Nintendo’s Talking Flower is a product ripped right from the video game Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Released on March 12, 2026, that’s about when we got our hands on it as well. It is a well, a talking flower that tells you the time, disrupts your quiet time, and says cheeky one-liners that either call out to the game world or just make comments based on the time of day it is. Think about it like a cuckoo clock, but with a voice you’re never entirely ready to hear instead of a bell.
The first time Nintendo’s Talking Flower interrupted the silence in our house, it told us, “Did you know the ocean tastes like tears?” Be proud of my husband and me for not immediately throwing it away. That was enough, though, to make the first week of time with the Talking Flower an ever-growing conspiracy about whether it was possessed or not. Brought to you by my husband secretly moving it across the house.
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But even though I wanted to get rid of this annoying flower that doesn’t only tell you the time on the hour, our product reviews are meant to be written after about a month with the product. This timeline lets us get used to it, embed it in everyday life, and give a pretty good recommendation as to whether or not readers should buy something or not.
The Talking Flower, though, this is going to be a case-by-case basis for anyone looking to bring a time-telling Furby into their house. I bring up Furby because growing up in a very Catholic household in a post-The Exorcist world meant that my mom side-eyed just about every toy or object that behaved weirdly in the house. A book fell off the shelf on its own. It must be a ghost; throw it away. A Furby talked randomly even after you quieted it? Yeah, throw it out.
And I can’t say I really blame my mom either. Every day, objects that leave their place or don’t act normally, and we all think “ghosts.” Yes, even in my atheist household, we have our own stories of products we put away or took the batteries out of because they would randomly turn on.
The annoyance starts right when you put the Talking Flower together. You unscrew the plate, put in the batteries, and then set the language (of which there are 11, including Spanish), and then you set the time. Setting the time on the Talking Flower is one of the worst product experiences ever.
The beep that it uses is like a more screechy fog horn, and if the time is, say, 7:54 am, like it was when I set it up, you will hear that beep 54 times, since holding the button will not, in fact, make it go faster. And if you’re also like me, you’ll end up hearing it 60 times more because you went too far on the minutes and need to circle back around.
Nintendo’s Talking Flower is a headache at first, but eventually, you’ll submit to it and accept the one-liners it has.
In our early days with the Talking Flower, before we learned all of its one-liners, the joke that we were being haunted or possessed was a constant around the house. We knew that we were both messing with each other, but the joke kept landing. As we learned the Flower’s lines and stopped being surprised when it woke us up or told us to go to sleep over the next two weeks, though, the joke stopped.
It wasn’t that the Talking Flower had lost its impact. It just started making it in different ways. The last two weeks have essentially been either being bullied by the Talking Flower or actually using it to stay on task during the day.
For the bullying, I need to tell you that during an argument with your spouse, when you have realized that you are probably wrong, the absolute worst thing that can happen is having a Talking Flower say, “It’s been really quiet lately.” And then, the tension is broken, and my husband has a little Talking Flower on his side.
It’s annoying when it happens, but it also makes for a funny time. In the same way that cuts tension during an argument, this stupid little Flower also works best when you’re already contemplating being lazy, and then it all of a sudden pipes up to tell you that “Perfect weather for a nap” on a rainy day. Does it kill productivity and let your laziness win? Yeah, it sure does. The Flower said so.
Alternatively, in the last week, we both used the “Have you finished your homework?” prompt to get off the couch and do work. Because, no, we had not finished our work for the day. If I had written this piece three weeks ago, or even two, I would have told you that we had taken the batteries out and that it was now just a collectible on a shelf. But somewhere in week three, my husband stopped telling me to take its batteries out and started using it for his jokes.
More still, before sitting down to write this, I asked my husband if we should take out the batteries because the review is done. His response? “Eh, I’ve gotten used to it.” I don’t know if it’s because we both have the love of a bit, or the mutually assured destruction of knowing that one of us is inevitably going to be bullied by the Talking Flower, but the batteries are staying in, the Talking Flower is staying on the coffee table, and when I nap, it’s going to jolt me awake uncerminoniusly the way Nintendo intended.
So yeah, the Nintendo Talking Flower is a hellscape until you get used to it. Then, when you do, it’s just a helper in bullying your spouse, waking you up, or just generally reminding you that you’ve been scrolling your phone too long when it tells you the top of the hour. Buyer beware that you’re in for a scare, or a really funny time at home, if you can muscle your way through the first few weeks.
