I got this game to play with my wife and her family. The characters are adorable, the levels are full of charm, the music is outstanding, and the platforming is really tight.

However, the multiplayer is an exercise in frustration.

  1. The camera constantly jumps ahead at minimal prompts, forsaking anyone who isn’t adept enough to get every jump as perfectly as the best player, even if that player is the kind who is inclined to wait. The camera just makes whoever it follows into an ass to the other players.
  2. Online connection options aren’t intuitive. It cannot even be disabled in the middle of a level. You have to quit, run somewhere on the map, disable it there, go back and restart the level. Contrary to the intent, it takes you completely out of the game.
  3. There is no shared progression with online friends. If a step is particularly complicated and you leave your friend behind, you don’t really have a means to “carry” them through the level or get the items for them. If they get stuck and you want to progress together, you just have to wait in the over world until they struggle it out for themselves. Otherwise hope they understand you as you try to explain what buttons they need to press, when and where. I think my wife and I spent an hour in online co-op with her parents just waiting for them to finish a challenge that her father refused to give up on. We ended up not doing anything else that night and a bit disappointed in ourselves.

I just don’t know why they needed to go with this whole ghost thing. Just let 4 of us play in the same world, the same levels, and collect the same resources. Why is that so hard?

  • @poryEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    When the game’s level design is set up to comfortably accommodate four players (which NSMBU is), those accommodations don’t necessarily make the game better when played solo. NSMBU has a lot of “extra” space and a really wide camera zoom compared to traditional 2D marios like World or Bros 3, and very few jumps require any degree of precision or P-speed (because if they did, it’d be really hard for four players to do them at the same time due to collision and camera shift).

    Wonder has really tight level design, which makes the 2-4p feel cramped and necessitates the removal of player collision. But those changes make it a much better single player experience.