Super Mario Bros. 2 Review (NES) (Retro WedNESday #10)
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: October 9, 1988
Super Mario Bros. 2 is the odd one out. If you grew up on the NES you know exactly what I mean. You play the first Mario, you play Mario 3, and they feel like they belong together. Then there’s Mario 2 sitting in between them being completely its own thing, and for years nobody could really explain why. It wasn’t until much later that I learned the actual reason, which is one of the stranger stories in gaming history, but we’ll get to that.
This was a game my family was split on. My dad, who loved the first Mario, just didn’t care for this one. The different feel of it, the way it played, none of it clicked for him the way the original had. My mom, on the other hand, enjoyed it, and so did I. It was one of the games she actually liked playing, which made it a bit of a special one in our house since the rotation was usually dominated by whatever my brother and I were into.
The big difference between this and the first Mario is that you’re not just running right and jumping on enemies anymore. You pick a character at the start of each level from Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, and Toad, and each one plays differently. You pull vegetables out of the ground and throw them at enemies, you pick up and toss enemies at other enemies, and you navigate levels that go up and down as much as they go left to right. It’s a completely different rhythm than the original, and whether you like it really comes down to whether you can let go of expecting it to be Mario 1 part two.
My character of choice was always Princess Peach. She floats. When you jump with her she hangs in the air for a moment before drifting down, and that floating ability just felt better to me than any of the other characters. It made the platforming more forgiving, gave you more control over where you landed, and turned tricky jumps into manageable ones. Mario and Luigi are faster and jump higher in Luigi’s case, and Toad is quick and strong, but I’d take Peach’s float over all of it. Once you get used to that hang time it’s hard to go back.
Now here’s the story I mentioned. For most of my life I had no idea that Super Mario Bros. 2 wasn’t originally a Mario game at all. The game we got in America was based on a completely different Japanese title called Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic, which Nintendo had made as a promotional game tied to a Fuji Television event. When it came time to bring a Mario sequel to the States, Nintendo decided the actual Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, the one we’d eventually get as The Lost Levels, was too hard and too similar to the original for American audiences. So they took Doki Doki Panic, swapped in Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Toad over the original characters, and shipped that as Super Mario Bros. 2 instead. I had no clue about any of this as a kid. I just thought Mario 2 was weird. Turns out it was weird because it literally started life as a different game with Mario painted over it.
Knowing that now actually explains a lot. The reason it doesn’t feel like the other Mario games is because at its core it isn’t one. And yet, somehow, it works anyway. The Mario coat of paint fits better than it has any right to, the gameplay is fun on its own terms, and the game introduced enemies like Shy Guys, Birdo, and Bob-ombs that went on to become permanent fixtures of the Mario universe. A game that was never supposed to be Mario ended up contributing a real chunk of the series’ identity, which is wild when you think about it.
The graphics are colorful and varied, with the desert and dreamlike settings giving it a distinct look from the green hills and underground pipes of the original. The music is solid Koji Kondo work, different from the first game but catchy in its own right. The four-character system gives the game some replay value since playing through as Peach is a completely different experience than powering through as Luigi.
It’s not my favorite of the NES Mario trilogy. That’s Mario 3, with the original right behind it. But Mario 2 is still a genuinely enjoyable game, strange origins and all, and the fact that my mom liked playing it gives it a warm spot in my memory that the rankings don’t fully capture. Different isn’t the same as bad, and this game proves it.
Super Mario Bros. 2 gets a four out of five: COMMENDABLE.
This one trigger some nostalgia for ya? Check out my reviews of Super Mario Bros. on NES and Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis, or browse the full Retro WedNESday archive. Next week we’re staying on the NES.
Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments below.
