this isn't "bad designed", it's actually a very interesting game. it's the true super mario bros.2 and it's basically a game made for the nerds that can finish the first smb. without dying. "oh so you think there's gonna be a mushroom in this block? yeah, but it's a poison one!"

yes, it is a cruel and very punishing game and whatever some "Game Design Fan" dude says to you but it has a very creative level design, creating some trends that today's platformers such celeste would use.

it is very limited by the first super mario engine - and perhaps it's 'cause of this that is so punishing - but it's worth playing, even using save states or rewind, just to aprecciate the level design geniality and the "in your face" nonsense.

also i don't vibe with puzzles levels where you should discover the path or then you start it again. hate them!!

Super Mario Bros 2 Japan is rough, it's mean, it's downright cruel, and to be frank it's also just completely disgusting to look at.

And I'm not even talking about my dislike for the details they added to some of the graphics like the cocoa pebbles ground. It's the fact that Miyamoto and his crew apparently forgot that games should still be enjoyable even if the difficulty is ratcheted up several magnitudes. Making the player have to waste their precious time on this Earth to run through boring as shit maze levels is not what I call "difficulty", and neither is getting tricked into Warp Zones that force you into killing yourself via pit or painstakingly allowing the timer to run out to avoid going back to earlier levels.

It's saddening seeing Nintendo give influence to rom hackers and Mario Maker shitbags by placing invisible blocks to break your skull on and send you careening down a pit. Even more saddening that they tried to add the most horse shit attempt at longevity to the game by demanding the player beat the game eight times to access the extra stages in the original version. It's embarrassing, and I really respect NoA for vetoing this pile of shit for western release because I definitely would've fallen off the Mario hype train if I played this thing back in the day.

It's like the original Super Mario Bros., except IT SUCKS! Ok, that's not true, it doesn't suck, as it is essentially the same game as the original Super Mario Bros., but it looks somewhat better. Everything is almost the exact same, except for the level design, which is so poorly designed and way too difficult to where it ruins the game for most people, including me. If you really wanted to play this game, and I mean, REALLY play it, just stick with the All-Stars version. Avoid the original NES game at all costs.

Game #2

Hard mode DLC for Mario Bros. With too many unfair versions of difficulty, like invisible blocks.

Almost everything from this game is straight from the first game, from sprites to music. Even the less than perfect physics are still here, except now they're worse because the game demands even more tight platforming.

Also the amount of BS looping levels has increased.

I'm acclimated to Mario 2 better than most, and after finishing it(bears saying with a healthy use of the rewind feature now and then) it really doesn't deserve the sour reputation it got. And people might hate that it includes very little in genuine graphical updates or mechanical additions but a sequel/expansion of this nature wasn't unknowable back then, and so many pivotal games had sister variants that expanded it or made its gameplay more difficult(like "Championship Lode Runner" or "Ms. Pac-Man"), but SMB2 still strikes and makes its way with a lot more originality and grace than those two games.

For me, the Japanese SMB2 is kind of like "The Stanley Parable" of Mario. I'm always the first person to bemoan over a difficult game but I was astounded how much enjoyment and connection I've managed to make with SMB2 - especially after going through what seemed like an interactive meta-commentary in every single stage. Playing "Lost Levels" feels like engaging a really intimate dialogue between the developer and the player, who are both well aware of the design nuances of the first SMB. Every level becomes a meta commentary subverting or examining core features of the first game.

Every stage the developer engages the player by asking: "Ok, but what if SMB did THIS? [presents]", and it becomes a novel thing where you are allowed to see Mario's gameplay features presented and experimented on in a different light, giving you an amazing shift of perspective: What if we included the water level enemies in the land levels? What if we can make a spring that launches you super super high up? What if we made a level entirely out of those springs? What if we gave you mushrooms that were an obstacle instead of a power up?. But crucially, you also get areas and experiments that give you a lot of clemency, like: "What if we gave you a starman at this particular spot where you need to jump over a bunch of piranha plants?". It's a brilliant, shocking insight into the nature of game development and it is superbly wonderful how this is a game that allows you to be on equal footing with a developer's headspace. That point about the starman and the piranha plants is exactly one of the many points in this game where the player's power just soars: you feel like you've gained the system and that the developer made this so you could feel a rush. It's a roller coaster. The highs of it are moments that I'm much fonder of than in Mario 1, and even the ending feels much more congratulatory, celebratory and welcoming of the player.

Every single addition here was an idea extrapolation and an experimentation of SMB1 that is akin to thought experiments and mental gymnastics and for me it is more quizzical than trying. Because of this, I've never seen the "Lost Levels" as cruel or tough, aside from the really inconvenient oversight that there is no way to save progress in the game, but instead you'll have to leave your NES powered on overnight. There are far crueler games on the NES: The basic "Mega Man" games will give you tons of unnecessary stress and I'm convinced "Zelda II" is for utter masochists. To say nothing of "Battletoads", or kusoge like "Spelunker", "Atlantis no Nazo", or the kaizo Mario hacks.

Without exaggeration: Mario 2 is hard, but not in a way people would imagine. People would imagine rows of enemies coming at you at once, shooting a swath of bullet hell pellets or having to spend an entire level just bouncing upon enemies like in the kaizo hacks, when really the difficulty is more based on placing key obstacles or enemies in testy places that are immediately observable. They are singular trick-shots, very naturally evolved from Mario 1, and not insurmountable challenges that require use of superhuman ability. Very often the tools to make it are right at your disposal.

Obviously "Lost Levels" hinges on the fact that you're familiar with the first SMB1 and that's a great backdrop to have to make an amazing exploratory meta-game of. After all, Nintendo would only do the exact same thing with Mario Maker, and hint at it in a no-small number of modern 2D Mario games. People would say that there are instances where the devs "troll" the player, but they are never cruel jokes and are just very light gotchas and temporary illusions, where usually the tools to solve it is right at your disposal. Like for example, there will be moments when you'll come across a huge dead end or a huge pit you can't leap over, but the solution it turns out is just to knock an invisible block right above you. There might be a row of spinies crawling on the floor, but you can use a koopa shell to knock an entire row of them. Plenty of these gotcha moments and gimmicks would be perfectly recycled for SMB3. Other NES games would be much more disrespectful to the player and deliberately punish them for innocent transgressions, but Mario 2 just isn't that. Not even the notorious poisonous mushrooms are that abundant - after its initial use in the first couple of levels, I've noticed that they just become quickly forgotten and discarded. They get used so rarely after World 1 and I swear that over 90% of the mushrooms in the game are normal, legitimate power-ups. Even world 8 in this game feels much fairer and more palatable than SMB1's world 8, and so many people are giving SMB1 a pass despite it being a very difficult game in its own right.

As a last point I need to mention just how utterlfy fantastic world 9 is, which you get as a reward for beating the game without using any warp zones. World 9 especially cements that it's a fun meta-commentary on Mario instead of aspiring to be the ur-kaizo. There's a whole lot of difference in intent, meaning and language used in Mario 2 that sets it apart from the kaizo community or the genre of immensely challenging games. It has more in common with developer commentaries in Valve games than "Cuphead".

If you consider yourself an enthusiast of SMB1 do give it a fair shake and get rid of the biases you might have heard. It's a great love letter and companion piece to Mario 1, but otherwise very inaccessible for casual Mario players, who have no shortage of introductory Mario games anyway.

Why yes, I did beat this game with Luigi! 💚

(Glitchwave project #016)

“As I continued to play, I found that Super Mario Bros. 2 asked me again and again to take a leap of faith and that each of those leaps resulted in my immediate death. This was not a fun game to play. It was punishment. Undeserved punishment. I put down my controller astonished that Mr. Miyamoto has chosen to design such a painful game.”

— Howard Phillips, 1980s Spokesman for Nintendo of America

Yeah I think I'm with Howard on this one, but it was pretty cool to finally be able to finish this with an actual NES controller through the NSO. Can't say it's a good game, can't say it's a bad game, but I can definitely say it's an evil game!

Shigeru Miyamoto invented Kaizo Mario in 1986.

Mesocore madness.
probably the first comedy game apart Takeshi no Chōsenjō.
People can argue that the high difficulty is artificial.
Gamers ,probably.
But that difficulty is the product of the inventiveness of the level design, which does not care shit about the player.
Much of the Japanese action games orbit around the dominance of a body or mechanics, then the player is pleased.
Not here, here you are nothing.

So after the original super Mario bros. Where possibly can we go next? Well over in the west, Mario and co. Went to subcon in super Mario bros. 2 which completely changed the gameplay of the first game. Why was it changed you ask? This was because that Mario bros. 2 was actually a different game in Japan but was sent to the west with the Mario name slapped on it with the original Mario bros. 2 being deemed ‘too challenging’. This is that Mario bros. 2 and oh man…I’m quite happy they didn’t bring it over for a while.

Going from the first Mario game to this is pretty daunting straight away. It immediately shows you in the first level alone that this isn’t the easy time you had in the first game, this is gonna be a struggle. The game throws loads of new stuff at you, like the new poisonous mushroom (I hate it), the super springs, and wind!

It’s a game, happy they didn’t bring it over for a while, I fucking hate wind

Talking about this game is pretty frustrating. On the one hand, I felt this was another case where the general populace overexaggerate on the difficulty. Often times, I found that levels were as good, if not better, than the first game, utilizing enemy behavior and patterns in a way that felt rather invigorating to handle. I also find that walking instead of holding down the B button made some of this way easier, which was probably the intention since most of SMB1 could be dealt with by doing just that. The new wind element and more abundant use of springs also helped with this as well. Plus, I'm willing to say that a few death traps were honestly really funny, like the backward warp zones.

On the other hand, I also found myself agreeing with those same people. Half of this game can indeed be downright mean, whether from using obstacles you'd have no idea about until you move them onto the screen, dumb invisible block paths or the stupid maze-like loop shit from before, or jumps requiring pixel-perfect jumping. The slippery controls from before is also still felt here, and I don't like how inconsistent and fickle the spring's jump timing can be, despite again how it makes going through the levels more fulfilling and different. It can also be too hectic with its enemy spawns, making some jumps harder to pull off as a result.

I dunno, I was actually pretty hopeful when going through this, thinking I'd say this game gets too bad of a rep, but once I hit World 7 I was pretty exhausted, and this was with heavy use of the rewind state. So close, yet so far.

nintendo made a kaizo hack of their own game and charged full price for it and I somehow don't think it's the worst thing ever

I won't be telling you that japanese smb2 is some underappreciated or overhated hidden gem like other nes sequels but I will tell you that it's actually really, really funny. It just has this level of personality to it, like no other game of its time had the audacity to make you wait out a level timer or intentionally throw yourself into a pit to avoid being sent back to the very start of the game. Smb2 was always supposed to be "for experts". The devs weren't just doing this to arbitrarily extend playtime, they did this to troll people, and they probably thought it was funny too. It makes the lost levels, to me, a microcosm of a time where game development wasn't just a job, it was also hobby - it was more personal. I think this game is actually kinda awesome for being less curated, more bullshit and not well designed, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

There's a lot of hard game that are know for that out there. Cuphead, Dark Souls, Celeste... and this one.
But, what mades a game have a good hard dificulty? Well, the answer is that a good hard dificulty must require ability.
But this? This doesn't require ability, this is just pure luck! If you put the best gamer out there to play this game he would still failing cause this game is designed terrible. The graphics are the same as the original Super Mario Bros, the lore is the exact same too!
People pray this game only because is a classic and/or because is just hard, but they ignore how unfair and boring this game is.
At least is better than Ghost 'n Goblins

Honestly? I really like some of the tricks that they used in this game. At least specifically like... using the NES's limitations and quirks to their advantage.

The difficulty definitely goes up and down in waves. Glad I had a version with rewinding if nothing else.

It's annoying that there's not really a definitive version of the game; for the reasons stated above I'd think the Famicom version is superior (they definitely mess up World 9 in All-Stars) but World A, B, C, and D are tedious to access in this version (even discounting the difficulty of the game).

I actually beat this on my actual NES because I'm completely insane -- this was another endeavor that took almost an entire day with getting up and walking away in frustration from time to time, and at the end I remember being so enthralled that it was finally over that I threw the controller down and bent over my own knees, feeling some fire-y mix of relief, rebelliousness, anger, pride... It was the kind of personal emotional experience that only a game that is hard enough to push you almost to your limits can give you.

And this game is hard as hell! But if you like the original Mario, which I do (it's one of my favorite Marios), this is just that but 10x harder, so the gameplay stacks up great against other NES games. Still Miyamoto threw some real garbage in this game, like a warp zone that only takes you back several worlds, and if you get into it you can't get out.

I would basically never recommend to play this on FDS to anyone, and will always say go play the SNES version on Mario All-Stars instead -- it gives you a checkpoint after every sub-world instead of a checkpoint after every world (collection of 4 levels) like the FDS version does.

However if you really want to torment yourself, give this one a go on this system. You will regret it. But if you stick it out and see the ending, I won't tell anybody if you feel so accomplished as a gamer that you cry a little bit while the ending music is playing.

4 - Great: A good, solid game that is enjoyable