The developers behind Super Mario Bros. Wonder have commented on how the game’s characters were decided and also revealed a mechanic for Yoshi that was ultimately scrapped.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder has the most amount of playable characters for the series yet. When asked by Famitsu in last week’s issue how they were selected, director Shiro Mouri said:
“The theme this time was letting you play how you want, and we wanted you to play as the character you like so there was a large variety to choose from.
Also, we implemented a system to loosely connect with other players online, and we thought it would be more fun to have various characters on the world map when playing online. With this aim, we selected more than ten playable characters (factoring in color variations).
As for the process of selecting, Mario, Luigi, Yellow Toad, and Blue Toad were playable in New Super Mario Bros. Wii. After that, New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe added Toadette and Nabbit. We decided to create these members first and newly added Peach, Daisy, and four different color variations of Yoshi. With these members, we decided the male-to-female ratio and invincible characters balance was good.”
By invincible characters, Mouri is referring to Yoshi and Nabbit. Although they can’t use power-ups, neither take damage from things such as enemies.
Speaking of Yoshi, it turns out that the Super Mario Bros. Wonder team tried out a mechanic in which he would be able to throw eggs, which is something the character could do in other games. However, it didn’t make it into the final game.
Producer Takashi Tezuka said:
“As for Yoshi’s actions, I thought it would be better if he could throw eggs, so we tried to create a prototype and test it. However, it became hard to control, and to let first-time-players have fun, we decided the current way was the best.”
Mouri and Tezuka also talked about the decision to remove the series’ timer in Super Mario Bros. Wonder. You can read about that here.
Translation provided by Philip Proctor, SatsumaFS, and Simon Griffin on behalf of Nintendo Everything.
