, or getting an Ash Face when zapped by electricity.
• Mechanical Abomination: Bowser transforms into a gigantic sentient flying fortress named Castle Bowser when he merges with Prince Florian's castle and his Koopa Clown Car.
• Mercy Mode:
  • Some badges lower the difficulty of the game substantially, in particular the "Safety Bounce" cap. If you equip it, should you fall into a bottomless pit or touch environmental insta-death hazards such as lava, you are instead bounced away from it. And you can use this once per jump, which trivializes many of the trickier stages.
  • Subverted in regards to selecting the "easy" characters. The Yoshis and Nabbit can't take damage from enemies, making them the "easy mode" for the game. However, they can't use power-ups and they'll still lose a life if they fall into a pit or the like. The enemies cause Knock Back, and that can make some levels harder than normal.
• Message in a Bottle: At Petal Isles, an Angler Poplin discovers a message in a bottle containing various hints, a note from Captain Toad, or the total number of Goombas defeated.
• Metal Detector Puzzle: The Sensor Badge makes the character emit blue waves when they're near a hidden item.
• Mickey Mousing:
  • The ground pound is now accentuated by a drumroll followed by a cymbal strike, with the former playing when you start the move and as you fall, then the latter playing once you hit the ground.
  • The Rhythm Jump Badge rewards you with free coins if you jump in time with a stage's music. The badge is rewarded to the player after finishing the hidden level Ninji Jump Party, which introduces the concept to the player using spectacle rather than coins; the party will get more exciting with each jump the player makes on-time up to a magnitude of five, at which point a special version of the song will keep playing as long as the player keeps time.
• Mini-Boss: The Battleship levels, which have to be cleared so the characters can proceed in their quest for the Royal Seeds, are guarded (and powered) by Bowser-shaped generating engines which serve as the ultimate target.
• Mini-Dungeon: In a case of role reversal when compared to other 2D Mario games, here the airships are the mini-dungeons while the castles are the main dungeons. In certain worlds, the path Mario and his friends traverse is intercepted by one of Bowser's Battleships, sent to them by Kamek; the characters have to storm it and destroy the Bowser-shaped generating engine (the resident Mini-Boss) and disable the vessel in order to eliminate the threat and resume their path.
• Mini-Game Credits: During the credits sequence you can earn points for each staff member's name you touch, while a variety of Wonder effects occur to keep you on your toes.
• Minimalism: The game has stages taking place in the evening, with everything being silhouetted, similar to Donkey Kong Country Returns and its sequel. This has the effect of making the game look minimalistic and 2D-ish. The effect becomes even stronger after you grab a Wonder Flower.
• Mooning: Bowser Jr agressively twerks at you before you fight him in "Fluff-Puff Peaks Palace". Not the most direct example, but fits because he doesn't wear pants.
• Morphic Resonance:
  • Even if you ignore their clothes, all of the characters are easily identifiable when transformed into elephants — the brothers keep their distinct mustache styles, the princesses retain their color schemes, and the Toads keep their Black Bead Eyes and color-coded mushroom caps.
  • The Wonder Flower induced transformations vary in what the character retains. Most of them keep the characters signature color, while others may keep their signature headgear (like the Goomba transformation).
• Mummy: A new enemy in this game is Mumsy, a mummy with a very tall hat made of bandages that can be defeated by grabbing the handle on their back and moving backwards to unravel them.
• Musical Gameplay: Several levels; Ninji Jump Party and Raise The Stage have the Wonder effect being to time your actions, such as jumping, to the beat of the music.
• Musical Nod:
  • The Wonder Token Tunes break stage in World 1 uses the bonus area music from Super Mario World - not even remixed, it’s just the original 16-bit track as heard on the SNES. Other variants use the music from Delfino Plaza in Super Mario Sunshine, the music from the secret stages from the same game, and the Battle theme from Super Mario Bros. 3.
  • The battleship theme incorporates the melody of the Super Mario Bros. Airship theme introduced in Super Mario Maker.
  • K.O Arena stages use musical cues from Mario Bros., including an abbreviated version of the “Level Start” tune and the level completion jingle.
  • The hidden coin minigame areas play a remix of Super Mario 64's "Slider".
• Music Is Eighth Notes: Music blocks have eighth notes on them. Singing characters also emit eighth notes.
• Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups: Par for the course for the series, but there's also an example in the form of badges. Each badge grants a special ability, but only one badge can be equipped at a time across all players in a local co-op session.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Unlike Super Mario 3D World where she dons a ponytail while in Fire form, Peach keeps her hair down like in The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
  • As another example relating to the movie, the official website has a small reference in Luigi's character description mentioning "When these bros team up, there's nothing they can't achieve!", directly referencing the movie's Arc Words.
  • Alongside Nabbit, the Yoshis are immune to damage aside from knockback, which fits in with their Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island gameplay, where they were technically immune to enemy damage but susceptible to Bottomless Pits and Spikes of Doom.
  • The Flower Kingdom shares a name with a location mentioned at the end of The Great Mission to Save Princess Peach!, which is where Prince Haru hails from. And the ruling character Prince Florian shares several of his traits; he wears a crown that bears a striking resemblance to Haru's, and his Wiggler body seems to be a direct, albeit differently-colored nod to Kibidango, the caterpillar-dog creature that Haru was cursed as for most of the movie. Their names are also related to flowers, with "Haru" meaning "Spring" and "Florian" being derived from "Flora".
  • Bowser's ultimate plan with the Wonder Flower's power is to create a rock concert of universal scale which hearkens back to the large concert held by his minions in The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Nabbit and the Yoshis cannot take damage, but both of them will still die if they fall down Bottomless Pits or come in contact with a One-Hit Kill hazard such as lava. In addition, Yoshis will receive knockback from anything that normally deals damage, likely as Necessary Drawback for having more abilities than Nabbit.
• North Is Cold, South Is Hot: The Southern half of the map features a desert and an active volcano. The North is home to the Fluff-Puff peaks with the only Ice levels in the game.
• No-Sell:
  • Outmaways cannot be killed with kicked shells because they can just stop them with their feet. They'll even kick them back at you.
  • If you're wearing the invisibility badge, no enemy can see you or react to you - all except Bowser, whose Wonder powers make him see right through your disguise.
• Nostalgia Level: Shining Falls Special Triple Threat Deluge is a subversion, initially it starts out like 1-1 of Super Mario Bros., aside from the three Lakitu throwing spiked balls at the stage, but quickly becomes very different.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • Standees that you've placed will revive other players, but they won't revive you. This prevents you from abusing them to constantly get revived.
  • Standees can be destroyed during boss battles, to make sure they don't become too easy.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Some enemies will helplessly panic if they're about to be hit by something lethal to them, notably shown with the Koopa Troopas and Paratroopas flailing their arms and legs when they're about to be hit by bubbles launched by the Bubble Flower powerup.
  • If a Goomba is nearby another Goomba that you just stomped, it will briefly panic.
  • When a player character becomes a ghost and is about to run out of time, they'll have a panicked expression. They also make a similar expression when the Lakitu's Cloud they're riding on is about to expire.
• Ominous Floating Castle: Bowser himself, as a result of touching a Wonder Flower that fused himself, his Clown Car and Prince Florian's castle together, has transformed into Castle Bowser, a giant flying fortress, releasing smog that corrupts the lands he passes over.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: When under the Goomba Wonder Effect, it won't matter what power up you had prior to transforming. Anything that can hurt a normal Goomba will kill you instantly.
• Orcus on His Throne: Played with. Castle Bowser is largely content to wait in the middle of the Petal Isles because he's focusing on gathering up Wonder power for his plan. He does appear to attack you during Wonder Effects on the airship stages.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: In Multiplayer, dying or pressing the L and R buttons will turn your character into a ghost, similar to the Bubble mechanic of the New Super Mario Bros titles. However, the player has but a few seconds to touch another player to turn back to normal, or else they disappear and a life is exhausted. This can be done infinitely so long as you can revive before the timer runs out, effectively making lives limitless.
• Painted CGI: The graphics in this game are noticeably more stylized than the ones used in the New Super Mario Bros. series, featuring a number of effects evocative of older titles' 2D artwork. Among other things, backgrounds and objects have textures that make them look more like paintings, and characters are lit and animated in a "3D imitating 2D" style, including heavy use of key frames, Cheated Angles, smears during rapid motion, and textures that look as if they were painted on.
• Pickup Hierarchy:
  • Primary:
    • The Wonder Seeds are the main Plot Coupons used to unlock new levels. Each level gives one for reaching the goal, and another appears when a stage's Wonder Flower is activated.
    • Royal Seeds are found at the end of each world's castle, and are needed to unlock access to Castle Bowser.
  • Secondary:
    • The 10-Flower Coins, which are not needed to finish the game, but finding all three in a level is needed for 100% Completion.
    • Badges are optional, but give useful abilities, or can make the game more challenging. They are bought at Poplin Shops, given as gifts for opening up Poplin Houses with Wonder Seeds, or awarded for completing Badge Challenge levels.
    • Wonder Tokens appear in certain Break Time levels or during some main levels' Wonder Flower effects. Collecting 5 of them gives a Wonder Seed.
  • Tertiary:
    • Flower Coins and their shards (10 shards make 1 full coin) are common throughout each level. 100 Flower Coins can be exchanged for 1 Wonder Seed at Poplin Shops, once per shop.
    • Gold coins are the base line collectable used to direct points of interest and, as always, reward a 1-up when 100 of them are collected.
• Platforming Pocket Pal: Prince Florian acts as a Shoulder Teammate during your journey, carrying your badges and giving you the magical power to use them while recommending specific ones upon request.
• Player Nudge: If you happen to bypass a Wonder Flower in some levels, a Talking Flower up ahead will muse about getting the feeling you're missing something.
• Power Up Letdown:
  • Despite being the game's main attraction, the Elephant Power ends up being this in practice. It lets you bust blocks and block projectiles by swinging your trunk, but it also makes you larger with a bigger hitbox, meaning attacks that won't normally hit a normal-sized character will hit an Elephant-sized character. It's abilities are highly specialized like the ability to shoot projectiles, that it cannot do without access to water, on top of the competing with the Fire and Bubble powers, and its ability to break blocks ultimately ends up being outclassed by the Drill power.
  • Wall-Climb Jump sounds like a cool badge, acting as a homage to the wall-climb glitch in the original NES game by making the player jump vertically up a wall before instigating a proper wall jump. However, not only are there few scenarios outside the badge's dedicated challenge levels where you'd want to do a wall-climb over immediately wall jumping, but it is completely invalidated in those scant instances by two other badges: the Parachute Cap and the Grappling Vine, as both allow the player to indefinitely ascend any vertical surface by repeatedly wall-jumping off and gliding/grappling back onto it.^note However, the Power Up Letdown trope is arguably downplayed here since Wall-Climb Jump isn't bad per se, just outclassed.
  • The Invisibility Badge renders the player character completely invisible to everything… including the player themselves. It's just as disorienting as it sounds, as you cannot see where you are or what you're doing.^note You can reveal your location by placing standees or using emotes, but those aren't something you can comfortably do while on the move. It's one of the Expert badges, meaning it's supposed to have an element of challenge to its use as a trade-off to its given perk, but the advantage of enemies not noticing you is really not worth the downside. You also miss out on the dialogue from the Talking Flowers, since they can't see you.
• Power-Up Magnet:
  • The Coin Magnet Badge draws in nearby coins toward the character. Super Stars will also give players an ability to attract smaller items from a short distance.
  • Just like in many previous games, shells of enemies can be used to pick up various items.
• Power-Up Mount: Yoshis can all carry riders. Amusingly, Yoshis can even carry around each other (like in Yoshi's Woolly World), or even any of the plumbers, princesses or Toads in their huge Elephant forms. Though the dinos are almost unstoppable, they aren't too happy about chauffeuring such large passengers!
• Pre-Explosion Glow: Sometimes rays can be seen coming out of path-blocking Pirahna Plants when they're about to be destroyed.
• Princesses Rule: Prince Florian is a male example of the trope. He is the ruler of the Flower Kingdom, with no king or queen to be seen.
• Promoted to Playable: For the first time in a mainline Mario game (since she's been playable in several spin off titles), Princess Daisy is a playable character.
• Punny Name: The Outmaway is named after the phrase "outta my way", a rude phrase which one might say to someone standing in their path. It fits for the creature, since they look perpetually grumpy and kick large ice blocks in their path.
• Pushy Mooks:
  • Hoppos deal no damage by themselves and only bounce Mario & co. around. A Wonder Effect oriented around them spawns a bunch in a small space, and the main challenge is getting to the Wonder Seed without being bounced away by the Hoppos.
  • A new Sledge Bro variant called Shova will push things like pipes around. Players can push them back, becoming stronger in Elephant form.
  • One new enemy is Outmaway, a short, white Waddling Head with goggles. It'll wander back and forth on a platform, and if it encounters a block of ice in its path, kick it. This ice block won't hurt, unless it squishes the player between itself and something else.
• Reality Is Out to Lunch: Touching the Wonder Flower causes trippy effects in a myriad of ways, the most conservative of which involve tipping the whole map and putting the player on a different gameplay axis.
• Reality Warper: In the game's opening, Bowser uses the power of the Wonder Flower to merge himself with Prince Florian's castle, turn the landscape from cheery and colorful to chaotic and full of nasties, and start flying around wreaking havoc on the Flower Kingdom. Notably, he transforms the homes of the Poplins who guard the Wonder Seeds into prisons, making freeing them the primary goal of many levels.
• Retraux: The Airplane Arms running animation returns. Also taken from those two games is the way Mario leaps when he's built up speed. The animation style, which trades a bit of fluidity in favor of stylish poses, evokes much of the sprite work of the early games.
• Revisiting the Roots: Although this game is a reimagining of classic 2D Mario platforming fare, several elements in this game harken back to the early installments.
  • Artstyle-wise, this is mainly illustrated in the game's Painted CGI art style, which translates the look of '80s and early '90s promotional art and the sprite animations of games from that era to 3D. This can especially be seen by how some of the characters have reverted to earlier designs (such as the Yoshis and Koopa Troopas), as well as Bowser and Bowser Jr.'s usage of Wonder harkening back to the king's earliest appearances as a sorcerer rather than a strongman.
  • The sound effect of sliding down the Goal Pole now goes from low to high pitched the further down you go, like how in did in the first Super Mario Bros., while later games from New Super Mario Bros. onwards had it go from high to low pitched.
  • There's significant inspiration taken from Super Mario World:
    • Throwing objects upwards is a mechanic that featured in World and then quietly disappeared from the series after; Wonder brings the mechanic back.
    • A number of enemies are similar to SMW incarnations of enemies that work differently in modern titles. A recurring snail enemy ejects from its shell when it's stomped, similar to the SMW version of Koopa Troopas. Outmaway is like a blue Beach Koopa for kicking things out of its path. The snakes stuck inside of jars are similar to Rexes, since they both need to be stomped twice and speed up after the first time. One bamboo-shaped enemy gets stunned when stomped and can be thrown multiple times, very much like a Galoomba.
    • ! Blocks appear in various levels to make gameplay easier by way of providing additional platforms and items. However, they appear through the use of the Add ! Block Badge rather than being activated by a Switch Palace.
    • The Brutal Bonus Level world isn't a postgame thing unlocked after beating the main campaign; entrances to the Special World are instead scattered in hidden places all over the map, like with SMW's Star World. Also like the Star World, the Special World hides a secret-within-a-secret: The Final-Final Test Badge Marathon, like SMW's Special Zone. Fully completing that awards the message YOU ARE A SUPER WONDER, referencing the YOU ARE A SUPER PLAYER message from the end of the Special Zone. And, finally, your reward is a cosmetic Silliness Switch effect (the Sound Off? badge vs. the enemy resprite mode).
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Prince Florian is a tiny Wiggler-like insect; he shows up riding on the character that you're currently playing as.
• Rollerblade Good: Rolla Koopas with pink shells make their debut in this game, skating across slopes. The Wiggler you can race against also uses rollerskates.
• Rotten Rock & Roll: All the areas relating to Bowser have a deep heavy metal theme in contrast to the whimsical nature of the Flower Kingdom; the Bowser Castle's levels in particular are announced with an electric guitar screech when they appear. The KnuckleFest stage in the final area is a metal rave, and Bowser's true goal is to create a rock concert that will force everyone in the universe to dance to it.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Princesses Peach and Daisy are both playable characters, and the newly-introduced Prince Florian will piggy-back with the player character so they can use badges.
• Rubber Man: Under one Wonder Effect, Mario and company can stretch out their torsos multiple times the length of their bodies.
• Rump Roast: A lot more prominent than in previous titles. Now dying to any fire or lava obstacle will cause the characters to get their butts burned.
• Running Gag: The Talking Flowers wondering what [X] tastes like.
• Russian Reversal:
  • Typically, a Mario game features the location of Bowser's Castle as the final main world of the story campaign. Wonder instead features the world location of Castle Bowser, which is Bowser literally transformed into/merged with the castle of the Flower Kingdom!
  • Maw-Maw Mouthful's Wonder Flower effect turns the players into Goombas that have a practically nonexistent jump and have to run/hide from the Maw-Maws out to eat them. However, it's still possible to stun and defeat the Maw-Maws by walking off a ledge and landing on them from above, meaning the Goomba is now the one doing the Goomba Stomping!
• Save the Princess: A notable defiance in the Super Mario platforming series, the first since Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins^note which is the only other mainline game before this one where that was the case, even Super Mario 3D World — with Peach being playable — still involved saving other princesses and Super Mario Run — with Peach and Daisy being playable — involved Recruitment by Rescue, where instead Mario and company help a prince rescue his subjects and retake his castle. As in literally retake, as Bowser has magically merged with it and flew off.
• Sea Sinkhole: On the overworld map, Petal Isles circles a large waterfall, with Castle Bowser resting in the middle of the hole.
• Sentient Vehicle: Upon fusing with Florian's castle, Bowser transforms into a sentient airship with his face on it.
• Sequel Goes Foreign: The game takes place in Flower Kingdom, a neighboring land found close to the Mushroom Kingdom (which in turn was the main setting of the preceding New Super Mario Bros. games as well as Super Mario Run). You can even see some of the Mushroom Kingdom's native giant mushrooms in the distance during the cutscene where Bowser steals the Wonder Flower and kickstarts the plot.
• Serial Escalation: Bowser's ambitions grow from creating a big Wonder to a huge, amazing, and epic Wonder, and by the time you face him, he plans to dominate the universe.
• Shifting Sand Land: The Sunbaked Desert is a desert that is normally abundant in water, but has dried up since Bowser Jr.'s stolen it all for himself. It features a small oasis and ancient palaces.
• Shoulder Teammate: Whenever the player character is idle, Prince Florian will pop up from behind their back and look around, suggesting he's always there and just usually not visible.
• Shout-Out: One of the earliest courses is called "Piranha Plants on Parade◊", in reference to the infamously psychedelic "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence from Dumbo.
  • In the Brazilian version, the "Dragon Boneyard" stage is translated as "Phostumous memoirs of a Dragon".
  • There's a secret level in Sunbaked Desert named Ninji Jump Party.
• Sickly Green Glow: All of Bowser's Wonder Flower-induced technology has a toxic black and green palette to contrast with the verdant and peaceful Flower Kingdom.
• Simple, yet Awesome: The Boosting Spin Jump badge gives you a vertical boost when spinning in the air. That's all it really is, but having a Double Jump is enough to allow you to reach areas through unintended methods, correct mistaken jumps, and make getting the Wonderful flagpole clears trivial.
• Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: Subverted. Bowser at first appeared to be absent from the reveal trailer, with only his new giant airship depicting his likeness. However, later trailers revealed that Bowser is the giant airship, having fused with Florian's castle and his Koopa Clown Car.
• Sliding Scale of Linearity vs. Openness: The game is somewhat more open than previous 2D Mario games. Some parts of the world map are open areas that players can walk around freely, allowing them to complete the levels in a more flexible order; previous 2D games (or games in that style like Super Mario 3D Land and Super Mario 3D World) tended to require players to complete the levels in a specific world in a set order, and even alternate unlockable routes typically still branched along similarly narrow paths.
• The Smurfette Principle: Discussed and Defied on part of the developers. Word of God says that Princess Daisy was added as a second playable Princess character because in the past their daughters would argue over who would get to play as Peach.
• Snot Bubble: Sleeping Goombas have snot bubbles coming out of their... noses?
• Source Music:
  • The vocals of the music during the Wonder Effect in the level Piranha Plants on Parade and the Special World level Piranha Plant Reprise are actually being sung by the Piranha Plants currently onscreen. Meaning if you happen to defeat them, the vocals will cut out, eventually being replaced with other plants ahead of the level and continuing where they left off.
  • Likewise the Boo at the Opera stage, where King Boo appears and sings… well, opera at you. Except in Boo fashion, he chases you slower and his singing becomes slightly distorted when you look at him.
• Space Zone: The Wonder Effect of the Cosmic Hoppos level launches the player into outer space, where they can float freely and must dodge floating spikes and Hoppos.
• Spike Balls of Doom: Spike Balls of various sizes make a return. Also, one of the wonder effects makes the player turn into a spiky sphere.
• Springs, Springs Everywhere: Various things in this game bounce the players and other things up in the air: surfaces, note blocks, hippos, and actual springboards.
• Sprite/Polygon Mix: All characters are 3D models, but most other things in the area of gameplay (such as the ground and blocks) are sprites, like with the New Super Mario Bros. series. There are also a few background objects that are sprites, though less than the New Super Mario Bros. series.
• Stealth-Based Mission: In certain levels, touching the Wonder Flower will turn the player into a Goomba, making them very vulnerable to the many Maw-Maws milling about. Being careful, hiding in the bushes to avoid detection, and timing out your movement is the only way to progress.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: As in all Super Mario Bros. games, you cannot drown in water in this game. One Wonder Flower lampshades this:
  Wonder Flower: Focus. Take a deep breath. No, wait, we're underwater! Just focus.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: The Poplins are like the NPC Toads from previous games. They're the main inhabitants of the Flower Kingdom, they have very similar body plans and outfits (just with a flower bud theme instead of a mushroom theme), they live in houses resembling buds in the same way Toads live in mushroom-like Toad Houses, they get captured and transformed by Bowser's magic, and they provide the heroes with items.
• Technicolor Fire:
  • Bullet Bill-like rocket enemies named Missile Megs fire off colorful smoke from their exhausts.
  • The burners in the Bowser-related stages emit green fire.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Elephant Peach and Daisy have differently shaped ears, with their inner ears and tails being colored after their hair, and the soles of their feet are shaped like hearts instead of being circular. Additionally, Peach and Daisy have a set of large eyelashes and larger pupils as a Goomba, when all the other characters shown in the form simply retain their caps (or, in Yoshi's case, gains a cracked eggshell hat). Averted with Toadette, who instead takes after the other Toads for both her elephant and Goomba forms.
• Thematic Sequel Logo Change: The "Wonder" in the logo is wavy and has the pattern seen on the Wonder Flowers to represent the game's primary mechanic of Wonder Effects.
• Theme Naming: The Flower Kingdom joins the likes of the Mushroom Kingdom, Dinosaur Land, the Beanbean Kingdom, and the Sprixie Kingdom as nations named after the species that populate them. Every part of the Flower Kingdom is dominated by flower imagery and flowery hills, and its primary inhabitants are the Talking Flowers and the bud-like Poplins.
• This Is a Drill: One of the new powerups is the Drill Mushroom, allowing the player characters to dig underground (or even into the ceiling of some levels). It also protects them from enemies above and defeats any who land on top of you.
• Toggling Setpiece Puzzle: Certain levels feature toggleable mechanisms that have to worked around to either solve a navigation puzzle or simply overcome an obstacle. As usual for the Mario series, the ON/OFF Switches can be pressed to swap their corresponding states. The mechanisms in question include the classic red and blue blocks, the Zip Tracks used for fast navigation, and the radius of light for objects in dark rooms.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Downplayed with Nabbit. Whereas he went back-and-forth between stealing from the heroes and helping them in New Super Mario Bros. U, there's no indication that Nabbit is stealing from shops and houses in the Flower Kingdom, implying that he's voluntarily helping Mario and friends save the Flower Kingdom with no strings attached. However, an in-game tip clarifies that he may have his own reasons for doing so.
  Nabbit isn't an enemy or an ally, really — just someone keeping an eye on Mario and his friends...
• Underground Monkey: New to the Koopa Troop's ranks are Spikes that spit fireballs, just like Fire Bros in their debut and early Mario media.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The whole concept of the Wonder Flowers, so much so that "expect the unexpected" is one of the game's marketing taglines. Touching them will cause the course and how the player engages with it to change, some being more subtle but others very dramatic. Some standout examples include:
  • A couple levels' Wonder Effects will turn the gravity from downward to away from the viewer, turning the level into a top-down game; you can move in whichever direction you want, but obstacles in these areas tend to get much more complex.
  • Maw-Maw Mouthful's Wonder Effect turns your character into a Goomba. You cannot jump (more accurately, your jump is negligible), so you'll have to rely on careful maneuvering of moving platforms, as well as hiding behind bushes to avoid Maw-Maws.
  • Taily's Toxic Pond's Wonder Effect straight up gives you a Pop Quiz, with questions concerning the game, multiple-choice answers and everything. Color-coded Tailies representing each answer trot along the ceiling and you'll have to grab the one with your answer to advance.
• The Unfought: Kamek is never fought once throughout the game, despite having repeatedly trying to impede the player's progress by summoning airships to deal with them.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: Due to an oversight, there are some levels that cannot be completed with Nabbit or any of the Yoshis, as you are expected to use the Elephant Fruit or Drill Mushroom to break through an otherwise impassable wall, and none of the aforementioned characters can use either powerup.
• Use Your Head: The Bulrushes destroy blocks and other obstacles by ramming head-on toward them. They get stunned if they run into a wall or another Bulrush.
• Variable Mix: All of the stage themes have multiple variations: an extra percussion track is added when players are moving, being an elephant adds horn instruments to the music, the music softens up when the players are in the background layer, and using the Rhythm Jump badge makes the music's beat more obvious to accommodate the gimmick.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • Players can help each other during multiplayer by touching their ghost after they die to prevent them from losing a life. This can also be done while playing with other players online, and players can give each other items while playing online. Helping other players online grants Heart Points, which are solely to show off how helpful you've been to others.
  • Standees will revive other players while playing online, which encourages you to place them in difficult sections of levels. You'll be rewarded with Heart Points if any player is revived by a standee you place. They can also be used to provide hints where to find secrets.
  • You can help out talking flowers in some levels for no tangible reward other than their voiced gratitude. For example, you can kill a Blewbird that fires at a panicked talking flower in Blewbird Roost, give water to a parched talking flower in the Deep Magma Bog, and spray seawater onto a talking flower who wants to taste some in Robbird Cove. The latter you almost have to go out of your way to do, since the best way to do so is to use the Elephant powerup, which isn't provided in the level.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • Played for Laughs; in the first course, a talking flower comments on a Goomba that isn't trying to attack you because it's asleep, saying that it "looks serene." If you go up and attack it anyway, the talking flower will be taken aback and simply comment, "Well then."
  • The Wonder Flower effect in the course "Piranha Plants on Parade" has the Piranha Plants singing instead of attacking you. There's nothing stopping you from killing them, and doing so actually stops their singing until more Piranha Plants appear.
  • Similarly, the Gamboos in multiple Wonder effects are content dancing in place and can be easily avoided, but you can defeat them.
• Video Game Dashing: This game features the Fast Dash badge, which lets Mario and his friends dash unstoppably in one direction. If you reach the end of a platform, you will even be able to dash a bit further without losing height and then jump from the air.
• Villainous Breakdown: Right after you defeat him, Bowser gets a rather amusing one. When his Wonder power is exposed, he doesn't seem to realize it for a few seconds until he feels that his head is bald. As the power soars out of him, he growls furiously and tries one more time to attack Mario... just as he loses the last of his powers and is sent falling.
• Voice of the Legion: The Talking Flowers found in Bowser's Rage Stage talk in a distorted voice, likely from the Wonder power Bowser's been building up.
• Warp Whistle: Unlike in older games in the series which only supported warping to whole worlds, this time you can just instantly warp to any level which you have beaten. The loading screen shows how you're transported there using propeller flowers.
• Wingding Eyes: Stunned or defeated enemies often have X symbols instead of eyes.
• The Wonderland: While the Mushroom Kingdom can be quite surreal in and of itself, the Flower Kingdom is absolutely bonkers! The new land has such bizarre sights as Talking Flowers, enemies on roller skates, an apple that turns whoever eats it into an anthropomorphic elephant, and flowers that cause crazy things such as Warp Pipes that crawl like inchworms and characters turning into Goombas, Spike Balls, Hoppycats, or Wubbas.
• Worm Sign: You can tell where the Smackerels are under ground by a bulge on the ground. Players using the Drill Mushroom also leave visible signs when they dig into the ground.
• Yellow Lightning, Blue Lightning: Lightning bolts, particularly in High-Voltage Gauntlet, are very yellow.

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"And we all lived Happily Ever After. Come back again sometime, yeah?"

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