Nintendo’s $20 Switch 2 Upgrade for Super Mario Wonder Is Worth It for the Extras

I want a new Super Mario Bros. Switch 2 game as much as anyone, but almost a year into the console’s first year, it hasn’t happened yet. Mario Kart? Mario-Tennis? Mario’s party? Yes. New Yoshi game? This will happen soon too. And now we have the next closest thing: the wonderful 2023. Super Mario Bros. Wonder is offering a Switch 2 DLC pack for $20 that is, well, kind of a new Mario game, just a week before the Super Mario Galaxy movie arrives in theaters.

I’ve been playing it for the last week, and it’s worth the upgrade if you like multiplayer Mario. If not, you might still consider it.

The awkwardly named “Super Mario Bros. Wonder – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup in Bellabel Park” is an add-on to Wonder, but it just focuses on creating a whole bunch of multiplayer party modes. The new course variations and mini-game challenges, while welcome, require online multiplayer or local multiplayer play to work. For most of this new Switch 2 update, you can’t play alone offline.

The multiplayer games span dozens of challenges and themes – some turning everyone into bouncing balls, others requiring everyone to race to collect the most coins. You can launch up to four players locally on the Switch 2 at home or up to 12 players online at once, and it gets busy quickly. I can see screams breaking out among the children.

I played about an hour of multiplayer sessions and it was fun. But I haven’t had a chance to play with many others online yet other than that. Still, it feels a bit like Mario Party Super Mario Style, as opposed to the Super Mario Bros. game expansions.

The DLC has a few extras that you can still enjoy for yourself. Seven new miniboss levels have been added to the game, featuring all the Koopalings to face. This is the expanded universe of Mario enemies, and in each level the miniboss uses a strange new power to melt the world in a clever way.

A new Toad Brigade Training Camp mode also features dozens of small challenge levels to overcome, all remixes of existing Wonder levels. Some involve surviving without hitting enemies or coins; In some cases, you need to defeat all enemies or collect all coins before time runs out. They’re addictive and hard, and I’m glad they exist.

Nintendo also tried to add some fun extras: Bellabel Park has lots of flowers that you can collect by watering the plants with “Bellabel Water” that you collect by completing tasks. And you can decorate parts of the park. This is sort of neither here nor there for me, because I come to Mario platformers to play fun levels, not to decorate gardens. Pokémon Pokopia is the ideal place for this.

Rosalina and a Luma Star are additional characters you can play as, but Rosalina doesn’t really do anything new and the Luma Star is a cooperative option. There’s also a strange flower power-up that turns you into a walking flower pot, throwing flowers upward to attack enemies or hit blocks. It was OK. Not my new favorite extra.

Maybe that’s what’s missing here: Wonder threw all kinds of wild cards into the game, from new enemies to strange Wonder Seeds that transformed the levels. Bellabel Park feels more like a multiplayer-focused remix than a bunch of new single-player fantasies.

I like the multiplayer games available more than the Switch 2 add-on for Mario Party Jamboree. They’re probably worth it if you’re a Switch 2 owner with a big family or lots of friends who want to play.

And while I appreciate the graphics resolution improvement, the Switch 2’s graphics upgrade is hard to spot since the game’s “older” graphics have a retro look that still looked great before the upgrade (at least to me).

What I really want, of course, is a truly new Mario game. Who doesn’t? It’s not on the table yet. But maybe, just maybe, the Wonder’s Switch 2 bundle is a little appetizer before this news arrives. But as revamped editions of the Switch 2 game go, Wonder’s extras are the best yet and turn this game into a truly multiplayer-rich game.