They’re so much fun to experience that if I missed one in a level, I had plenty of motivation to run back in to find it.
As such, I looked forward to the Wonder effects on every stage. You just never know what will happen next. Sadly I’m not allowed to show you most of the best ones, but Mario might transform into a rolling spiky ball, or the camera might shift to a top-down perspective, or Mario and his enemies alike might morph into stretchy ink silhouettes, or he might turn into a Goomba who can’t jump or attack, or there might be a dance party.
Getting access to that hidden seed usually involves finding a Wonder Flower – sometimes hidden in blocks, bad guys, or in secret areas – that makes something unexpected happen. Most levels include at least two Wonder Seeds, with one of them at the end and another hidden somewhere within it. But it leaves no cloud hanging over the Flower Kingdom, because the dozens of stages across six main worlds – along with the Petal Isles hub that contains stages of its own – offer so many different looks and wild hooks that the typically forgettable story simply didn’t matter.
