Some of the sickest ideas and one of the best soundtracks on the Game Boy, completely squandered with some of the slowest, most boring movement I've ever seen in a video game, a terrible framerate that slows and stutters whenever there's two enemies on screen, and some just abysmal level design full of cheap one-hit kills. The tough-but-fair brilliance of the first game is replaced with unrelenting tedium, even for such a short game. Just skip this one, it's not worth playing (but you should listen to the soundtrack though it goes CRAZY).

EDIT: 3/10 -> 2/10 if the game is nearly irredeemable why did i give it a 3???

Very fun game, I was a little surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It's very satisfying to take down enemies and build up an army to help you conquer the dangerous landscapes. My only gripes were the inconsistent difficulty and the AI of the pikmin which led to some disasters that weren't my fault. It can also get a little samey as the game goes on, but it doesn't overstay it's welcome and ends up being a fairly short game, so I didn't get very sick of the gameplay. Overall a great game and I'm excited to play the rest of the series

Pretty fun and innovative platformer. It's a shame it didn't see much success -- I can't even imagine what kinds of games we would have gotten in the Super Mario series in a different world

Okay in all seriousness this was one of the first games I ever played and man this game seemed impossible as a kid, I could barely get to world 4. But I decided to go back and give it a shot, beating every single level without warps and it felt amazing to finally complete this game that holds a special place in my heart. That being said it's not perfect, Mario feels extremely stiff and imprecise in this game which can make a lot of sections really annoying as Mario seems to almost disobey the player at times. It's kind of amazing Mario feels as good as he does since it was the first game in the series, but every game after (except for JPN 2) improved vastly on this one. Also, game overs in this game are bogus. Replaying levels you've already beaten is simply not fun and, again, every game that came after handled this much better. All that to say, a really short and sweet platforming game held back a bit by stiff movement and a lack of continues.

This is by far the best NES Mario. It's also like 20x easier than the others. The levels in this game are (mostly) pretty great and Mario feels great to control. I think there's just a couple flaws that just barely make it a 7/10 instead of an 8. Not every level is fantastic and a lot of them start to feel very samey, especially towards the end. I also think the difficulty curve is super weird, world 6 is by far the hardest and world 3 is pretty tricky too. By comparison world 4 is incredibly easy and world 8, despite being the last one, is filled with like 2 tricky levels and a bunch of fairly easy ones. The final castle is especially disappointing, I remember it being hard from my last playthrough but it's super short without much challenge. Still, I really like this game a lot and is, in my opinion, the first truly good Mario game.