we'll change bricks to stone
and give most everything eyes-
voilà! a new game!
Additional Comments:
Traditions, traditions. Honestly, I didn't think I'd manage another Mario Christmas. But here we are!
My original intention was to run through Super Mario 64 this year, but due to various reasons, that never materialized. Reason number one being I have zero interest in playing that game. It just feels so alien whenever I play it. Mario game? What's a Mario game?
I thought of a couple other possible kooky titles to hit up, but in the end, I wanted to tackle a game that falls directly in the line of sight of a Mario platformer. Ooh! Wait! What about that one game that was an actual sequel according to Japanese Mario lore but was nothing but a mythical Nessie to the rest of the world? After all, I somehow skipped over it in order to play Yume Koujou: Doki Doki Panic...er, Super Mario Bros. 2. But...this is Super Mario Bros. 2. No. Wait...what? Could be worse. Could be Final Fantasy III...I mean VI...I mean... Wait. If it's VI, then where are the three unaccounted Final Fantasy games? Ah, Japan, you sneaky little devil you, keeping everything to yourself.
I played Super Mario Bros. 2 years ago as part of Super Mario All-Stars where it was cheekily dubbed, The Lost Levels. Nice save there, Nintendo. I remember very little of the experience except for the newly implemented wind feature being doubled up with some disgustingly stupid jumps and the overall increased difficulty compared to the first SMB. I think I quickly put that game down and returned to SMB3 - my personal favorite. The Lost Levels felt like a sour pang. It was so cool to see this "lost," to the Western world at least, Mario game, but at the same time, I was hugely disappointed. Not just because of the difficulty or the lack of noticeable improvement over the first game, but something just felt off. It felt lazy; unnecessary. Nothing grabbed my attention other than the mystique behind the game's existence itself. Then again, maybe it was just those god forsaken wind jumps.
This is the first time I've returned to this game since that experience. I've always wanted to return to give the game a proper chance, but I always knew in the back of my mind that the game would feel like nothing more than cutting room scraps. After completing it, my opinion on the matter barely deviates from my original thoughts. It feels like a lazily slapped together game shoveled out with the intent to make a few extra yen. In today's terms, it feels equivalent to some thoughtless DLC created to make a quick buck because everyone loves the base game so much, they'll buy any old horse shit that we decide to pack on. I know this is likely a controversial viewpoint on the matter and people likely think I'm just butthurt over the difficulty, but I'm not. I simply believe I played through a poorly designed game.
You don't have to venture far on the internet, or amongst gamers in general, to know that this game has acquired a reputation for being notoriously difficult compared to the first. But what makes it difficult? In the first game, the difficulty was progressive on a fairly linear scale. New enemies were introduced as well as more complex structural patterns and jumps in fairly forgiving ways. The sequel, however, appears to take the position that players of SMB2 will be players who have already conquered SMB, therefore there's no need to potty train them all over again. They're aware of everything we're going to throw at them so let's pick it up from right where we left off. This is a ridiculously stupid model. Granted, we're talking about the early days of platforming and few if any sequels existed. So it was all very much up in the air as far as how games were designed moving forward. Why reinvent the wheel all over again when we can just pick up where we left off?
The argument can be made that the game is simply introducing what sort of challenge to expect. Instead of starting at the ground floor, this game starts you on the tenth floor and gives you a royal kick in the arse saying, "Have at it (you foolish idiot)," as you go hurtling through challenges never before imagined over the course of the first few floors. Only, as the game progresses, the difficulty curve is all over the place, like a highly turbulent day on Wall Street. This alone pisses me off in regards to starting the game at such an extreme level compared to the original game. There's no sense of learning. Instead, there's often a sense of relaxation or stagnation, or simply, we ran out of ideas so enjoy this long stretch of flat land with very few enemies.
But what makes the game difficult is the poor design. Looking back on Super Mario Bros., the levels appear to be well made, as though there was purpose to every brick, every pit, every goomba etc. Here, it seems like the designers blindly slapped the levels together in the dark. So much of the game feels like a bad YouTube hack. No other official Mario release, at least that I can think of, carries such a comparison. It feels like there's no rhyme or reason to anything here. Instead, it's like someone had a handful of bricks, question blocks, platforms, enemies, etc. and nonchalantly splattered them across a giant canvas. Voilà, level 3-1, or 4-2, or 7-4, or what sort of level did we need? Underground? Ah yes. Just add a bunch of random pipes. That'll do. What? The piranha plant is dipping into the ground? Who cares?
A result of the slapdash design is incredibly dickish jumps. This mostly revolves around wind or the more infuriating, green springboard. More than anything else in the game, I abhor the green springboard sections. Unless I'm just flat out misunderstanding moon launch physics, Mario's return to earth is total guesswork. I died far too many times because I misjudged where Mario was going to drop from the top of the screen. Every time I expected him to be relatively center, he'd somehow drop on the far left. How is that happening? In an attempt to correct, I'd overcompensate and Mario would suddenly drop center screen. Far too many Marios lost their lives to these blasted devices. And it's such a shit way to die because I felt like I had no control over the situation. If I die because I fall in a pit while attempting a particularly tricky jump or run straight into a koopa because I mistimed something, I can totally accept that because the game got the better of me and I made a mistake - sometimes a stupid mistake. But to die over what's essentially a blind jump is pure bullshit. Frankly, it amazes me that a game that has zero vertical scrolling somehow managed to introduce blind jumps. That's brilliant minds at work right there.
Even the old staples of annoyance like fortress mazes make an unwelcome return. That was one aspect of the original I never liked and this game somehow made the concept just that much more frustrating. The first game at least had mazes that felt intuitive, but here, there were a couple maze that kept throwing me for a loop because there were a couple blocks I never would have guessed were part of the design. I think one of them I solved by sheer accident. Another maze, I'm not even sure what the intended method is, but if it's how I eventually solved it... *Facepalm* There's nothing more to be said. More incredulously, backwards warps were added. If the game couldn't troll you enough - backwards warps. Wow!
It's not all bad, however. There are some improvements over the first game that I enjoyed. As much as I hated the wind sections, I found the wind to be a very unexpected, and rather genius addition. Eventually, through the NSMB series, we came to see the wind gimmick being used with proper intelligence and we have SMB2 to thank for that. Additional types of moving platforms were a highly appreciated improvement. We even find the precursor to the platforms that move infinitely to the right in later games like SMB3. So yes, along with poison mushrooms (though I hesitate to call that a worthwhile improvement - it actually adds very little to the game in my opinion) or elongated fire bars, there's is a handful of new elements to help freshen up the gameplay so it's not a completely stale rehash of the first game. Unfortunately, most of the welcomed improvements are far outshined by everything that's wrong with this game.
I can't convince myself to recommend this game under any circumstances. I suppose if you like shitty SMB hacks, sure why not? But if you want to play a quality product, this is not it. Even if you simply like a good challenge, I can't recommend this game in good conscience. To me, it's a poorly made mockery of everything Super Mario Bros., and that's rather depressing because it's such a mythical game in the early days of the Super Mario franchise. People often say the game was never brought to the Western world because Westerners can't appreciate a good challenge like the Japanese gamers can. I've never understood that as we had a number of stupidly difficult game here in the Western world. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, The Adventures of Bayou Billy actually saw an increase in difficulty for its Western release in comparison to its Japanese counterpart, Mad City. In my opinion, the whole notion of Westerners hate a good challenge is nothing but a crock of shit. Yes, remarks have been made that NoA didn't wish to bring the game to the Western world precisely for the above reasons, but I call bullshit on that. I wholeheartedly believe this game never saw a Western release because its crap. I'm glad we got a hastily converted game about a family in a strange Arabian setting as opposed to this poor excuse at level design. What came to be "our" Super Mario Bros. 2 is a vastly superior game in the platforming and design departments. I wouldn't say it's a superior Mario game as I still don't find it Mario-esque at all and if there's anything the Japanese version is, it's undeniably a Mario game. But as far as everything else is concerned, the Yume Koujou: Doki Doki Panic ripoff that we got is a game of far greater caliber.
Nano-Rant:
I actually have two things to rant about - one short one long.
First, my true nano-rant: floating bloopers. This is yet another reason why I can only compare this game to juvenile YouTube hacks. It just screams unprofessional.
And now for my more serious complaint: Worlds A-D. I have nothing against Worlds A-D themselves, and rather enjoyed them a bit more compared to the rest of the game, except for the sections that were blatant copypastas of previous levels. My issue is with the hoops you need to jump through just to access them. Beat the game eight times? What a ridiculously arbitrary number and what an unbelievable way to pad out gameplay in hopes of replayability. World 9, on the other hand, has a totally sensible method of unlocking: beat the game without warps. That's completely fair. But beat the game eight times? What kind of third rate award tactics is this?
I hated the game on my first playthrough, so there's certainly no way I'm playing another seven times. Even if I loved the game, I'd likely play it two maybe three times through completion in a relatively reasonable time period (few months to a year?) at least to experience the full game with both Mario and Luigi. Additional playthroughs would be sporadic at best over the span of years because it still doesn't have the same exact type of replayability as say Mega Man 2 or Super Mario Bros. 3 where you can impose a number of challenges upon yourself to make things more interesting. Needless to say, there's no fucking way I'm ever going to play this game through to the end eight times, even if I just ran the minimalist route. A sensible solution would be to beat the game twice, once with Mario, once with Luigi. I could totally accept that since there are some slight differences in physics between the two brothers so the experience would be ever so slightly different across each playthrough. And then, ta-da! Bonus world!
As is, I'll use Game Genie, thank you very much.
Rating: 1.5 peace pavers out of 5
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