tomaitheous wrote:
SMB2j is such a dated looking game though. I for one am glad for SMB2us. SMB2j would have done pretty poorly in sales IMO at the time. It's not even a real sequel. It's just rearranged levels. At least with SMB2us you got really interesting level designs and newer/more advance gameplay. To me, it's closer to SMB3 than SMB2j will ever be. /rant off
Does it look dated? Well, no more than The Legend of Zelda does these days, which uses the exact same graphics engine. No, I don’t think its graphics would have been the cause of lower sales, although the game's difficulty surely would have placed it in the teen market bracket. It would have looked just fine when it was a new title on a new console.
Keep in mind that in 1986, the US was just getting used to the NES and many games had inferior graphics to SMB and SMB2(J). The USA SMB2 has superior graphics because it is a newer title. There’s no reason they couldn’t have marketed them both: ‘Super Mario bros. for Super Players’ and ‘Super Mario’s Arabian Nightmare’, for example, but the US SMB2’s gameplay is nothing like SMB or SMB3.
Something to keep in mind is that SMB2 (J) was released on 3rd June 1986 (from the game's manual) and is titled "Super Mario bros 2: For Super Players". It's as much of a sequel to SMB as SMB3 is a sequel to SMB2(J)...or for that matter Rockman (Mega Man) to Rockman II (Mega Man II) and so on.
Bowser returns to re-kidnap the princess in order to take revenge and now Mario must find his way through 13 levels of enemies and mazes to save her. The same old song.
That’s what I recall anyway... If anybody wants, I will photograph the manual story pages and post them for translation.
The game also does have significant improvements as follows:
The concept of the stomp-jump first appears in this game. This is the same technique used in SMB3 to stomp an enemy I order to make an extra-high jump.
Luigi jumps higher, but skids: As this is a 1-Player only game (another reason I think that NOA passed on it), you can select to play the sturdy Mario or the high-jumping Luigi. I prefer the latter.
(For the record, the jump mechanics are different on the FDS SMB2J to the Super Famicom/SNES “Lost Levels” game.)
New enemies: There are a couple new enemies and some enemies are tougher. Flying Bloopers and Red Piranha Plants both started here and ended up in SMB3.
The Poison Mushroom: This is a power-down/trap item, which makes the game more interesting.
Improved graphics: The graphical tiles are nicer than SMB, with a pebbly ground in place of stones, smoother looking bricks, nicer mushrooms, etc.
Reverse-Warps: This game has reverse warp zone areas that serve as both traps and methods to gain extra lives.
Multiple paths: There are two endings, one for beating Levels 1-8 + A-D and another for beating Level 9. You play Level 9 by beating the game eight times.
Also, keep in mind that NOA decided to make SMB3 easier for the USA market by adding the two-stage hit system (Fiery/Leaf->Super->Small_. In Nippon, Fiery/Leaf Mario went straight to small Mario when hit merely once.
You can love the USA SMB2 to death, but it’s as much of a Mario game by inception as the USA release “Street Fighter 2010” is part of the Street Fighter game series. In Nippon, this game had an entirely different story that had nothing to do with Street Fighter.
NOA is famous for remarketing titles in order to boost sales of them, and the two main treasons that we never saw the real SMB2(J) in America are because it was deemed too difficult for younger players and because NOA didn’t want to release the FDS here.
Did I say that the USA SMB2 was junk? No. It’s a decent game with excellent playability and it sold very well. Do I see it as a true successor to SMB or a prequel to SMB3? Of course not.
I should also ask, before I rant further, if you’ve ever played the original FDS version of SMB2, and whether or not you like the game of you did. If you hated the game because of its difficulty, I can see your animosity more logically.
I think that it is a fantastic game: a worthy successor to SMB and it’s a shame that NOA skipped it in favour of rebranding a different game. Nonetheless, this is getting far off topic…
The original idea was to convert RR to a SMB title, and I still say that the previous Brazilian attempt at doing this (for the Master System/Game Gear) is all the proof you need that it’s not a very good game mechanic for a Mario title.
-Xious