No one could have been more excited for LEGO Super Mario than me.

As a bearded forever-child who has played every Mario game in existence and owns way too many LEGOs, I am literally the exact target demographic for a Nintendo/LEGO collaboration. The prospect of collecting official Nintendo-branded LEGO Minifigures is almost too much to handle. I’m not just talking about Mario LEGOs either; we could see a Link LEGO, a Samus LEGO, maybe even a Pikachu LEGO. This is what’s at stake. To put my excitement (and privilege) into perspective: If Nintendo LEGOs had turned out the way I imagined they might, I would’ve considered 2020 an excellent year, even if half the population fell to the COVID-19 Pandemic and Trump got re-elected. And then this trailer dropped:

www.youtube.com

I’ll be frank: What the f*ck is this?

Rather than making LEGO Mario look like…a LEGO version of Mario…Nintendo and LEGO seemingly wondered what it might look like if Kamek attempted to animate a Mario clone out of a trash can, or perhaps how a giant baby with a full diaper would appear with a mustache.

This was so easy, guys. This should have been a slam dunk. If someone told me two days ago that the Nintendo/LEGO partnership would result in such an abomination, I might have slapped them for lying to my face.

But alas, here we are with big fart pants Mario getting aroused by child hands.

The worst part is that there are some genuinely super cool concepts at play here. Interlocking, swappable level pieces is an absolutely perfect premise for a line of LEGO Mario play sets. I’ve always wanted to build my own physical Mario levels (kind of like Mario Maker in real life), and the Mario LEGO sets hold the potential of making that a reality. Moreover, the integration of electronics that allow the Mario “LEGO” to have unique interactions with different pieces is both novel and fitting. After all, Super Mario is a video game franchise, so bringing electronics into the mix makes a lot of sense. I love the idea of a LEGO Question Block that actually makes the same noise that it does when Mario hits it in-game, and there’s even a certain joy at seeing Mario collect coins on his weird chest screen. But as soon as I look up at Mario’s face, all joy fades as I remember the vast emptiness beneath his shifty electronic eyes, always lying just a few dead pixels away.

Unfortunately, Nintendo’s official press release provides absolutely no insight into why they decided to turn LEGO Mario into a monstrosity. “The new product we created together with the LEGO Group seeks to combine two different styles of play,” said Nintendo executive officer and game producer Takashi Tezuka. “One where you freely build the world of Mario and the other where you play with Mario in the very world that you have created.”

Yes, that’s great and all, but you could have done the exact same thing without…whatever the hell this is.

Nintendo/LEGO

I lied about the worst part though. The worst part isn’t how horrible it looks. The worst part is that I’m still going to buy it, anyways.