I want to preface that I was not born during the time of Rockman's initial creation and popularity. I'll never understand what it was like being there at the time that these games were coming out. That said, I'm playing all these games for the first time in my early 20s and, in advance of writing a review of 9, I decided to go back and journal my thoughts on 2. I just thought this game was... okay? So okay that I didn't even bother writing a review when I played it.

As I write this review, this is the game leading the Street Fighter 6 Rockman popularity poll. But I want to know what kind of factors led to this one being the most popular of the original series? Is it just "right place, right time?" Is the game similarly held in high regard in Japan? My honest guess is that people just had so much fun with 2 that, as the transition from NES to SNES took place, nobody really cared to bother with more NES Rockman games when the SNES and Mega Drive were releasing.

Prior to actually playing the games for myself, this is the only one I ever saw talked about ANYWHERE, and it's lauded as one of the greatest games on the NES or something. At its best AND at its worst, this game is good. But it's not really anything more than that imo.

I genuinely believe every other Classic game that released after it outclasses it in some way or another. 3 introduced the Slide and even had the Doc Robots bring back the RM2 Robot Masters after you beat the first 8. 4/5 introduced/refined the Charge Shot. Even 7 and 8 both capitalized on the strength of the new hardware to create gorgeous graphics that still look great today, and introduced neat changes to the formula found in the NES games. 2 being the golden child, so much so that 9 decided to ditch nearly everything I liked in 3-8 and even removed the Slide/Charge Shot, just confuses me.

I'm sorry if this doesn't come off very much like a review of the game and more a review of its status? Or sounding salty that its popularity influenced a direction on the series temporarily for 9 and 10 that I disliked. I would just really like to hear from folks who grew up with this game to understand what I might not be seeing about its greatness compared to everyone else.

Diddy Kong is the best 2D platformer character to control from a base level. While other characters like Zero or Alucard have multiple extension options that mingle with their enemies in fascinating ways, Diddy is just pure fundamental controls, looking to perfectly preserve momentum. And if you charge forward with him, every single level in DKC2 not focused on swimming or an animal buddy can be adeptly handled with him weaving through stages in a beautiful, seamless chimpy charge. The way that DKC2 organizes its levels to play with this, placing enemies that Diddy juuust has time to either avoid or use to extend a cartwheel, is absolutely immaculate. On that merit alone, the game is superb and deserves play.

But DKC2 isn't satisfied with this. If Diddy's technical ceiling is too high, Dixie exists to help ease you in and find new ways to abuse levels. Every high ground now becomes a new vantage point to blaze through levels from, and her obvious strengths are well taken into consideration. Teaming up is required to plunder every secret, making maintaining both kongs paramount in a way that DKC1 simply never achieved, and DKC3 perhaps was a bit too overzealous to toy with. Animal Buddies are given their own unique sections, and each one combines a level of absolute freedom with a new level of trepedation, having either very obvious horizontal or vertical strengths with great weakness in the other deparment in the case of Rambi, Enguarde, and Rattly, or having incredible versatility but being terribly pressured up close in the case of Squawks and Squitter. AND there's the incredible amount of character work and writing and world design to make everything feel so vibrant and lived in and funny and the bosses don't suck anymore!

DKC2 is the golden standard I judge all other 2D platformers on. It's scary at first, it rewards you for mastery pretty quickly, it makes you feel in control of your own destiny at all times, only challenging you to maintain it in the roughest of circumstances. Is it flawless? Nah, Glimmer's Galleon ain't the best and camera tracking on Squitter specifically wasn't given the most elegant solution. But it's a lot damn closer than anything else in its genre has gotten, and also I really like it!

I’ve been replaying this recently and I’m starting to realize that a lot of the levels in this game feel as though they’re either poorly made or just throw away fodder with little thought put into their design and are nowhere near what I would describe as memorable. I like Mario's movement and it's some of the best I've felt, but you never get to appreciate it because the level design feels like a group of 12 year old assholes who just got mario maker for christmas made this game in a few weeks. The most fun i've had with this game is with the hacks the community has made for it over the years.

Mario World is mechanically sound, with the best controls of any Mario game so far. Everything about how the game feels is tight and responsive. The in-air mobility, the turning, the way you control your jump height, the build-up of your speed and how you maintain it as you sprint across the stage, the way you slide and duck under obstacles, or spin jump on enemies that previously couldn't be bounced on... it's all perfect.

The world map had some tradeoffs, such as a lack of the Mario 3 minigames and enemy encounters, but in its place came a more open-ended world design, where finding secret exits in stages can allow you to beat the game through different routes. I enjoyed the freedom this allowed, whether you wanna find the shortest or longest route to the end of the game, or just do a casual run by taking as few secret exits as possible.

It's a very well refined game, but sometimes, I feel like refinements is all it has. Comparably, I play Mario 3 more often than Mario World, and I think this is because Mario World feels like... "another one." Whereas Mario 3 had the neat little stage play theme and a ton of new ideas, Mario World feels more confused about what it's trying to do. It's supposed to be a dinosaur and food-themed setting, but I didn't get that vibe at all. The levels are named after food, but they don't look like they're made of food at all to me.

Meanwhile, the dinosaurs ARE there, they're your enemies, sometimes I have to remember Yoshi is a dinosaur too, but, I just can't help but feel like these elements should've been leaned into harder than they were.

Because right now, what this game feels like is a mild mix of those elements, with a greater focus on generic level themes that don't take advantage of them. I'll be honest with you, I don't know what you could do differently to make this game feel more unique than it already is, maybe more prehistoric settings? More blatant food-themed levels, the kind that look delicious when you step into them? I dunno, something about this game feels very withheld.

Keeping in mind that I still think this game is fun, here's another nitpick. This one is what I call the "Koji Kondo dilemma." Koji Kondo has made some of the greatest songs in video game history, and this game is no exception. These things are stuck in my head, and I will never get them out. The dilemma is this: Every song that Koji Kondo makes is good, but he does not make many of them. As a result, you wind up hearing the same 4 songs over and over throughout the 3-5 hours that this game will take you to 100%.

I think this amount of songs would've been acceptable back in the NES days due to size constraints, but with the introduction of a new fancy 16-bit console, I strongly believe that Koji should've composed a greater variety of songs to take advantage of it. On the other hand, it's possible that composing the already-existing songs was a difficult process, and I've heard the game had to be rushed anyway, so there wasn't much of a choice.

Thing is, the Koji Kondo dilemma would've persisted for several more games after this. Amazing songs, but not a whole lot of them. Initially, they're enough to carry the whole game, but let's say you've replayed it 10 or 20 times like I did, there comes a point where you realize the lacking music variety becomes tiring to hear, and that dilemma wouldn't have existed if each world had at least 1 or 2 unique tracks to call its own. Like I said, this is all a nitpick, but it is one I've been thinking about more and more lately.

My thoughts on Super Mario World come down to this. Fun to play, but not particularly impressive for an SNES launch title that should've been there to showcase the system's true capabilities. it feels safe. Very safe. Moreof a continuation of Mario 3, rather than the next big step in the Mario series. But if you just want a fun Mario game, who gives a shit? This one does its job as well as it can. But I can't help but feel that there's something missing here.