Super Mario Bros. Wonder has attracted the attention of many speedrunners with its rich movement and speed-enhancing badges. As if that wasn’t enough, though, a slew of recently discovered world skips offers an impressively fast route for players looking to run Mario Wonder as their next speedrun of choice.
Mario Wonder features many checkpoints on the world map that require a certain number of Wonder Seeds to enter, much like Power Stars in Super Mario 64. Unfortunately, many Wonder Seeds trigger auto-scrollers, slowing down the game drastically and making for a worse speedrun experience. Grand POOBear, a Mario speedrunner who’s been playing Mario Wonder since its launch on Oct. 20, even mentioned how he’d prefer that Wonder Seeds weren’t a requirement.
While there’s been no discovery on how to forgo all Wonder Seeds (yet), runners have found not just one but three different world skips. On Oct. 29, Super Mario Galaxy speedrunner Jhay posted a Mario Wonder world record (WR) speedrun of 1:41:13 using these world skips.
The first skip is at the castle at the end of the first world. With two controllers on the world map, one character sits on the castle while the other runs to the far left to go out of bounds. The player then pauses to access the character select menu, where they reverse the characters on each controller. This causes the player who was out of bounds to now be on the castle while the other is now on the screen but off of the track that players are normally forced to follow, allowing them to beeline straight toward the Petal Isles.
The other world skips are both on the Petal Isles, allowing the player to skip the second and third worlds entirely. Both of these skips are incredibly similar since they revolve around the same movement tricks. Much like in the first world, the player will use two different controllers here. One character will stand on the tracks while the other is in the free-roam area of the world map. The second character needs to jump and the player has to pause mid-jump. From there, the player goes to the character select but, this time, does not need to reverse the characters. The jumping character will clip slightly out of bounds, allowing them to walk off-course and onto the sandy path that is normally submerged beneath the water, requiring the player to play the second and third worlds to recover them.
Jhay has credited the development of these world skips to Twitch chatter “burgerandfreys.” “The message that started it all,” Jhay said. “This person discovered the glitch that broke Wonder.”
In less than two weeks, Mario Wonder has already been cracked wide open. This demonstrates the vast potential this game has for speedrunning as there are bound to be plenty of game-breaking skips yet to be discovered.
