Completed playing all levels with Peach except one that I played with Toad.

It's strange how much of this game is subconsciously stored in my brain. I played through and knew where the warps were having not played it since I played it on the NES what feels like ages ago.

And I certainly recalled 7-1 but had no memory of 7-2... so I assume that I've never beaten the game before.

7-2 though is pretty rough to get through. So many lives lost. And it all ends with Wart dying from vegetable poisoning? Poor guy.

I'm not sure if it's the NES Classic that's the issue, but there's some hideous slow down when there's too many sprites on the screen.

But I like this game. It's kind of calming not having a timer constantly judging you and it gives you time to explore and see what you can find. I'm pretty sure I found some new short cuts that I hadn't known about before. And the soundtrack is super boppy too.

Perhaps one of the most well-known "fun facts" in gaming is that Super Mario Bros. 2 was actually a title by the name of Doki Doki Panic in Japan before having character sprites swapped to a Super Mario aesthetic for Western release. Which is a shame, not necessarily because the original aesthetic itself was worthwhile in any way, but because the core mechanics of the game are quite fun to play with. Picking things up and throwing them adds a lot of depth to how one can approach levels. Many of the levels are quite memorable, each world having it's own mechanics. They do kinda run short on ideas with a few of the later stages being redundant, but there's a lot of diversity on display here. The boss fights are also great, arguably some of the best on the NES. The franchise would eventually go back to it's roots rather than continue expanding on many of the ideas brought up in this game, but this was for the better. Still, it would've been nice for the original IP to have gained some traction and provide further development of the unique mechanics. This is a fun game. 4/6

This could be more of a Doki Doki Panic review, but at this rate that game is more famous as Mario 2 than it is DDP. It may not be a sequel to the first, but I argue it actually serves its job better than the actual sequel (which is complete s#!t, by the way.) Either way, it's a fun romp from beginning to end.

The levels are much longer than the first, though there are less of them. The bosses are the best of any Mario game on NES, The graphics are leagues above it, and while I am disappointed they got rid of multiplayer and power-ups, I'm willing to accept it for different characters. Peach is my favorite, followed by Luigi, Mario, then Toad. The powerups here are great too. Chucking turnips or yeeting enemies into each other feels surprisingly good. Doors, extra health mechanics, more clever warp zones, and much better enemies. It's a bit harder than the first too, which has grown to be pretty easy to me. A nice balance between extreme ease and difficulty.

Overall, I find this game to be very, very fun. It's a happy, upbeat journey from start to end. Super Mario Bros 2: Mario Madness deserves being called the successor to the original.

Quality = 4 / 5
Gameplay = 4 / 5
Story = 3 / 5
Soundtrack = 4 / 5
Pacing = 4 / 5
Enjoyability = 4 / 5
Challenge = 3 / 5

Overall = 3.25 / 5

Of all the NES games that had so much potential and just made me wish that they had been developed in the SNES era with the experience of the previous console generation behind them to provide guidance to greater heights, Super Mario Bros 2 might just be the game that tops the list for me at this point. I feel this way thanks to how amazing so many elements of this game are, and the way they often feel marred by some often massive flaws that tank a lot of these ideas and made the game as a whole feel rather unsatisfying to play. It's also pretty funny how clear it is that this was not originally a Mario game, though it honestly feels more like a little fun fact about gaming history rather than anything that shaped my opinion on this game in any particular way. In fact, I'd go as far as to argue that it feeling so blatantly disconnected from the other Mario games in almost every facet serves to elevate this experience quite a bit and ends up making it feel like a pretty unique game on the system as a whole.

The level design is where a lot of this really is most apparent, for better and for worse. While it's all very linear still, albeit with usually a couple of paths that you can diverge from and have them link up at the end, it feels like there was a lot more that went into crafting a set of distinct worlds that presented the player with a decent variety of challenges that feels more adventurous, as if the player is being taken on a proper journey. The complexity of some of these challenges feels pretty interesting as well, aided by the throwing mechanic allowing for some more room for creativity. Even the early parts of the game are able to integrate this stuff in, with the very first stage providing the player with an optional path that they can only get through if they carefully time when they throw a bomb they pick up. The moment most indicative of this however is in the way the player has to take on the minibosses in the game. Rather than simply having to jump on the enemy's head or make it to a button past them, the player has to actively intercept the projectiles being thrown in their direction and then throw it back at them, and it's stuff like this that ends up contributing to a game that feels very compelling and brimming with interesting ways of challenging the player.

With that said, this complexity and variety also comes with a couple of huge stipulations that stops this from reaching its full potential. The first is that a lot of the level design ideas themselves are simply not good at all, often being confusing, frustrating, painfully obtuse, or a combination of some of these. There's often something that feels a bit off about navigating certain sections of the game, as if it's all just a bit off in what the game seems to expect from you. While some of these are rather charming ideas, such as having to guide a flying enemy down to you and then hijack its flying carpet to reach new areas, there are a fair few times where it comes across as unintuitive in such a way that it ends up teaching some pretty bad habits to the player, ultimately leading to a game that's probably more confusing than it ought to be in many cases. A prime example is the way the game early on has you riding on top of an enemy projectile, which in itself is a really cool idea, but one that get ruined by introducing this possibility that flying enemies and the like could be also leading to progression or secrets, a thought further reinforced by the way some levels almost seem to reach a dead end out of nowhere and have the player take on some more unconventional paths. By introducing such a possibility and then having level design making this possibility seem even more plausible, weird and interesting ideas like this end up leading to a lot of moments that make the levels feel more convoluted than they are most of the time. This could have worked in the favour of the game for sure, but with certain NES design conventions being plastered everywhere, it really does become hard to truly parse what ideas you come up with are nonsense and what ones could actually happen.

Another huge issue is that the game feels like it runs out of steam after the 4th world, where this almost aggressive variety in what challenges are presented mostly halts and the game starts retreading. The moment where this really clicked is when world 6 came around and it was a desert themed world in a game that already had one of those, same assets and everything. This ended up making the 2nd half of the game lose a lot of its appeal in discovery due to how it really stopped feeling like you were discovering all that much, and those few ideas you did were almost universally overbearingly difficult. The worst example yet again finds itself in world 6 where the player has to find a key and has around 15 - 20 small sub areas that the key could be hidden in, with the only way of finding it being either knowing beforehand, or by trial and error. Even ideas that were initially interesting, such as having to dig through layers of the ground ended up feeling more tedious than anything after having the same dynamic be repeated multiple times in a bunch of levels, each time simply being more irritating due to the often unfair sense of difficulty at play.

Ignoring the level design as well, there are still issues with most areas of the game, despite most areas also showing some serious promise. I love the way the controls feel in this for the most part, still having a bit of slipperiness to your movements, but feeling as if you have considerably more control over where you're going, which stops this constant anxiety of thinking "what if the controls don't work as intended this time?" which was nice after having that thought for almost the entirety of my SMB1 playthrough. Unfortunately, I found it endlessly unbearable to have the button to pick things up and the button to run be mapped to the same button. I had more times than I could count where I died because I tried jumping across a scary looking gap, only to pick up what was under me and ruin the timing. The lives system in this also seems cooler for the most part, as while a lot of them come down to RNG, the combination of the doors you can use to get coins being an interesting idea, and the amount of chances you get end up giving you a considerable amount of lives. However, both the fact that some of the stages near the end are downright brutal, and the way this gives you a total game over where you have to start from 1-1 after losing all your lives a handful of times makes it feel far worse in general, especially without that safety net of warp zones allowing you to at least make back some of that progress. Really in the end, there's a lot I love about Super Mario Bros. 2, but it still feels as if it's been held back so strongly in a variety of ways that culminate in a game that is amazing on paper, but thoroughly unenjoyable to actually play, or at least I found that to be the case.

The music in this game drives me absolutely crazy. I wanted to kill myself by the end of the game.

However I do need to give this game credit for introducing the sexy milf Birdo into the Mario universe.

40

En mi análisis del primer Super Mario dije que lo peor del juego eran esas pocas secciones de las mazmorras finales donde tenias que buscar el camino correcto dando vueltas o de lo contrario volvías al principio del nivel, porque se perdía esa fluidez y gracia que tenia el resto del juego.

Quien me iba a decir que gran parte de este Super Mario Bros 2 era justamente de ese estilo.

El juego desprende ideas y creatividad por todas partes. Ahora permite tener más interactividad con los mapas, pudiendo coger las plantas del suelo para utilizarlos como armas, o también pudiendo coger a los propios enemigos o bombas para destruir ciertos bloques etc. También tienen más profundidad los escenarios, pudiendo entrar por puertas, grietas de cuevas o excavando en la arena, dándole más cohesión a los lugares y sentido a la exploración. Se añade verticalidad, tanto para subir pantallas a través de las nubes como bajarlas a través de subterráneos.

Pero, irónicamente, por culpa de lo anterior ya no estamos hablando solo de un juego tremendamente inferior al primero, sino directamente mediocre.

Quiere ser tantas cosas que no hay prácticamente ninguna gracia ni pureza en ninguna de ellas, como sí lo había en el primero, que era saltar y todo contribuía a ello.

Plataformas, acción, lucha, aventura, exploración. Durante todo el juego se van sucediendo situaciones de dichos géneros y apenas quedan atisbos del simple disfrute de saltar porque es divertido. Es el claro ejemplo de el que mucho abarca poco aprieta, y en su intento de ser muchas cosas a la vez, se queda entre dos tierras. Ahora la mayoría de elementos son tareas: derrota por décima vez al Boss de la misma manera para continuar, pon aquí la bomba para avanzar, consigue esta llave y escapa de la máscara para proseguir, móntate en este enemigo o no podrás hacer nada y un largo etcétera.

Al final se vuelve directamente aburrido, sobre todo esos no pocos momentos de ir apilando bloques uno encima de otro para llegar a un sitio elevado. No es que ya no tenga pureza, es que es soporífero.

Lo he jugado con emulador y si no fuese por la característica de guardado instantáneo de este, no lo hubiese terminado.