I played this game at four years old when I was incredibly sick with pneumonia, and I've played it since, and I can confidently call this one of the best platformers on the NES, it's only rated four stars for the gripe of having played it most when I was on death's door, and the rarity of the power ups.

The Tanuki and Hammer Bros. suits are two power-ups that generally rank high on my rankings due to the interesting nature of them. The Tanuki suit being an upgraded version of the leaf variant, it adds defense (and offense, if you decide to smush people), by allowing you to turn into a stone statue. While the Hammer Bros. suit allows you to fire hammers at a slow arc, and these hammers allow you to kill most the opposition in your path, including Bowser himself if you can aim well enough. These power-ups have a reason to be rare, they're strict upgrades of the two main power-ups of the game. But they are quite hard to find, despite being one of the most interesting parts of the game, which is a travesty! The frog suit isn't an upgrade necessarily, but it felt incredibly useless after World 3, which is sad! It was a cute design that was under utilized because they realized water levels controlled poorly.

All and all, for my first introduction to gaming, I'll be damned if it wasn't a high note.