Sunshine Hits Switch 2, but Toadsworth Is Already Gone
Super Mario Sunshine is finally getting a handheld debut: it lands on Nintendo Switch Online for Switch 2 players next month, more than two decades after the GameCube original. For anyone who kept this era of 3D Mario alive through emulation handhelds, that’s a milestone worth marking. So Nintendo marked it — with a summer wallpaper recreation of Sunshine’s iconic key art, and one conspicuous absence. Toadsworth, the mustachioed old Toad who escorts Peach to Isle Delfino, has been scrubbed from the image. FLUDD is right there. Toadsworth is not.
The Mario subreddit responded the way it always does to Nintendo’s quiet curation choices: with a funeral. A post titled “are we fucking serious nintendo” kicked off a thread where fans speculated the elderly Toad “was executed,” joked that his past deeds in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door finally caught up with him, and settled on the most plausible read: “He really is never showing up again.”
FLUDD Makes the Cut, Toadsworth Doesn’t
The detail that stings most comes from the comments: “they included FLUDD but not Toadsworth.” A robotic water pump made the wallpaper. The character who guided Mario and Peach through Sunshine’s opening hours didn’t. For a game whose entire personality is its peculiar vacation cast — Cataquacks, Piantas, the island’s endless parade of oddities — dropping the most recognizable face from the key art isn’t an oversight. It reads as a deliberate roster decision, and fans are right to treat it as one.
The darker speculation isn’t entirely unserious, either. Toadsworth hasn’t appeared in an original Mario game since Mario & Luigi: Dream Team in 2013 — 13 years now, with only Smash cameos and underwhelming remakes keeping the character technically alive. Nintendo doesn’t usually retire characters this quietly, but when it does, a removed-from-wallpaper moment like this is exactly how the news breaks.
Portable Replays Are Where Roster Cuts Become Visible
Here’s the handheld-specific irony: Sunshine’s NSO release could have been Toadsworth’s comeback. This is the largest portable audience the GameCube era has ever had — Switch 2 players who can suspend the game mid-level, carry Isle Delfino in a bag, and burn through the postgame on flights, starting when the game hits the GameCube Classics app on August 13. That replay wave is exactly where a missing character becomes impossible to ignore. The community that spent years playing this era of Nintendo on emulation handhelds is the same community now scrutinizing official art for signs of life — and finding none.
This port will still be a win. Sunshine on a portable, with proper suspend and resume, is the version fans have wanted for years — even if the raw-emulation build ships without enhancements, as our breakdown of the Classics release details. But the wallpaper sends a message the port itself can’t: Nintendo is happy to sell you the memory of Isle Delfino, just not all the people who lived there. Toadsworth, it seems, stays on the island.