Five features we’d like to see in the next Super Mario game

Nintendo has confirmed that we’ll be hearing more about the Nintendo Switch successor within the fiscal year, but said nothing about the launch titles for their upcoming new system. It is safe to say that we’ll be getting a new 3D Mario game at some point, although whether it’ll be a Super Mario Odyssey 2 or something entirely new is anyone’s guess. However, we have some ideas about potential new features that could be in the game – which you can check out below.

Playable Bowser

At this point in Mario’s history, nearly every one of the main recurring cast members has had their own game series – all except for one: Bowser. He has of course been a playable character in many spinoff titles up to this point, but the only game where Bowser has featured in a prominent role outside of being the primary antagonist is in Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, the third game in the spinoff series.

Super Mario Odyssey gave us a small taste of what it would feel like to wield the awesome power of the King of Koopas in a mainline Mario title, and the next 3D Mario game would be the perfect place to expand on this. Maybe a new antagonist could overthrow Bowser, and it wouldn’t be the first time that he’s found himself allied with Mario under these circumstances. Super Mario RPG saw him thrown out of his own castle stronghold and a reluctant ally, and with the remake of that title releasing on Nintendo Switch, it’s a scenario that’s fresh in our minds. Given his size and destructive tendencies, it’s not difficult to imagine what form playing as Bowser might take, and smashing your way through obstacles rather than platforming your way through them could make for a nice change in gameplay.

To some, asking for a playable Bowser might be the same as asking for a playable Ganondorf in a Legend of Zelda title (with Echoes of Wisdom giving us a playable Zelda that’s not as big of an ask as it might have been in the past!) but in a world where we have Luigi’s Mansion, Yoshi’s Island, Captain Toad, and Super Princess Peach, it feels as long we are long overdue a Bowser-centric title.

Interconnected worlds

In Bowser’s Fury, we had our first taste of a more “open world” style of Mario experience. The next logical or expected step would be to make a full open world game; what would essentially be a Mario equivalent of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But Nintendo rarely do what fans would expect, so instead of making the leap to an open world title, what if they instead opted for a series of interconnected worlds, similar to what was seen in Super Mario 64, only on a grander scale?

This is also a recurring element in the 2D Mario titles, in which you can find hidden warp pipes that let you jump to levels you otherwise wouldn’t access until much later in the game. This kind of sequence-breaking would be a fantastic reward for exploration that would go above finding your hundredth or so collectible, and make the world feel more seamless and interconnected without putting you in the middle of an overwhelmingly large map and leaving you to your own devices.

New power-ups

Part of the joy of new Mario games in recent years has been in discovering what new crazy power-up the plumber will be getting his hands on next, and how it’ll change up the gameplay. In Super Mario Odyssey, Cappy brought a unique (although quite terrifying if you stop and think about it) element of possession which turned the game into a puzzle-platformer at times as you needed to figure out which enemy ability you needed for that particular section. It’s difficult to imagine how Nintendo would manage to top the variety that Cappy offered, but we certainly didn’t see the Elephant power-up in Super Mario Wonder coming, so it’s only natural to expect that there will be new forms to discover in the next Mario game.

Returning characters

In most Mario titles you can usually count on seeing familiar faces alongside Mario: Peach, Yoshi, Luigi, and Toad are usually present in the game in some form, and Bowser will often be the main antagonist. But there are many, many more characters in the Mario franchise who have been absent for far too long, and who are long overdue a return. As the most obvious example, Wario hasn’t been seen in a mainline Mario game since his first appearance, having immediately gone his own way to spawn his own fairly successful spinoff series. You will usually find small cameos and references to previous Mario games and characters if you look hard enough, but it’d be nice for these characters to feature a little more prominently in the games. Maybe in the next Mario title it would be time to search multiple castles for Princess Daisy again?

Online multiplayer

The Mario franchise as a whole is hardly a stranger to multiplayer, with more recent 2D Mario titles allowing for up to four players to play through stages together, and of course series like Mario Kart and Mario Party are designed with this in mind. It’s difficult to imagine what form this could take here because 3D Mario titles are usually solo experiences, but if anyone can pull it off, it’d be Nintendo. In Super Mario Odyssey a second player could control Cappy, so perhaps in the next game this could be taken a step further, and a second player could take control of Luigi, or Peach, or even Bowser, to adventure alongside Mario on equal footing.

What sort of things would you like to see in the next Mario title? Let us know below in the comments.