Miyamoto criticized Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s elephant Mario during development

Super Mario Bros. Wonder took advantage of the Gamescom 2023 spotlight to show industry professionals what Nintendo is preparing for one of its great exclusives for the holiday season. in conversation with IGN, Shiro Mouri and Takashi Tezuka, director and producer of the game, respectively, have shared a curious anecdote: it seems like Shigeru Miyamoto was not convinced by the elephant power-up, one of the big novelties of this installment.

The day Miyamoto declared himself on the warpath against the elephant from Super Mario Bros. Wonder

“Sometimes [Miyamoto] 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,” said Tezuka. “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.”

During one of those moments of closeness with the team, Miyamoto did not hesitate to show his disagreement with the version of the elephant they had at that time. “He [Miyamoto] did have a comment about Elephant Mario,” Mouri revealed. “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.”

Remember that Super Mario Bros. Wonder will hit the market on October 20 exclusively for Nintendo Switch.