Top 10 Powers in Super Mario Bros. Wonder Ranked
05) Parachute Cap
Parachute Cap is pretty cool. It’s the first badge you get so I didn’t really use it much as other badges kept showing up and I wanted to try them all so I didn’t think about it until later.
The parachute works like a glider, making your character pull a hat (sometimes out of thin air) over their heads and float along.
The prolonged length of the jump mixed with the fact you can open and close the hat for increased distance makes this ability feel like a mix between the lengthy float of the Tanooki suit from Super Mario Bros 3, mixed with the cape mechanics of Super Mario World.
Mixed with the fact that Super Mario Bros. Wonder has a great sense of momentum means that you can use the parachute cap to pull off some really fun runs across stages.
The only reason this incredibly useful ability isn’t higher ranking on the list is that it drives me nuts that a game with this level of detail makes every character use a Mario hat to glide. Toad’s cap (don’t @ me) would look just like a parachute. Peach and Daisy could use a flower. Yoshi and Nabbit could…figure something out. I don’t care about them, they’ll be fine. But still more detail would be great.
04) Grappling Vine
The vine grab is one of my favorite new abilities and even though it comes from a badge I swear this feels more like a traditional power-up in terms of abilities and appearance. All they needed was to give your character a new color outfit.
If you haven’t seen the vine grab yet, it’s a badge that allows you to press R in the air and fire a piranha plant on a vine out of your sleeve that grabs onto a vertical surface pulling you in and, if you’re close enough to a ledge lets you up there.
It almost turns your character into a Bionic Commando-esque character.
Honestly, my primary problem with this power-up is that once you get to the point where hitting R to fire a line becomes second nature you’re going to find yourself making a LOT of stupid mistakes when you use a different badge because you’re gonna expect to be able to grab a wall.
03) Fireball
The tried and true O.G. The first power-up that didn’t just make you taller. The Fire Flower does what it’s always done and I love it for that.
No changes have been made to the Fire Flower and that sort of makes it the most reliable. The only thing that makes it a bit hard to use in Mario Wonder is that the landscape is sort of all over the place meaning that the fireball bounces in bizarre directions and often encounters hills steep enough to stop it like an obstacle instead of allowing it to move forward.
Pretty much every threat in this game is vulnerable to fireballs too. Because of this, if you’re used to the way that fireballs bounce, you can straight up tear through a slew of stages simply by throwing flame all over.