Old School Game Reviews -- Super Mario Bros. 2

Greetings everyone, welcome to my review on one of the weirdest Mario games I've ever played. I hope you're having a good day. Super Mario Bros. 2 came out in 1988, a few years after the original. I was going to talk about the original first but this game has a much more interesting story behind it in my opinion. When I was a kid I grew up with Nintendo systems, never owned a Sega Genesis. So naturally I was very familiar with all three original Mario games. The first one is a classic of course but there's not much there to talk about. The sequel changed things up quite a bit and I spent a lot of time playing this game. Pretty much everything was different about it, except for the main characters. I'll talk more about that in a little bit though.

First of all, the main difference you will notice right off the bat is you get to choose from four main characters, Mario, Luigi, Toad, and the Princess. Each one plays a little different. Mario is a well rounded middle of the road type with nothing special about him. Luigi can jump very high but is a little hard to control, making it hard to stick the landing. Toad is extremely quick and sturdy but can't jump very high. The Princess has the ability to hover in mid air for a few seconds. As a kid a would try out each one to see how they all handled, but after using the Princess a few times I quickly learned that she was my favorite. This was also the first Mario game where you would pull things out of the ground, usually it was a vegetable of some kind that you could throw at an enemy. But sometimes you would find a red potion, you had to find the right spot in the level to drop the potion to open a doorway, and if you did it right there would be a mushroom there for you that would extend your life gauge.

One thing I always loved about Mario 2 was the variety of different levels. First you start out going through a grassy world with hills and waterfalls. Then you might find yourself in a desert with quicksand and pyramids that you would have to dig a tunnel through. Later you're at an ice world with whales that spout water out of their blow holes and sliding around on glare ice. Then towards the end you were up in the clouds jumping from puffy cloud to puffy cloud trying not to fall off. The huge variety in level design was one of the best parts of the game to me when I was young. Even going back today and playing the three NES Mario games, this one is my favorite. Something else worth mentioning is the variety in enemy design as well as the bosses.

In the first Mario game every castle had the same boss at the end, Bowser. All you had to do was get past him to the other side of the bridge. In Mario 2 every level had a cool and unique boss at the end, that you had to figure out how to defeat. This is what I love most about this game. In fact Bowser isn't even in this game, and there's a reason he isn't that I'll get to shortly. From Birdo the pink dinosaur looking thing, to Mouser, the bomb throwing mouse. Then you have Tri-Clyde the three headed fire breathing snake and Fry-Guy the giant fireball that dances around spitting flames at you. Finally at the end of the game you expect to fight Bowser, but nope, instead you go up against Wart, a giant frog that spits bubbles at you. All of these bosses are such a departure from the original game that it almost seems like this isn't a Mario game at all. Well that's because it kind of isn't.

I've played this game so many times since I was a kid and I never knew until recently that this isn't actually Super Mario Bros 2 at all. Back in the mid 80's after Nintendo had such success with the original Mario game, they quickly got to work on a sequel. This original sequel was released only in Japan. It looked exactly the same as the first one, played the same as the first one, but the difficulty was off the charts. The game was so hard that nobody liked it and Nintendo panicked. They needed a sequel but knew they couldn't release what they had made so instead they took the game, Doki Doki Panic, a game that hadn't been released in America, removed the characters and in place put in the four Mario characters. As you can see from the photos above, Mario 2 is literally the exact same game as Doki Doki Panic. The only differences are minute, like instead of a bird head that you walk through it was a masked face. That's why this game always stood out to me as being so much different from any other Mario game, because it really isn't a Mario game. All these years I never knew about this and I thought I would share it with you guys.

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That's not to say that this shouldn't count as a Mario game or anything, I just thought is was a cool story that most people probably don't know about. Regardless of the back story this is still my favorite Super Mario Bros and I will always love playing it. If you never had a chance to play this one you should definitely check it out, it's so strangely different from any other Mario. I recently went back and played through this one again and it's still so much fun to go through all the unique levels that I have to give Super Mario Bros 2 an:

A-