(Jogado na versão ALL-STARS de SNES.)

Para começar quando joguei não sabia da história envolvendo o Doki Doki Panic, então eu realmente estranhei esse jogo ser bem diferente do que eu esperava... só que quando fiquei sabendo de suas polêmicas, olhei pra ele com outros olhos... Eu tenho uma filosofia de jogar os jogos e julga-los não da forma que eu quero que eles sejam, mas da forma que eles são. E dessa maneira, Super Mario Bros. 2 é sim, um ótimo jogo.

Uma das coisas que eu gostaria de acentuar e enaltecer nele é sua variedade de fases, algo que eu sempre gosto de avaliar nos jogos do Mario, porquê é uma das coisas mais importantes a se analisar em qualquer jogo dessa franquia maravilhosa. E eu gostei muito das fases dele.

Como pontos negativos eu colocaria:
- Sua dificuldade extremamente exagerada em algumas partes, principalmente em regiões apertadas, comigo achando injusto algumas coisas;
- Pouca variedade de inimigos.

Levando em conta as suas polêmicas, ele é de longe, o Mario mais diferente de todos. (Em minha opinião).

Kudos to Howard Phillips recognizing that what would eventually be known as The Lost Levels wasn't going to work well as a sequel in the US. Getting a reskinned Doki Doki Panic ended up being the best thing that could have happened to Mario because of how novel everything felt for the second time in a row.

The theme music here is just as memorable as in the original game as far as I'm concerned, and this game probably had the best controls out of any platformer to have come out at the time of its release. The visuals were colorful, had some great new enemies, nice animations, and little flourishes like stealing the magic carpet and being attacked by one of the bird doors towards the end of the game. I do think it overstays its welcome a bit, as the last third of the game starts feeling a bit repetitive, and I also wish they had done more with the Subcon world behind the magic doors. While this wasn't what they initially intended for the sequel, what they ended up with ended up working out far better.

Pros: Four characters to choose from to play as! Fun boppy music! Interesting and fun pluck mechanic. And, best of all NO TIMER! You can diddle around as much as you want in these levels without the stress of impending doom by a clock.

Cons: The platforming gameplay of this game, just isn't as fun as traditional hop & bop Mario platformers. Also, the level design is kinda not great, to be honest... There's one stage with a series of jars/pipes, and only one of them has a key hidden inside it, so you're going down each jar/pipe to find the key, dealing with enemies over and over, until you find the right jar/pipe with the key... and there's no sense of design at all, just blind trial and error until you find the right pipe/jar with the key... a bit frustrating really, and there's bits of things like that throughout the game, that leads this one feeling a little less quality than other more mainstream Mario titles.

What it means to me: First played this on the All-Stars version for SNES, and it was pretty whimsical, and for a while, this was my favorite Mario game, really! Playing as Peach with her hover ability, and not having a timer, really helped ease myself into these types of games as a kid. A lot more accessible considering those elements, which, makes this game a lot better as a result.

The first time I played Mario 2, I was surprised at how fun it was. It holds up much better than Mario 1 and is still really solid today.

The terrible Mario 1 physics are gone and game plays so much better for it. All the characters are much faster and a little more slippery feeling which makes the platforming a lot faster paced and fun.

The game looks really nice and the new characters are really cool. I tried to use everyone a few times, but I mostly stuck to Toad and Mario. The new moveset takes some getting used to at first, but they provide a nice variety in platforming by allowing the game to have vertical levels. The soundtrack is really nice too (although I wish there were a few more tracks).

The game still has some jank, but it's nowhere near game ruining. For example, in most circumstances, you cannot hit the run button to prepare for a jump when standing on a floating projectile. I also never got fully used to the throwing physics in this game, there were many instances where I wanted to throw it further, but I guess I wasn't moving fast enough for the game to register it as a throw, so mario would just play whatever project/object I was holding in front of him. Additionally, if I was trying to throw something mid air while underneath a platform, Mario would place the projectile on the upper platform instead of throwing it at the boss or enemy. The blast radius of the bombs were a little janky at times too. The bombs bounce and if they bounce a small distance off a wall or if they bounce up before exploding a bombable floor piece, the wall/floor are not gonna explode your target.

It's not too hard to adjust to these issues, but it does take some time, especially if you've played a lot of Mario maker 2 like I have. That game fine tuned the Mario bros 2 controls and physics to fix some of the jank from the original game, but the gameplay/physics differences is nowhere near as drastic between MM2 and the Mario bros 1.

Overall, Mario 2 is still a really good time. It holds up much better than you would expect and controls so much better than it's two predecessors. It's still not perfect, but it obviously stands out as being unique from the other 2D Mario games and is still very much worth playing today.

Mario madness, indeed. I really enjoyed my time with this again. First time I have beaten the original, actually. I've played the Mario all stars version a gazillion times (when it's one of few games you have as a kid, you tend to go through the same ones quite often), but only really played this one on NSO and the Smash Bros demos on Wii U. And the one time my mum took me to a game shop in Humberstone where I played the display NES and this blew my mind.

Good fun. On to Super Mario Bros. 3, next.

The black sheep of the Mario platformers. I could give you the usual, trite spiel about the Lost Levels being too hard for westerners so we got a reskinned Doki Doki Panic and blah blah blah. Honestly, I don't think this game is good or interesting enough to warrant that, nor is its supposed "real" Japanese counterpart. Both SMB2s represent a turning point, the videogame equivalent of an awkward, hesitant pause. Unsure of how to follow up such a smash hit as the first Super Mario Bros, Nintendo opted for a bullshit troll level pack for Japan and some reskinned crap for the West.

What's curious is how much of this game has survived in Mario's canon, but in such minor roles. Shy Guys and Birdo haven't gone away, but you can't say they've ever taken the centre stage in a way like this again. There's an air of begrudging duty forcing Nintendo to acknowledge this game, but never to give it any more than that, and perhaps that's for the best. The first and third SMB games are still innovative, fantastic pioneers for the genre, but both versions of the second entry are little more than historical curios. Their legacy will always be an overshared anecdote about the bizarreness of 80s games localisations and little more than that.