The limitations of the Game Boy prevent Mario Land 2 from true greatness, but there's still a lot to love it for.
The worlds, thirty years later, are unlike anything we've seen in a 2D Mario game since. Instead of the usual "biomes" we see in traditional Mario titles we get the inside of a big Mario robot, a world where you're shrunken down to the size of an ant, and space! There aren't a ton of levels but each of them have a hook tied directly to those concepts, so they're all decently memorable. And you have more weird shit going on like jumping in a hippo's snot bubble to float to the goal, insane dreamlike scenarios that you'd never see in the series now. The open map exploration is cool too and gives the game a nice sense of discovery.
Wario's Castle is the most memorable level and that's because you are forced to start from the very beginning every time you die, even if you've reached the three phase boss battle at the end. It's a pretty steep increase difficulty from the rest of the game but it's a welcome challenge and fun to see yourself get the hang of it. What is unwelcome is losing all of your golden coins after dying, and needing to replay all the previous boss levels to get them back and access Wario's castle - I confess I didn't bother with this and just used a save state.
The worlds, thirty years later, are unlike anything we've seen in a 2D Mario game since. Instead of the usual "biomes" we see in traditional Mario titles we get the inside of a big Mario robot, a world where you're shrunken down to the size of an ant, and space! There aren't a ton of levels but each of them have a hook tied directly to those concepts, so they're all decently memorable. And you have more weird shit going on like jumping in a hippo's snot bubble to float to the goal, insane dreamlike scenarios that you'd never see in the series now. The open map exploration is cool too and gives the game a nice sense of discovery.
Wario's Castle is the most memorable level and that's because you are forced to start from the very beginning every time you die, even if you've reached the three phase boss battle at the end. It's a pretty steep increase difficulty from the rest of the game but it's a welcome challenge and fun to see yourself get the hang of it. What is unwelcome is losing all of your golden coins after dying, and needing to replay all the previous boss levels to get them back and access Wario's castle - I confess I didn't bother with this and just used a save state.