I think the greatest sin of the NSMB games is that they've "flattened" people's perception of what the 2D Mario games were/can be. Believe it or not, games like SMB3 and SMW didn't limit themselves to just "grass world, desert world, ice world, water world", and even when they did use those tropes, they didn't depict them exactly the same way. Those games didn't just have an overworld map, SMB3 had essentially a board game with moving pieces that was catered perfectly to competitive playthroughs, and provided variety between levels. SMW's map was less varied, but told a story through the way you progressed through a detailed map with detours and distinct sections that all made sense in how they were all a part of one specific location. Even SMW has more than just one 1-up minigame. These games had distinct personalities, different aesthetics and inspirations, and the NSMB series serves to get everything in one perfect line. This is what Nintendo would have you believe Mario has Always Been and Always Will Be, which is why it seems projects like Super Nintendo World and the Illumination Mario Movie seem to borrow a lot from these games.

There are some actually good ideas for Mario levels here, some joy is to be had in terms of providing good, reliable 2D Mario platforming. Honestly, I wouldn't go all the way to say this is a bad game. But it seems to actively try to be unremarkable the whole time. The game's marketing revolves around "look at AAALLLL the COOOIIIIINS" but I'll be honest, there's a lot of them but not THAT many. Not enough to hang your entire game on. Also the raccoon leaf is here, P-meter and all, no real reason, it's just here because they need something here, god forbid they come up with an actual new power-up. Like I said, there's genuinely good levels and moments in this game, but it's not worth it.

One last thing: this game tries not to be too hard in terms of level design, which is fine, but it tries to make up for that by making some of the collectibles absurdly difficult to find, usually involving assumptions I would never make on my own. I guess that's also not a bad thing, just slightly exhausting. Glad I never got tricked into actually buying this game at any point. Did you know it's very easy to hack your 3DS?

Não tem nada de tecnicamente errado com esse jogo. Se qualquer coisa, New Super Mario Bros. 2 é um jogo de plataforma bem competente. Visual agradável, música que faz seu trabalho, controles bem precisos e mecânicas sólidas. Só faltou uma coisa: alma. Ele é tão absurdamente genérico e sem nada de especial que jogá-lo me colocou num estado de completa apatia. Nunca um jogo conseguiu desligar meu cérebro de forma tão eficiente. Ao final de minhas jogatinas eu nem chegava a estar entediado... Era como se algumas horas da minha vida simplesmente tivessem passado sem a minha presença.

Eu não lembrava de absolutamente nada desse jogo e agora que zerei de novo (com direito a platina) continuarei não lembrando de nada.

I think I might have to bend the knee here. Not all the way, but..

New Super Mario Bros. 2 is, metaphysically, a lot of things, and also not much. It's Super Mario at its most ad nauseum. I never bothered with it at launch because, like you, I was feeling the fatigue of the New. I let it pass me by as I did most of Nintendo's catalogue of this era, but a decade later, in this day and age where It's Actually Really Easy To Hack Your 3DS, what's the harm in trying?

I'll get the obvious out of the way, NSMB2 is nothing New. It's a tepid celebration of the passé, a slideshow of the been-theres and done-thats. You've seen it before. At the time, when you didn't even know it, you were gonna see it again (but if you wanna be pedantic, sure, you did know). New Super Mario Bros. 2, like most of Nintendo's exports of the early 2010s, is and was perfectly content being vehemently washed of purpose.

But NSMB2 represents a stubborn truth here, one I think many fellow gamer internetizens who utterly disdain it for its blandness feel obligated to gloss over: it's not bad.

I tend to enter games of this kind of reviled category without any expectations if I can manage that. I don’t go in looking to redeem the perceived unredeemable and vice versa, and my groundbreaking, earth-shatteringly contrarian take here - is that it's fine.

I've gone through the obvious; you've seen this before, but would you deny it was ever bad? More of the same is certainly fatiguing, but is New Super Mario Bros. 2 actually a substantial drop in quality from its formers? I don't really think so. You go through Grass Land, Sand Land, Beach Land, Swamp Land, Sky Land, and Lava Land pretty much in the same order as you've done twice before by this point. Actual new stage gimmicks are few and far between. The new “coin rush” ethos here isn't the most convention-flipping as Nintendo wanted you to believe, sure, but I'd argue some identity is better than none (looking at New Super Mario Bros. U here).

It wasn't until the very end of the game that I realized I was never really disengaged. Even at Super Mario's universally-perceived worst, I can think of plenty of other platformers with much worse level design. My engagement never flatlined, and that goes double for the challenges in going for the Star Coins this time around - they're actually fun, more than I think they've ever been in this series.

All of this text is to just overly extend what was probably my only thought playing this: “This is it? This is the worst Super Mario game?" I can't say it's anything more than good at best, but at its worst (and I'm just preaching to the choir here) it's uninspired. It certainly isn't New, but I don't think that makes it bad.

The only Mario game I've ever played that I consider actually bad is Lost Levels. People talk about NSMB2 like it stands along side it as the lowest of the low Mario games. After replaying it after like 11 years, this is one of the best games ever made of course. It's a Mario game, only Lost Levels is bad. 2.9 average Score? Seriously? This is just more Mario levels, and that is all I need in life.

I want to get it's biggest flaw out of the way, It is very derivative to a fault. Probably the most unoriginal Mario game ever made. This is why people rate this so low, and it's definitely not a good thing, but it does have its own fair share of new level mechanics as well, not to mention the main coin mechanic.

The Levels are what makes these games so great. Even if these games are so derivative, the Levels are designed so well and are made specifically for you to have fun. The star coins are well placed in the levels as well. Nintendo just does 2D Level design so well.

Music is what I found to be the most unoriginal. I swear the OST is just straight up from NSMB Wii. Note for Note, I swear it's the same. It still slaps but damn, can't you make it at least a little different?

World Maps were also derivative as hell. Just same old NSMB stuff. They still looked great, just felt like I had seen them before, just in a different font.

I love the art style of this game, and the NSMB games in general. Though I believe NSMB2 has the worst background art of all the other games, It all still looks great.

This game was so unbelievably easy. The coin mechanic allows you to easily get hundreds of lives, and with the tanuki suit, you'll rarely die as it is. The Mini Bosses and Main Bosses were also very easy. I wish it was harder, as that would be a way to separate it from the others, though I know Nintendo was marketing towards a younger and more casual audience with these games.

I wanna mention the Bosses again, the Mini castle bosses are very mediocre. Just so easy to beat, and it's literally the same thing every time, just slightly harder with each world. The Main Castles actually had some pretty cool mechanics involved in the Boss fights, and I've always really liked the Koopalings anyway. The Final Boss, Bowser, was pretty awesome, and my 2nd Favorite in the NSMB series, besides NSMB Wii. He was fairly easy, but very cinematic and a nice conclusion. I also really loved the Credits after beating Bowser, I thought they were pretty damn cool.

To touch on the Coin Mechanic one last time, it is pretty cool, but I feel they could have done it so much better. Maybe don't make it so 100 coins give you 1 life, make it like 300. Probably should've had Wario as the main villain, that would have been pretty awesome. Just felt like they could've done a lot more, though it was still a lot of fun.

Though It is so very derivative and unoriginal, often to a fault, this is a 2D Mario game, so It's just a great fun time. I've always loved these games, and I will continue to do so. If you want a fun platformer, or you like playing games in general, I recommend NSMB2.

Score: 4.1/5
Letter Grade: A-

It's still not really New and definitely not Super Mario Bros., but at least it's better than Wii.

The smaller screen resolution and single player design makes for more focused, compact level design; the stages don't rely on party-esque jank as much; hidden paths like in Wii are completely absent, and the coin scoring genuinely adds some interesting metagame functions, like adding importance to not dying, revisiting levels with flying gold blocks and gold flowers to maximize your score... it can get really interesting once you try playing it that way.

I just wish they'd gone all in with this mentality. Many levels simply don't work with this idea (eg: basically every ghost house); the traditional structure of the game doesn't lend itself as well as a more score attack-focused structure like the Pac-Man Championship Edition games might have; and perhaps most crucially, there's no online leaderboards for coin records that I can find.

It's a very interesting idea that could seriously be elaborated on further - but sadly, 2 inherited Wii's half-baked, newbie-training mentality, and gave up all kinds of iteration and elaboration in the process.

I know it's not a hot take by any means to say "the New Super Mario Bros franchise is a bland, flavorless oatmeal of reused assets" but man I am struggling to finish this one. I have to play this 2D Mario in the middle of the day because it's a powerful cure for insomnia.

Sure, it functions well enough, the level design is tighter since there's no 4-player, and I don't think this is the worst NSMB game (Reznor and Raccoon Mario over Boom Boom and the squirrel suit make this better than U) but also I can't help but think about how there was a Game Boy game where some of the level themes were "Halloween", "Giant House", and "Giant Robot Mario" while this game can't be assed to think of something beyond "well World 2 HAS to be the desert level right, that's how it was 6 years ago".

Come on, man. At least do something with the whole "collect all the money" theme. Have Bowser's Castle be themed around giant piles of treasure. Give the Koopalings some slightly altered designs where they're just covered in jewelry. Make Mario explore a sunken pirate ship with cartoony pirate skeleton enemies instead of just having the beach/ocean world be the beach/ocean world from NSMBWii. This didn't have to be boring!

UPDATE - I beat the final boss after writing this review. It starts with a fakeout battle where Bowser recreates the mechanics from the Super Mario Bros Bowser fights and then he grows really big. Wow. Never seen that before.

This was.. very uninspired? I liked the coin gimmick and thought that was pretty neat but like this was basically the same game as the first with very minimal changes. I played the first a long time ago so there was some nice nostalgia, and admittedly ive never cared all that much for Mario but its just weird a franchise known for its creativity could just put out a game that feels so samey. The coin thing isnt enough to give it much of an identity. That being said, I'd be lying if I said I didnt enjoy my time with this and I even went out of my way to do the two optional worlds. It's a very low 3.5/5 but it was a welcome distraction for when I didnt wanna deal with the pressure of playing a more involving game.
Overall, it was pretty fun. But that's only because the first one was fun to begin with.

Time Played - 9 hours
Nancymeter - 66/100
Game Completion #33 of 2022
April Completion #2

The whole coins thing in this game is interesting because you couldn't really pull it off with any other series and have it be this effective. For so long, Mario coins meant exactly one thing to us and were precious in a very specific way and doled out and withheld from us in a very specific way. This exploits those multiple decades of history in kind of a profound psychological trick, just showering you with them in a way that, upon starting the game, if you have any experience with the series at all let alone a long and deep connection, is going to give you an undeniable dopamine dump and shoot lightning through your most base lizard gaming brain like nothing else. And the excess extends to everything - NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. WII was already insanely generous with powerups (seriously, you were never more than a screen away from at least a Fire Flower in that shit) but they crank it up even further here, and for what I believe is the first time in the series, the lives counter goes up to three digits. And boy, you're gonna need that extra zero on there, because besides getting multiple hundreds of coins per level now and green mushrooms flying every which way, this game is just absurdly easy. Comparing it to its two immediate (extremely, extremely mechanically and structurally similar) predecessors, this feels like the same game on some kind of baby mode. Levels are flat out designed in a much more forgiving way, and the focus is squarely upon arranging fun and surprising ways to earn more and more coins rather than any kind of meaningful platforming challenge. I went through multiple worlds in a row - WORLDS, not levels - without losing a single life. Without even getting to small Mario status!

All of that together certainly does amount to a new vibe for the series. Levels feel less like gauntlets and more like playgrounds, or silly high score events. It's almost like some kind of joyful celebration of the series, a game-long bonus round, a veritable Mario heaven. But really, that high only lasts for a little bit. At some point the novelty wears off, and it isn't replaced with anything else, leaving you playing a very, very easy carbon copy of the first one where you wade through a neverending sea of coins, caring less and less every level about about how many you're getting. You plow through areas barely even noticing the themes behind the waves of gold, get to world bosses so simple you might think they're a first phase or just a joke or something, and then the series' second consecutive auto-scroller final boss, and then that's it. There's no way you're as pumped by the end of this thing as you were when it started.

Credit where it's due - this is more "New" in some respects than the other ones, but cashing in (har har) on our hardcoded expectations of video gaming's most ubiquitous item, while clever, isn't really a compelling basis for a whole game, let alone one that we have otherwise already played more challenging and better versions of.

New Super Mario Bros 2 é mais um excelente plataformer da franquia, muito embora tenha seus pequenos defeitos, foi um dos jogos mais divertidos que joguei nos últimos meses (levando em conta a experiência da primeira jogatina da campanha principal). Mario sempre foi referência em seu gênero e esse é mais um dos grandes exemplos de como fazer um ótimo jogo de plataforma 2D.
Sua gameplay e respectivas mêcanicas não fogem do padrão da franquia e acaba sendo mais do mesmo sem grandes novidades, ao não ser da imortância da coleta de moedas de ouro durante as fases. Ser mais do mesmo não implica defeitos, até porque se é bom não necessariamente precisa de uma melhora para sua excêlencia, tudo referente e jogabilidade de outros jogos (2D) é visto aqui e por isso é assim como os outros, ótimo.
O level design também é muito bem elaborado, a maioria é bem criativo e dinâmico e agrega muito juntamente das mecânicas bem consistentes do game, porém, eu sinto uma queda de qualidade nesse aspecto com decorrer do jogo, ao meu ver os mundos 1-3 são extremamente bem construídos e usufruem do melhor nessa questão, mas depois disso notei uma queda com muita repetitividade e falta de criatividade das fases desses respectivos mundos.
A arte e a trilha do jogo assim como os outros da franquia Mario são excepcionais aqui e dão muita personalidade ao jogo, não acho que sejam melhores que um Mario World por exemplo, mas ainda sim aqui tem muita identidade que te faz lembrar do jogo só de escutar um pequeno corte de determinadas trilhas. Por o jogo ser de 3DS ele tem suas limitações gráficas, porém isso não impediu do mesmo de ter uma arte fenomenal, muito linda mesmo.
Um adendo para as batalhas de chefes, achei a maioria bem pouco memorável e sem muita criatividade, a melhor de longe é a final com o Bowser, possivelmente a única relativamente boa do jogo. Também é meio chato ter que enfrentar toda vez uma trupe de elefantes na metade de cada mundo, fica bem enjoativo em certo ponto.
No geral, New Super Mario Bros 2 é um excelente plataformer, mas é só mais em meio de vários tantos da franquia. Super recomendo para quem nunca jogou nenhum Super Mario, ele pode servir como uma boa forma de entrada para novos jogadores quais buscam iniciar por aqui.

Eu adorei toda a temática do jogo envolvendo moeda, porém isso faz o jogo ser bizarramente fácil, tipo fácil até demais, por exemplo eu terminei o jogo com mais de 100 vidas jogando normalmente! o que pode ser uma faca de dois gumes, já que para algumas pessoas a dificuldade fácil possa fazer da experiência algo relaxante mas pra algumas pessoas pode ser uma experiência frustrante por não demonstrar grandes desafios.

Os mundos são rápidos, bons e bonitos, com fases muito gostosas de se passar e divertidas pois nenhum mapa me fez ficar estressado e todos tinham designs bem bonitos para um estreante no portátil, podendo ter gráficos comparados até mesmo com a versão do wii, entretanto acho desnecessário o "mini-castelo" que tem literalmente os mesmos bosses em todos os mundos, e a própria boss fight final do bowser é bem chatinha.

Em resumo é um jogo divertido do Mario mas como um mario 2D não é nada demais se comparado aos outros, uma continuação boa e decente no que ela se propõe a fazer, acho que todo fã da franquia deveria ao menos experimentar.

I think this is the most pointless mainline Mario game to exist.

It's not a BAD game. The level design is fine enough. But it's just okay, and didn't really need to come out when 3D Land came before it on the same platform and NSMBU came out just a few months later.

And the main gimmick for this game doesn't really make sense. The main draw is to collect as many coins as you can. But...there's nothing really that rewards you for doing so. Your main objective is still to beat Bowser. You don't use your coins that you collect in many meaningful ways. If anything, the sheer amount of coins makes getting a Game Over nearly impossible, since you're getting lives constantly.

You can collect 1 million coins. That nets you a new title screen. But that's it. If you don't care about that, then collecting coins is pointless, and really, by this point in the 2D series, collecting coins was basically already pointless.

Again, not a bad game. Just an 'okay' game.