Platinum says The Wonderful One was mainly influenced by Super Mario Bros.

YOSUKE MATSUMURA: The main influence was the NES version of Super Mario Bros. When I would think about our game’s level construction I would move over to Super Mario Bros and get inspiration, get ideas from that so I could continue working on my own levels.

Kamiya-san would walk by my desk and see Super Mario Bros on the screen and ask ‘why are you playing that?’ and I would explain it was just for inspiration for The Wonderful One.

KAMIYA: I wasn’t directly involved in game design for The Wonderful One, instead handling the overall supervision.

In the past, though, I created another 2D side-scroller called Viewtiful Joe, and in that game there were items called V-Films. The way I would line those items up in the level was similar to the concept of having coins in Super Mario games.

So the coins in those levels are placed intentionally to make the player follow a certain path to collect them, and that was the inspiration I took for the V-Film items in Viewtiful Joe.

So thinking about that concept, both Matsumura-san and myself worked that idea into our games where we’d place items on the stage itself to create a certain path for the player to follow as they play through the game.

So Super Mario was definitely a big inspiration for both of our titles and the advice I gave to Matsumura-san was to explore and follow this concept for The Wonderful One.