 It's time to talk about the literal elephant in the room. Among the many oddities on display in Super Mario Wanda, none are more striking than the power-up that turns Mario, Luigi, Peach, Daisy and Friends into an enormous block-smashing Yoshi-squishing elephant. If you're first thought upon seeing this was… why? Then Wanda no longer. According to director Shiro Mori, the goal of Elephant Mario was to make the game easier As an elephant, players can simply brute-force their way through most of what the game throws at them. According to an interview with NPR, director Shiro Mori said he wanted the elephant power-up to accomplish three design goals. The first was to have a body that's a little bit bigger, enabling the player to grab coins and stomp on enemies easier. The second goal was to allow Mario to hit blocks from the side, enabling players to access new areas. Thirdly, the elephant can spray water. By watering a withered flower, you might be able to experience or discover something new, said Mori. Having a slightly bigger body, being able to attack blocks from the side, and being able to spray water, I mean, the elephant's the only natural answer to this, he added with a grin. In an interview with IGN though, Mori has said that Elephant Mario wasn't universally popular, and one developer in particular wasn't a fan. Mario's dad, Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto is notorious for flipping the tea table, by taking a casual look at games while they're partway through development and forcing the developers to completely rework large parts of the project. Sometimes he'll even ask them to remove segments of a game entirely, and in one case a developer was so nervous about presenting to Miyamoto that he couldn't demo his game without shaking uncontrollably. Mori said, It was a phase where we still had tentative visuals for Elephant Mario, and we had plans to adjust the visuals already, but Miyamoto had come and taken a look before that, and he gave us the sharp comment that, this doesn't look like a Mario character. Along the same topics, there was the idea of how Elephant Mario sprays water. He came and said that if an elephant was actually spraying water, it wouldn't move that way, and that was an example of the feedback he gave us. Presumably Miyamoto's concerns about Elephant Mario were solved by the time the game was finished because the form takes pride of place in the new game. The moral of the story is that sometimes to get the job done, you need an elephant. That's a good enough moral, right?