It needs to be said, but I want to know how some of you view Mario games and where they started and ended at.
My take- I feel that Nintendo hasn't made a good Mario game since.. 3D world on the 3DS/wiiU and before that.. Mario Galexy and then.. since Paper Mario on the original Wii. those games were in my opinion the best of what Mario has to offer as it was originally intended. Fun, colorful cartoony, and exciteing.
If I had to tell you to play between Paper Mario Wii edition (not Wii U) or New Super Mario Bros Wii. I would suggest Paper Mario for the over all better experience for a Mario game. Granted it's considered a spinoff, it's more colorful and you could tell the devs actually cared about making a good game there.
Super Mario Galaxy and Mario Sunshine are games that make me wonder the following. They chose the water flood gimmick over a real sequal to Super Mario 64 with fixed physics camera, and everything. Then on the Wii, they chose to not make a good Mario 64 sequal there they kept everything small and simplified, and focused on the gimick of the console. Think of how we went from Super Mario bros 1 to 3, and from 3 to world. But that never happened going from the N64 to the Gamecube.
For the longest to time, it's been the spinoffs keeping Mario alive, super smash bros,, Mario Kart.. paper Mario if not for those all we would have right now would be dumped down Mario games like new super Mario bros u or the Mario 3d world (even tho its one of the best, it's not as good as it should be) with no real innovation for Mario or excitment.
If they don't make a real Mario game for next gen, as they did during the N64 erra, Mario will never be good again. Mario Wonder is not a next gen game, they held back all their best, and finally now they make a good looking 2d game. This is what we should had gotten on the Wii U launch.
Edit: the idea of a perfect next gen Mario game would be something that plays like like Super Mario 64 , but then the moving/running and jumping physics of what you get in the new super Mario bros including the wall jumping, and with character models looking more like something you'd see in Super Smash Bros Brawl for the best modern approach for what Mario is suppose to look like graphically. Odyessee, while the graphics are good, i'm not saying they are bad. For a Mario game they are out of place. Lastly as for the camera, the camea should control more freely with the right stick, kinda like how the camera in Rayman 3 would control as a comparison for 3d platformers. Of course my opinion isn't the absolute solution.
Mario Wonder is not a bad game, to me it's just a little too late for a game like this, this could had been done easily on the last gen console, the Wii U when I was more open to the Mario games then most people because everyone was playing on the XBox 360 and Ps3, I was one of the real Mario game supporters of that console generation. but then.. the Wii U happened.. and then.. all you would get on the switch were Wii U ports.. besides odyssey. and now when the switch is about to be replaced by the next console soon, they finally make a new Mario game that's actually good and charge full price for it.
I will never say that Mario wonder is a bad game, it's a great game, if you have fun with it that's great, I personally would have fun playing it myself. However, the point is not that the game is bad, it's that it's not as good as it should be for the hardware that the game is running on. I'm not expecting it to be like GTA quality, but I'm kinda rather expecting something in the mix of super Mario 64 and Super Mario sunshine but better for next gen. That's my idea of a real Mario game.
I feel your frustration. I played New Super Mario Bros. Wii (2009) on an emulator recently and then New Super Mario Bros. 2 (2012). They've literally been selling the same game over and over again for full price for 15 years.
I guess I just take this in another direction. I don't yearn for some new fangled mario with better graphics, I just accept that I'm not going to pay for the same product over and over again.
Your the only one that could meet half way and understand atleast where I am coming from. I don't buy the Mario games, instead I just bought Toree 3D, Toree 2 and kiwi 64, 3 great 3D platformers although short, from this indie dev Siactro on the switch. Toree 3d and Toree 2 were both $1.00 each and kiwi 64 was $3 and kiwi 64 was shockingly good for the 3 dolar price tag. It was just short.
It's a 2D platformer. Technology is no longer the limitation.
That's the reason the value proposition is so bad, too. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with any of the 2D Mario (or the rest of their 2d side scroller catalogue). It's that they're charging full AAA game price for content any indie can match at everything but the specific IP (and many do better).
Some of their ideology helps their games last the test of time reasonably well, and they're the biggest publisher that's so heavy in 2D side scrolling stuff, but the reality is that it's now so easy for a solo dev to publish in an extremely polished format that there's very little they could do that would justify their price point.