Super Mario Land 2 has some legitimately fun parts - the Hippo Zone leading directly into the Space Zone especially feeling good. It's a game just bursting with unique ideas and environments that would come to define the Wario Land series, individual enemies with funky designs shining before Mario disposes of them with a single jump. It's even got a pretty fun approximation of Mario's Super Mario World movement, abilities, and a last level that's oddly harder than the entire rest of the game! However, the game itself is rather woefully short when it comes to extra content and incentives to play it, neat little side areas usually only existing for a 1-up, which the game is both too easy to need and too plentiful to feel particularly earned. The game is restricted by its adherence to the Mario formula and trying its best to replicate it on a system that can't quite handle it (and I think was done a bit more fun in the previous approximation). I respect the ambition of this as a handheld Mario title, but the platforming is rather clumsy, with the largest bits of difficulty coming from trying to get Mario to awkwardly drift on top of a moving platform or enemy rather than much else. It's cute, but it's clear that Wario Land was the ultimate result this team wanted to achieve.