I think people only care about this game because it was the Japan-only "REAL Mario 2!"
But you know? I'll give Doki Doki Panic/Super Mario USA that it was creative and well-designed. Japanese SMB2 is almost entirely reused assets. Its most notable contribution to the series is the poison mushroom. The level design is terrible and designed to frustrate you. Sometimes there are good challenges, I admit, but they're overshadowed by things like wind that pushes you back and warp zones that bring you back to World 1. It was satisfying finally beating it, but it's not a very fun Mario game.

You can safely ignore the stupid reviews complaining that they somehow ruined the game by making it better. They're obsessing over minutae of artistic intent that pretentious pseuds made up rather than admit the 2010 gameplay was bad, and ignoring the actual artistry of the game. "NieR's gameplay was bad on purpose" was a cope made up by people who don't want to admit the original game was severely flawed but I guess if you tell yourself something like that for enough years you psyop yourself into actually believing it. The reality is the original game was trying to genuinely compete in the market of action RPGs (it was trying to be on par with kingdom hearts, but for SE's older audience) but Cavia didn't have staff with the chops for action games. With 1.22 NieR Replicant is better than it's ever been. While it was my favorite game the original had huge, glaring flaws. While the core combat in this version isn't anything amazing, in the original it just wasn't any good. Content was cut from the game due to constraints. Graphically it was dated on release and really overused the bloom. Here they've polished the game and really let it shine. The things that most needed improvement have been improved with the soul and aesthetic still intact afterwards. It plays dramatically better. It looks dramatically better. They've added cut content back in. It's fully voiced now. You're an idiot if you intentionally lose out on a massive improvement because you've deluded yourself into thinking the game being tedious to play was a core tenet of the story and not just the result of it being a low-budget game made by a studio that was bad at making action games. Honestly if you're one of those people, I question whether you really like NieR or just like feeling smart for having played the less popular one (Same with the people who love OG NieR and hate Automata. You don't actually like NieR)
The same thing happened with Automata; people would find every contrived reason to whine about it now that the series is popular, but go on about the original was just to make sure everyone knew how cool they were for playing it. Thinking Yoko Taro was an infallible genius when he made half-baked games but hating his work now that his games are more successful and have actual quality support just shows that you are a contrarian hipster.

* lol, how personally these people took me calling their reviews stupid is really telling

With shallow, unresponsive combat and bad enemy design that has you spending the whole game fighting walls of armor that rarely respond to being hit, from the onset it's already not a good Tales game, nor is it even good on the merits of the more typical 3D action RPG it abandoned the series' core to be. If you look outside the combat, however, there are things to like, or at least at first. The story is alright and the environment design is a step up from what Tales has been doing for years (the dungeon design, however, is not). Those things all get worse as the game goes on until you reach the irredeemable late game and struggle to continue giving a shit, between the story falling apart, the game's already heavy reliance on recolors of otherwise recycled enemies becoming even more prominent, and the asset recycling creeping into dungeon design with lots of copy/pasted rooms that maybe will be recolored. And don't even get me started on how they locked artes and their associated skill trees behind DLC costumes, or shit like the $16 Sword Art Online DLC