[DeepL Translation - needs review] Volume 1: ●Synopsis: Super Mario, the world's most popular video game hero, has finally made his way into the world of manga! Mario and Luigi are a pair of misfits who have lost Princess Peach to the new Koopa Army while she was playing in Dinosaur Land. The two immediately set off on a journey to rescue Princess Peach. On their journey, they are joined by Yoshi, the famous foodie! Can they save Princess Peach now that they have finally become a big, blunde...
Well, it turns out Volume 4 wasn't the end of the Super Mario World arc, despite showing the literal end of the Super Mario World arc. Before the final showdown in Volume 4, they do have a little insert with Mario, Luigi, and the readers all asking Sawada "when's the grand finale gonna be?" and a note that just because everyone's asking so much, it's coming right up, but I kind of whooshed past the unspoken subtext of "we're doing this ahead of schedule and actually have more Mario World written, but we'll show the ending first since y'all want it".
So with that in mind, the timeline does get a little funky and I do think 4 volumes would have been a fine place to cap of Mario World, but this isn't a super plot centric manga and every chapter is it's own unique story anyway, so it's really not so much "what plotline are we in" as it is "what game is the aesthetic based on?" and this volume still has lots of fun stories and weird gags. An early chapter is actually based on the NES puzzle game Yoshi, which I did play a fair bit of when I was young, but haven't really thought about since then, and it hasn't really become a classic like Dr. Mario or Yoshi's Cookie. Stuff like that is interesting to me because you get some inadvertently deep cuts. Yoshi was obviously a new game at the time and therefore they felt a need to tie it in, but it's more obscure now so seeing it was a fun big of "hey, I remember that one".
Sawada was obviously on something of a movie kick when he wrote this volume, since we have stories about:
A dry bones from the future coming back in time to kill Mario (I would have picked up on this faster if I had just said Ka-me-ne-ta out loud instead of trying to decode if it was a Japanese pun)
A giant goo monster that takes the form of whatever you're thinking of (it goes better for Yoshi than it did for Ray Stantz)
Yoshi literally merging with the fly from the Mario Paint flyswatter minigame.
I always get a little caught off guard when I catch references to western films in Japanese media I'm reading because I'm so used to trying to decode whatever the Japanese reference is that I have to take a second to go "I understood that reference". It's fun. This volume also cements for me that Super Mario-Kun is, weirdly fixated on the topic of death. In an earlier volume we had Mario go to hell because of all the enemies he's killed and in this one we get Mario trapped in a graveyard for all the slain enemies and attacked by their ghosts. I love how all-in this series is on the weird unspoken that you kind of brush off in the games, like yeah, Mario is actually killing all those Goombas.
There's also a surprising bit of actual worldbuilding. We find out the true purpose of star road and meet some sentient Starmen in charge of sending powerups around Dinosaur land, and this is still well before Paper Mario introduced actual sentient stars who live on the Star Road which is cool. It's always really fun when Super Mario Kun accidentally predicts something that would be in the games later, and there's also an ice flower which at the time was clearly just a logical play on fire flowers, but did eventually become a real power-up. Apparantly volume 6 is the actual last Super Mario World volume, so it will be interesting to see how they finally transition to something else since they've technically already shown the ending.