Coming out of the same Nintendo Power read-along that brought told us the next Zelda is going to be more of the same comes some disappointing news on New Super Mario Bros. Wii: There are only three and a half playable characters.
When asked about the playable characters being Mario, Luigi, Toad and Another Toad, Shigeru Miyamoto says “That’s it.â€
When Infendo asked at E3, Nintendo staff told us that other characters might be a possibility, but warned us that nothing had been announced and they could not confirm or deny speculation. It’s too bad too, because while one Toad has enough identity to stand on his own (a la Mario Kart,) next to Mario and Luigi a second Toad steals the individuality of both funky fungi sidekicks.
Give us the Princess, Yoshi, Geno, or even a Koopa – pallet swap clones are just weak. Let’s hope that Miyamoto’s “that’s it” refers only to what’s been announced, and is yet another cover for “rumors and speculation.”
[via Aeropause]
Would be kind of neat if Wario and Waluigi replaced the two Toads.
Unless you have to save Peach at the end, I don’t know why they wouldn’t go with the Super Mario Bros 2 quartet of Mario, Luigi, Toad and Princess Peach.
It’s not even Toadette, just “another Toad”. Lame.
Or your Mii! That would be fun, teaming up as yourself with Mario and Luigi!
Yoshi is in the game, right ?
I’ve seen screenshots of it
http://media.insidegamer.nl/screenshots/public/14613/132668.jpg
yeah that is kinda weak to recycle the same character. i agree it should be a koopa or yoshi.
there should be a mario game that you can play as either the good or bad guys, and all good/bad guys should be playable, i think that would make an awesome game
that aside, 2 toads is a bad idea, the regular 4 + yoshi would be a better idea, unless (like joshdad said) you have to save peach, in that case just drop her as a playable character leaving the other 4
ok, LISTEN everybody!!!!! Yoshi is someone you can ride on in the game, not a standalone character.
Long time reader, first time commenter.
I’ve seen this issue addressed on a few other sites. And as bummed as I am about there being two unnamed toads, I understand the logic.
In multiplayer experiences like this, Nintendo likes to do all they can to distinguish players from one another on screen. In most cases, including this one, this is done through the use of basic colors that can’t be confused.
In certain circumstances, pink could be mistaken for red (Mario), so Toadette is out, despite being my favorite suggestion here in the comments. What they clearly decided on is Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow.
As far as the other characters mentioned here, there are issues of motivation and other uses in the game.
Peach is busy waiting to be saved, Yoshi is the same color as Luigi and already serves as a power up of sorts in the game (and we can’t have Yoshi on Yoshi action), Geno (despite everyone’s wishes) is pretty much gone for good, Koopas are enemies in the game, Wario’s out for being a bad guy, and Waluigi’s out for being both a bad guy and purple.
At the end of the day, there are two plumbers in the game. Can we really be that upset about two Toads?
Isn’t it obvious why? All those other characters like peach, yoshi etc all have their own attributes, the extra toads are merely space fillers for the basic gameplay that the mario bros will have here. No koopas either because, duh, they’re the bad guys.
Would you want to play as yoshi without his tongue/hover etc? peach without floating? wario without headbutts etc?.
Well Reynard by those standards Luigi would be able to jump higher than Mario but I don’t think he can do that.
Maybe true, but in the original mario bros they were just pallete swaps and right here it’s obvious they want a completely equal footing across all four players.
It’s rather painless to just give both brothers the same feel, it’s not as easy to give any of the other good guys the same. The toads are the only good guys in the cast that are basically gameplay blank slates.
I don’t have 4 wiimotes so, it’s pointless to me.
GGG has a point. No one will notice the toads unless they happen to have 3 or 4 friends who want to play the game. I don’t know about you guys but I am the only Wii-owner in my city.
Miketendo makes great points about the colors–definitely an interesting angle I wouldn’t have considered. Still, even in the context of wanting the characters to be red, blue, green, and yellow for differentiation’s sake, I’d rather have Wario or Daisy and I don’t think they have much working against them.
Wario wouldn’t jump as high as Mario or especially Luigi, but he can jump as high as a Toad alright. And he’s been in a Mario platformer before working with the good guys: Super Mario 64 DS.
As for Daisy, she’s never been in a platformer (I’m still holding out for Super Princess Peach 2 with both of them), so they could do just about anything with her and she could have been a cool selling point as a never-before-playable character.
@Matthew
Oh yes because in Super Smash all the other characters ride yoshi, he doesn’t fight for himself (i hope you noted the sarcasm). Come on man, yoshi can be a stand alone character. Besides when you are playing yoshi’s island, you are moving yoshi around and having him do the attacks. So your logic makes no sense. If they wanted to have yoshi as a playable character they could do it with no problem.
What Miketendo said makes more sense because you have 4 players each with a different color to easily differentiate one from the other. Now that is a better reason than “you can only ride yoshi”.
@Attillio
I think Matthew’s comment that you can only ride Yoshi was simply to clarify what we already know about this particular game. He wasn’t speaking generally. Obviously, Yoshi has been a playable character in the past. For this game, they wanted to use him as a power-up. That’s it. Yoshi riding on another Yoshi would be like dogs and cats living together.
You know why there are two plumbers and two toads in this game? That’s the way they designed it. I believe Nintendo knows what they’re doing when it comes to making Mario Games, especially lately.
That said, I think Reynard’s comment about having similar controls across all four characters makes the most sense. Think about it from a level design perspective.
Mike hit the nail on the head, I was not talking about Yoshi in general, I was talking about how they showed him in this game, as a power up.
“You know why there are two plumbers and two toads in this game? That’s the way they designed it.”
You win most generic statement of 2009! Runners up: “You know why Michael Jackson’s not alive? Because he died,” and “You know how I bought this game? I spent money.”
That’s a lame defense man. I’m sure Nintendo’s “expert design” of having two toads running around is going to be a LOT more fun than if we had four unique characters somehow. In fact, why not make them ALL toad, no – no SCREW THAT. ALL TINGLE. Who cares if it’s the wrong franchise, MIYAMOTO IS NEVER WRONG, I mean- Wii Music showed all those doubters, right?
…right?
This is just lazy/uncreative in my opinion.
EVEN IF, the color theory about needing four different colored characters is legit, that is simply Nintendo’s preference, and what they should be doing is allowing the player to choose for themselves. If four people are playing and two of them want to be a similar color (a la Smash Bros) then they are FREE TO DO THAT. But if someone playing has trouble differentiating between the characters because of that they simply TALK TO THE PEOPLE PLAYING and everyone fixes the issue because the game has options built in that allow the people playing to play how they like.
Humans are PRETTY smart, Nintendo. Not always, but most of the time, if they are given some options they can figure out the best way to deal with these issues themselves. I understand Nintendo is trying to make this simple for everyone, but at the end of the day it just seems like micromanaging with a pinch of “whatever”.
Oh and the only reason Mario, Luigi and the two Toads are all going to just the same height is just because Ninty said so. Luigi is now generally known to “jump higher” and they are changing that for this, so there really is no excuse to leave out characters like Wario and Daisy who “can’t jump as high”.
@ That one guy says…
I can’t argue with a multiplayer game with Tingle and his brothers. I think i might be one of those lone Tingle fans but i’ve always loved the guy.
Except in Majora’s Mask. He was creepy as hell in that game.
Having different physics for every character is out of the question if you don’t want your players to fight over who’s going to play the strongest guy. So I guess Luigi in this particular game is a pallet swap as well (correct me if I’m wrong and he actually jumps higher). And of all the mario games characters toads have the closest set of abilities to mario’s. So here we have a nice symmetry. I don’t really understand how this is weak, Sean. Just look at the game, it’s got to be a perfect platformer. Lazy developers wouldn’t make a game like that.
@that one guy
My statement was meant to be generic. My point was that we haven’t played the game, so we don’t even know if any of these complaints are valid. “That’s the way they designed it” and we won’t fully know why until we see the game. *THEN* we can all complain.
I’m still guessing that from a design perspective, all of the characters have to play the same. This is both for the reason that Nikita just mentioned, and the fact that if one character had a certain unique ability (like jumping higher/longer) it would have a huge effect on level design. You should be able to do everything in the game with 1, 2, 3 or 4 players, and these experiences should be basically the same (but with increasing chaos).
If the levels were designed to employ different character attributes, it would be the Lost Vikings.
I’m no Nintendo apologist–I simply think that the strength of these complaints is unwarranted, given the information we have.