Though I have beaten the game on the SNES several times (this is probably my 4th time beating this game), this was my first time beating it in Japanese! I bought the SFC Mini almost entirely to have a convenient easy way to play this game XD . I enjoyed Paper Mario so much in Japanese that I really wanted to see the localization of the previous game, and it was great fun just like Paper Mario was~. This time I played through with a team of Bowser and Mallow, despite Fast's warnings against it, and came to the conclusion that Mallow is indeed terrible and made the game FAR harder than it needed to be XD

The translation of the English version is quite faithful to the Japanese original, at least as far as my memory serves (and what I occasionally looked up online). Things like Booster's eccentric speech being similarly silly but in a different way (he has his own kind of punny words he uses for himself and switches between SUPER casual and very formal speech a lot), Johnathan Jones speaking much more about the honor of being a manly man's man, and a couple silly naming conventions and puns here and there that didn't make it into the English version. Regardless, the English version is a fantastic companion piece to the Japanese original, in my opinion. Neither is better; they're just both good in similar but different ways.

Dunno if the game was just a lot harder than I remember, or if Mallow and Bowser are just a terrible team combonation, or if the Japanese version is harder than the US version, but the end game was definitely harder than I remember. I still enjoyed it either way though. A nice nostalgic trip down memory lane with a foreign-language twist~