Nintendo Releases Official Render of Mario Characters

As Nintendo preps for its upcoming console launch, it’s been going above and beyond to show players not only what the software can do but also what the games they can expect to be on will look like in one form or another. For example, we know via certain hands-on previews that Switch 2 indeed has a lot more power and that it’ll allow for new levels of innovation in gameplay design. To that end, The Big N has done some redesigns of characters like Donkey Kong to help fit the “new mold” that the console offers.

Yesterday, Nintendo dropped a piece of art showing off the new official renders for Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong. We already knew what DK looked like via his new game, but this was the first time we had seen the official “new look” for Diddy. On the one hand, his design wasn’t that altered, but you could still see some of the differences between what came before and what was being shown now.

Fast forward a little bit, and The Big N decided that it would drop the official renders for Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Yoshi, Bowser, and the rest of the Mushroom Kingdom crew! You can check out what the crew looks like below:

As many of you will point out, they don’t look too different from what came before during the Switch era. However, there are some small tweaks that you can point to with their looks to show that there is some improvement with the Switch 2.

Just on a hardware level, this all makes sense. Due to the higher graphics and processing power that the console has, the teams working on their games would be able to put in that “extra level of detail” because they know the Switch 2 can handle it. All of these characters are in Mario Kart World, for example, and that game definitely has a lot more power behind it, or else it wouldn’t be able to handle the open world vibe that it’s promoting.

The real question is about what other games the Mario crew will be in as the Switch 2 continues on in its life. We still haven’t heard anything about a 3D Mario title, and you all know that the Mushroom Kingdom will be the focus of at least a few more games in the near future to help get the console into gamers’ hands even more quickly.