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It might surprise you to learn that one of the features that ended up being cut from Super Mario Bros. Wonder was live commentary, which, in a rather amusing twist, came with an optional Tsundere variant.
This interesting little nugget was revealed in an official interview with several of the game’s developers (thanks, Nintendo Everything), with Game Designer Koichi Hayashida saying that the team spent around six months seriously working on live commentary for the game. By the sounds of it, if you left it on the default settings, the narration would have been provided by a newsreader-style voice and reacted to the action going on in your playthrough.
That said, as director Shiro Mouri goes on to reveal in the interview, an optional Tsundere version of the commentary was also developed, and apparently went down quite well among playtesters.
Just in case you’re not familiar, Tsundere is a Japanese term used to describe characters who generally maintain a harsh or critical attitude towards another character, but harbour a hidden soft side towards that same person, which gradually comes out over time.
So, yes. It seems like you could potentially have ended up playing a version of Super Mario Bros. Wonder in which your every move was narrated by someone who treats you a bit like a surly step-dad or a love interest that shows their affection by sternly telling you to stop crying because your iconic plumber’s just fallen off a ledge.
That said, while the live commentary didn’t end up making it into the final version of the game, with producer Takashi Tezuka citing the “tremendous amount of work” it would have taken to deliver properly, it did eventually end up morphing into the game’s talking flowers.
Amusingly, this means that creations of the modders who’ve been busy making the flowers yell rude stuff at the player might not be too far off of the reality we could have ended up with.
Over on ResetEra, fans of the series are naturally pretty devastated by the idea that they won’t get to experience the wonder of a Tsundere Mario experience, with several calling on Nintendo to release the optional commentary as DLC with #ReleaseTheTsundereCut being adopted as a bit of a rallying cry.
Regardless of whether you’re now setting up a petition asking the Japanese publisher to do just that, make sure to check out our review of Super Mario Bros. Wonder.