Was surprised how much I ended up enjoying playing through this, and unlike most NES games from this era I found myself not really wanting to use savestates or rewind much unless thrown into something explicitly pretty bullshit (the bomb in the room on 7-1 lol)
It's hard to imagine what the trajectory of Mario games would be like without this honestly, considering the very strong emphasis on item play and pickups, something that Super Mario Bros 3. and later Super Mario World would both use in their level designs; almost exclusively in a linear fashion however unlike 2's challenging routine of guiding a magic bottle over to urns to find warps. There's also a lot of clever skips reliant on the player experimenting with enemies and using them as platforms; something the series effectively never comes back to experiment with unfortunately. The gauntlets on 7-1 and 7-2 are pretty messed up and the final boss mostly amounted to waiting on the left platform but overall this was significantly more enjoyable than I thought it would be.
I feel like this is mandatory playing with or without savestates for any 2D Mario fan, if for no other reason than to act as a palette cleanser as being the most unique entry by a mile.
It's hard to imagine what the trajectory of Mario games would be like without this honestly, considering the very strong emphasis on item play and pickups, something that Super Mario Bros 3. and later Super Mario World would both use in their level designs; almost exclusively in a linear fashion however unlike 2's challenging routine of guiding a magic bottle over to urns to find warps. There's also a lot of clever skips reliant on the player experimenting with enemies and using them as platforms; something the series effectively never comes back to experiment with unfortunately. The gauntlets on 7-1 and 7-2 are pretty messed up and the final boss mostly amounted to waiting on the left platform but overall this was significantly more enjoyable than I thought it would be.
I feel like this is mandatory playing with or without savestates for any 2D Mario fan, if for no other reason than to act as a palette cleanser as being the most unique entry by a mile.