Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a delightfully inventive and downright trippy video game. One of the hallucinogenic pieces of it is that the flowers talk to you as you run by. If you’re a fan of those talking flowers, you’re in luck: you can preorder a plastic Talking Flower of your own now. They’re available at the Nintendo Store for $34.99, with a release date of March 12.
One thing to note is that this is not exactly a kids’ toy geared towards play. It’s more of a decoration that occasionally talks. You set it on a desk, shelf, or bedside table, and the thing will say something periodically (Nintendo says it speaks roughly twice an hour). It says things like, “Is it weird for flowers to talk?” Or, “Sometimes it’s nice to space out.”
It has a button you can press to make it talk on command. If you press the button repeatedly, it will utter “special phrases,” whatever that means.
The Talking Flower doesn’t have any built-in AI and it’s not connected to an LLM. It doesn’t have a microphone, so it’s not listening like an Amazon Echo, and you can’t hold a conversation with it. But it does have a built-in clock, so it can make comments about the time of day it is. It can also sense the temperature and make comments about that.
It can also make the sound from the game when you get a Wonder seed and the level transforms. It then plays music, and you can press the button in time with the music to make it react.
You can have it speak in the morning when you want to wake up, like an alarm clock (lookin’ at you, Alarmo). You can also press and hold the button to make it be quiet for a while. It also won’t talk over night. The Talking Flower supports 11 languages. If you want one of your own, you can preorder now at the Nintendo Store.
In other Super Mario Bros. Wonder news, the game is getting a Nintendo Switch 2 Edition upgrade, plus a new expansion called Meetup in Bellabell Park. The DLC adds a number of new multiplayer-focused game modes, along with assist mode options. That extra content arrives March 26, along with three new amiibo figures.
Chris Reed is a commerce editor and deals expert for IGN. He also runs IGN’s board game and LEGO coverage. You can follow him on Bluesky.
