Super Mario Bros. Wonder devs on Miyamoto’s involvement, wasn’t a fan of initial Elephant Mario design

When it comes to the big Nintendo franchises like Mario, many fans tend to be curious as to how much Shigeru Miyamoto is involved. Miyamoto is one of the most important people at the company as the creator of various characters and franchises. Even if he’s not quite as hands-on as he used to be, he still contributes to some projects.

As for Super Mario Bros. Wonder, producer Takashi Tezuka said Miyamoto would “give some opinions” and “make comments here and there”. Tezuka said in an interview with IGN:

“With Wonder in particular, it wasn’t like Mr. Miyamoto was in our hip pocket during this whole time whispering in our ears or anything like that. Sometimes he would come by where we are working and look at things and give some opinions. He would generally observe things and make comments here and there, and even things that didn’t seem like they were big comments – I have worked with Mr. Miyamoto for a long time and really understand him, so I was able to get what he was implying or getting to and we would have conversations around those sorts of topics.”

One strong opinion Miyamoto had was that the initial design Elephant Mario needed to be changed. However, little did he know was that the visuals were already planned for an adjustments.

Director Shiro Mouri stated:

“He did have a comment about Elephant Mario. It was a phase where we still had tentative visuals for Elephant Mario, and we had plans to adjust the visuals already, but he had come and taken a look before that and he gave us the sharp comment that ‘This doesn’t look like a Mario character.’ Along the same topics, there was the idea of how Elephant Mario sprays water, he came and said that if an elephant was actually spraying water, it wouldn’t move that way, and that was an example of feedback he gave us.”