An official interview was recently published by Nintendo with the Super Mario Wonder development team, and it includes a number of interesting revelations regarding the early development of the critically acclaimed game. One of the things mentioned is that Super Mario Wonder was originally supposed to include amusing live commentary during playthroughs, but thankfully, the development team decided to scrap it. The team spent six months seriously developing the live commentary for Mario’s latest adventure. You can read our 10/10 review of Super Mario Wonder here.
Do you mean the difficulty level of the entire course would change in real time? Indeed, that’s hard to imagine. (Laughs)
Tezuka: Well, you never know, right? Maybe it’ll be in the next game.
Everyone: (Laughs)
Sato: I always had to be on my toes, since I never knew when Tezuka-san might show up and ask the impossible. (Laughs)
Mouri: Tezuka-san also once asked, “Can’t we have live commentary?” I had absolutely no clue what he meant. (Laughs) But I interpreted it as a desire for a new experience, even if it’s not necessarily in the form of live commentary.
When you say live commentary, do you mean like in soccer or baseball games? You considered doing that in a Mario game?
Hayashida: We actually spent about six months seriously developing live commentary. We tried adding voices to match the player’s actions. Even though we’d added various voices, questions like, “Who’s doing this commentary?” started to pop up amongst the team. Something about it just didn’t feel right. (Laughs)
Tezuka: I was quite a fan of it. (Laughs)
Mouri: Even the team was evenly split between those in favor and those against. (Laughs) The default voice was very generic, like a newscaster, but you had the option to switch it to a Tsundere (17) commentary.
(17) Tsundere is an adjective term in Japanese that is used to describe a personality or a person who usually has a cold and harsh attitude but on the other hand shows a glimpse of affection.
Wait, a Tsundere commentary?
Mouri: In fact, according to our play test records, quite a few people were switching to the Tsundere commentary. (Laughs)
Everyone: (Laughs)
Tezuka: But if we were to do this commentary feature seriously, just the process of creating voice variations alone would’ve involved a tremendous amount of work. So, unfortunately, we had to let it go.
Still, it would’ve been a shame to shut down the whole experiment. So we brought in an additional team member to dedicate themselves to this feature full-time.
Mouri: Around the same time, there was a discussion about setting the game in the Flower Kingdom, and we were able to incorporate the idea of live commentary in the form of Talking Flowers that would match the game’s world. It’s a version of live commentary that fits the world of Mario.
Hayashida: It’s nice that you’re never lonely when the Talking Flowers are there. If you were all alone in a course, it might feel like it was you against the world, but the Talking Flowers speak to you at just the right time.
Sato: They’ve got some funny lines like, “Make sure you’re getting your veggies!” as a parent might say. (Laughs) I think it’s a fun experience for those watching the player too.
Indeed, the Talking Flowers give hints during the course and say what the player might already be thinking. I think that’s going to make it feel less of a lonely battle.
Tezuka: We thought the gameplay might be more enjoyable if the Talking Flowers speak to you and you can resonate with what they’re saying. Of course, there’s an option to turn off the chatter, but we hope as many people as possible will give it a listen.
Mouri: And by making them something that exists in the course, we were able to create a new type of Mario gameplay. For example, searching for a hidden Talking Flower or catching a glimpse of one above you and working out how you can reach it.
Kondo: While discussing difficulty levels and live commentary, there was mention of Tezuka-san “asking the impossible.” I felt like there might have been a disparity between the world of Mario that Tezuka-san and I envisioned and the world of Mario that the rest of the team had in mind. The developers found creative ways to pack every gameplay idea they could think of into each of the Mario games up until now, within the specifications and limitations of each successive hardware. For the development staff who grew up playing Mario games, they see the world depicted in those games as the world of Mario. And they try to carry that over to future games. But the world of Mario that Tezuka-san and I think of is actually much broader, and we’re allowed to incorporate anything we think would be fun. So maybe that’s why they thought we were “asking the impossible.”
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