by Nelson
Let me preface this week’s article with this: I’m not a “gamer” by modern standards. I love video games. I grew up playing them, but, today, I’m typically 10+ years behind the industry. I play my Gamecube and mini Nintendos more than I do my Playstation 4, and I don’t get to touch my Switch at all anymore thanks to my wife’s discovery of Animal Crossing. So, if I date myself with this one a bit, my apologies.
I don’t give Mario enough credit, really. As much as I loved things like Ghostbusters, G.I. Joe, and Batman as a kid, the overall wearing, super jumping plumber was on a pedestal all of his own. It was through him that I learned what a video game was. With my controller in hand, the two of us braved across oceans, islands where everyone is either gigantic or miniature, and even kingdoms in the clouds. We saved princesses that admonished us for picking the wrong castle; we helped transformed kings regain their original forms. Hell, we even scored our very own Hammer Brothers suit and used it to become the biggest badass plumber in the Mushroom Kingdom. I loved Mario so much that I pitched a weekly fit when all my red t-shirts were in the laundry, leaving me unable to pay tribute to the mustachioed, jumping hero.
I had a decent library of Mario Games on the original Nintendo Entertainment System to choose from. Super Mario Brothers 3 was all the rage at the time I got my system, which left me with two other Princess-Saving Ventures to enjoy. But, beyond that, I could see Nintendo’s mascot as the referee in games like Punch Out and Tennis, and, if I was feeling bold enough, I could even try my hand at Dr. Mario. Of course, I had absolutely no clue how to play that one, and my tenure on that game was an abysmal failure that left me both shamed and devastated.
Aside from titles like TMNT: The Arcade Game, the Castlevanias, Bart vs. The Space Mutants, and a few others that I’ve forgotten in the 30ish years that have passed since I was happily playing my brand new video game system, Super Mario Brothers games were my main go-to titles. I’d love to sound cool and talk about how I was playing Zelda and absolutely owning Ganon’s beastly ass before I was ten, but the truth of the matter is that Zelda was way out of my league. I made it about ten minutes into the first one, and I lasted a few hours in the second one simply because I had zero idea what I was supposed to be doing. I was still a few years away from the land of Hyrule, but I was more than game to go in and teach King Bowser the error of his ways.
I got my Nintendo for Christmas. Like so many kids in that era, my system included a Super Mario Brothes/Duck Hunt cartridge along with a copy of the final challenge of The Wizard, Super Mario Brothers 3 – probably the crowning achievement of the system and the quintessential side scrolling, Goomba stomping adventure. It took everything that worked about the original and turned it up to 10 while also adding features that would become staples of the series going forward.
But, when it came to Mario adventures, I was missing one game. A crucial one. I was a meticulous, obsessive kid. I couldn’t just skip from 1 to 3 without my head feeling like it would explode. It wasn’t right, and the thoughts of what this missing chapter in the lore could possibly consist of kept me up at night for months. Finally, Easter arrived, and The Bunny saw it fit to leave a copy of Super Mario Brothers 2 in my basket. I eagerly ran into my bedroom, popped the cartridge in, and was greeted with an impressive (at the time) title screen followed by a story about Mario opening a mysterious door. Then, I pressed start and something weird happened. I was taken to a character select screen. This was new. Now I could play as Luigi without having to hook up my other controller and select a two player game? I could even play as Toad and The Princess? And The Princess could kinda/sorta fly? It was almost too much to process.
Before I ever owned a Nintendo, I was a committed fan of the Super Mario Brothers Super Show. While I’m tempted to go on and on about how the live action sequences featuring an array of guest starts and Captain Lou Albano as Mario were some of the most amazing moments on television, but that wouldn’t really tie into my love for the video game series’ first sequel. What does tie into that appreciation, however, is the fact that, since it was produced a few years after the original game’s release, the animated adventures incorporated several elements from Part 2 into the program, including the main cast of good guys and most of the villains. Many of the locations used in the animated portion of the show were also very evocative of the lands gamers traversed in Mario 2.
So the game featured a whole lot of the things I’d watched in the cartoons, which meant an awful lot to me. Despite how much fun the original and Part 3 were, Part 2 felt like the most “Mario” of all the Mario games.
Of course, this is incredibly ironic. As any gamer worth their salt knows, the game that became Part 2 didn’t even start out as a part of the series. The “real” sequel was deemed too difficult for poor, simple American gamers to handle. And that was during a notoriously unforgiving era of video games, too. Pretty much all of them were difficult. But, as its eventual American release a few years later proved, the game that was actually produced to be Super Mario Brothers 2 was purely and simply evil. It was also basically a clone of the original, just, you know, way harder. And it had these bastard poison mushrooms that pretty much chased you down even if you knew better than to grab them.
I hate the “real” Mario 2.
Doki Doki Panic was the Japanese game that Nintendo re-tooled to include the world’s two favorite plumbers, the Princess of the Mushroom Kingdom, and her annoying mushroom headed…advisor? Friend? Unwanted guest? I’m not sure what the deal with Toad was, really. Aside from swapping out the main characters, pretty much everything else about Panic was left the same. So gamers wound up with a Mario game that featured zero Goombas, Piranha Plants, or any of the adversaries we’d come to know. Even King Koopa was replaced by Wart, an oversized toad who hates vegetables above all else. As if that wasn’t strange enough, jumping on enemies in this game was entirely ineffective. Depending on who you were trying to jump on, you’d either find yourself riding atop their heads or taking damage. This time around, the idea was to pick up things and toss them at the enemy. No question mark boxes, no blocks to break…only the four selectable characters, the power star, and 1-ups were there to remind us that we weren’t playing a game from a totally separate series. And, hey, we pretty much were.
Because of how weird it was, Mario 2 was the black sheep of the series. I don’t think the game was ever outright hated, but it certainly wasn’t the go-to game for folks who just wanted to grab and Fire Flower and watch the world burn. Like most things, fans have gained an appreciation for it over the years, but I loved it from the moment I saw that character select screen. I couldn’t rightly say that I loved it more than Part 3, but it definitely eclipsed the original for me. Aside from giving me the sense that I was playing the video game version of the cartoon I so loved, the game was the only one that bothered to distinguish between Mario and Luigi. In other games, Luigi was just a palette swapped Mario, despite the fact that all illustrations depicted him as being taller and skinnier than his brother. This didn’t even change when the series upgraded to the Super Nintendo with Super Mario World! How can this game be the only one of the 2D era to actually depict the titular brothers accurately?
More than that, though, each character in the game played differently, with unique strengths and weaknesses. The Princess could float through the air, Luigi could kick his legs and out-jump his brother, and Toad picked up things really fast. Some characters were better to use for certain levels, which added a level of strategy to the game that didn’t exist before. Furthermore, depending on how you want to play, this is the first and only game in the Mario series (not counting spinoffs, ya nerds!) that someone could potentially play without using Nintendo’s mascot at all.
Despite the fact that they weren’t initially designed as such, a surprising amount of the villains in the game became staples of the Mario series. Even the iconic Bob-Omb owes its existence to the game that was once another game. Only the game’s final boss, Wart, has been more or less forgotten by the lore. But he did manage to appear as Mamu, his Doki Doki name, in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which means that basically *every* element of the strangest, most offbeat Mario game of them all has been incorporated into the company’s signature franchises.
It was weird. It certainly didn’t feel like a sequel to the original. It created a unique situation that sees a single gaming franchise with two distinct Part 2s under its belt. It’s probably its uniqueness that keeps me in love with this game, and I’m eternally grateful to the Easter Bunny for dropping it off for me.
Doubtfire 