How a fresh take on a classic formula resulted in a game that was unforgettably unique.
If you're the type who enjoys watching sports, then you've undoubtedly heard sports commentators talk about something called the "intangibles"--the impactful-yet-largely-unnoticed contributing factors that play a role in helping a team to win. They're not the types of things that appear on a game's stat sheet, and their impact on the game usually goes unmentioned because it's difficult to give substantive value to elements that don't fit into neatly defined categories (number of shots taken, runs allowed, passes completed, and such) or into box scores that have been traditionally accepted as the complete story of Team A's victory over Team B.
The same thing happens in video games. Important game elements go largely unnoticed because reviewers and critics simply don't look for or care about them.
This is the case because a long time ago, a group of like-minded magazine writers got together and decided that a game's value should be determined solely by how it ranks in four specific categories: graphics, sound, control and gameplay. And ever since then, games have been scored strictly within these limited parameters.
And for about the first two-thirds of my life, that's how I thought it should be. I believed that numerical-ratings systems were the most accurate indicators of games' worth. They could be trusted to tell you whether or not games were any good.
It's only as I've gotten older and gained a deeper respect for the medium that I've come to see the flaws in that way of thinking. For many reasons, I've become wary of the idea that you can determine a game's worth via a process of systematic appraisal. I've come to see that judging a game within a narrow framework (like I did in each of my old Castlevania reviews) only serves to do it an injustice. It doesn't allow you to tell the entire story. It causes you to ignore or overlook the game's all-important intangible elements.
What my adherence to those systems did was rob me of the ability to tell you how I really feel about games and explain what they truly mean to me. And that's not how I wanted it to be. I wanted to say it all. I wanted talk about the games' standard elements, yes, but also the ones that perform sadly unappreciated jobs--the ones that do the most to stir my emotions and inspire me to think, work and create. These are things that are so immeasurably important to me that I had to start an entire blog to talk about them!
I'm telling you about this today because it's relevant to the game in question: Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins--a game for which I have a strong appreciation even though I don't consider it to be anything close to a masterwork. I'm fond of it mostly because of how its intangible elements stir emotions in wonderfully new ways and consequently help to render a Mario game that's unlike any other.
Super Mario Land 2 produced some of my best gaming memories, and I'm going to tell you how it did that and do so in a way that numerical rankings never could.
Wherever I was, the Game Boy had me covered. I had my "home games" (those like Metroid II: Return of Samus, Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge and Castlevania: The Adventure) and my "road games" (those like Super Mario Land, Tetris and Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge), and I felt that I was all set. I didn't need any other games. What I had was enough.
I thought as much, that is, until Nintendo Power Volume 38 arrived with news that a major new entry in the Super Mario series was on its way. It was called Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden coins, and it was a direct sequel to Super Mario Land, which I loved and played very often. And after I saw what it looked like, it instantly became my most desired Game Boy game ever. "I absolutely need this game in my life," I thought to myself as I examined the preview's imagery.
The thing is that Super Mario Land 2 came out of nowhere. Its existence was never foreshadowed, hinted at, or even teased. There was never any indication that a Super Mario Land sequel was on its way. And that's not how it usually was with Nintendo. The company was always intimating or quietly signaling that new entries in its biggest franchises were in the works. That's why I was caught off guard and pretty much shocked when the game's title unceremoniously appeared in the magazine's Pak Watch section with a low-key-sounding "Bright Idea" label.
There really wasn't much to the preview. It was comprised merely of a blurb and two accompanying screenshots. Yet still, the little bits it presented managed to paint an incredible picture for me. According to what I'd seen and read, Super Mario Land 2 wasn't going to be your average sequel, no. It wasn't going to simply iterate on the existing formula. Rather, it was going to strive to be something far greater than its predecessor. It was going to see a huge boost in presentation that would put it on the level of the 16-bit Super Mario World!
At first, I wondered to myself, "Can the Game Boy really produce something like that?!" I wasn't sure that it could. But those two preview images certainly seemed to suggest otherwise. The graphics depicted within them did indeed look uncannily similar to Super Mario World's, and I thought that was amazing considering how the original Super Mario Land couldn't even measure up visually to the rudimentary, early-8-bit-era Super Mario Bros.
It appeared to be the case that the Game Boy was much more capable than I thought.
For the next few months, Super Mario Land 2 was the talk of neighborhood, and friends and schoolmates alike couldn't wait to see more of it. It was one of those games that inspired us to run to our mailboxes every afternoon with the hope that Nintendo Power would be there waiting for us and that it would come bearing news and information about Super Mario Land 2. We didn't care if the information amounted to nothing more than a minor detail. That, for us, would be tantalizing enough.
In our worlds, Super Mario Land 2 was all that mattered, and the only thing we desired was to see more of it.
I was as eager as anyone to learn more about the game, certainly, but I had my own reasons for wanting to do so. What I desired, above all, was to get an answer to my question: Can a Game Boy game actually meet the visual standard of a 16-bit game? Because that was a pretty big boast, and, honestly, I wasn't sure that the game could back it up.
And, well, any doubts that I had were completely cleared away when, at long last, Nintendo Power Volume 42 arrived with a four-page preview whose screenshots illustrated, in clear and satisfying detail, that Super Mario Land 2's visuals were indeed comparable to Super Mario World's. It had the same large character sprites, the same Super Mario World-style multi-screen map, and graphical and environmental design that was convincingly close to what I'd seen in Mario's 16-bit adventure.
"How is this even possible?" I wondered as I engaged in my old habit of underestimating Nintendo's little gray brick.
The preview also explained Super Mario Land 2's plot. It spotlighted the game's new arch-villain, Wario--an evil Mario doppelganger who was intent on making the plumber's life hell--and explained how he had seized Mario's castle while Mario was off rescuing Daisy in Sarasaland. At the same time, he had created all kinds of mischief in Mario Land and engaged in the evil deed of casting a mind-control spell over all of its citizens and turning them into zombies. Now it was up to the returning Mario to set things right.
Also, there was apparently some type of jealousy-driven backstory between the two characters (though, I don't remember where I got this bit of information), which I found to be a little off-putting because I never liked it when an established character's history had to be revised to accommodate a story element that was conveniently created to justify something that happened in just one particular episode. It came from out of nowhere, and I couldn't remember anything of the sort ever being mentioned in a past Mario game.
At first, Wario struck me as an unimaginative villain. I saw him as nothing more than a threadbare, recolored version of Mario that existed only because someone at Nintendo thought that flipping the letter M and turning it into a W was somehow clever. Though, after I saw Wario in a Super Mario Land 2 commercial (the classic one in which he says, "Obey Wario! Destroy Mario!"), I kinda warmed up to him. His zany personality and maniacal, expressive mannerisms shined through and rendered a genuinely interesting antagonist.
For one thing, that commercial's impact served as another example of how great Nintendo was at manufacturing off-the-charts hype for its Mario-branded games. My excitement-level raised significantly after I saw it. At that moment, I knew that I needed Super Mario Land 2 in my life.
"This is the Game Boy game," I felt. "There's never been anything bigger."
At the time, I, like most kids, was on a Mario high. The incredible Super Mario Bros. 3 was more than two years old at that point, yet its flame hadn't withered a single bit. It was still dominating our psyches. All of the neighborhood kids and I were still fervently returning to Mario's magnum opus and thoroughly enjoying the magical experience it offered.
And more recently, the marvelous showpiece Super Mario World had arrived in our homes alongside the SNES and showed us what gaming's greatest icon could be when he was harnessing the power of next-generation hardware.
These two games were always on our minds. We were constantly playing them, thinking about them, and talking about them. At times, kids would argue as to which one was better, but I never partook in any of those discussions. I didn't want to. I had no desire to compare the games to each other and resultantly slot one of them lower than the other. I adored both of them, and to me, they both represented the pinnacle of video games.
During that period, those two games owned a big part of my soul, so naturally I was going to be excited about any game that happened to look like either of them. And that's why I was so obsessed with Super Mario Land 2. It looked just like Super Mario World--one of my all-time-favorite platformers! And for that reason, alone, it earned itself the top spot on my Christmas list for 1992 (the game's actual release was late November, but I didn't mind waiting an extra month if it meant saving $40).
Unfortunately, I don't remember any specific details about my first play-through of Super Mario Land 2 (it's likely the case that I was so engrossed in the action that I never took the opportunity to make mental notes), though I do recall my immediate impressions of graphical and technical aspects: For one thing, I was blown away by how closely Super Mario Land 2 resembled its console counterparts not just in look but also in play-style. In particular, I was amazed that it could pull off Super Mario World's "advanced" block-breaking spin-jump. Seeing that move executed in a Game Boy game was unreal, and I could only conclude that its inclusion was the product of some type of newly learned programming sorcery (mind you, I was still operating under the assumption that the Game Boy was even less powerful than the NES).
"This kind of stuff isn't supposed to be possible in a portable game!" I thought.
At the same time, though, there existed a strange disconnect whose qualities I couldn't explain. I just didn't have the words. Mainly, while Super Mario Land 2's visuals certainly reminded me of those I'd seen in Mario's graphically evolved console games (despite obvious concessions like reduced background detail, stricter object limits, and the color deficiency that required the designers to differentiate Mario's fire-flower form by placing a feather on his hat), its personality and vibe didn't. They were wholly disparate. They didn't feel anything at all like the console games' or even the original Super Mario Land's.
I couldn't put my finger on why that was. "Is it the odd mix of Super Mario World-style visuals and monochromatic coloring?" I wondered. "The weird imagery (pickle-shaped foliage and angry-faced mountains)? The bizarre enemies? The music's distinct tone? Or maybe a combination of all of these elements?"
It would be more than a decade before I could clearly articulate what the disconnect was and explain how it was affecting me emotionally.
But what I found the most striking about Super Mario Land 2 was how it didn't even feel spiritually connected to its predecessor, Super Mario Land, which, I felt, had created an ideal template for portable Mario games. It had established a distinct visual-and-aural style that a sequel could easily adopt and expand upon.
But for some reason, Super Mario Land 2 didn't desire to take that route, no. Rather, it wanted to be a creature of its own design. It wanted to be different in its own unique way. And this was reflected in its design decisions: It had no points system and thus treated the mowing down of Goombas and Koopa Troopers as a space-clearing exercise. It had you accumulating coins not for the purpose of earning extra lives at certain thresholds but instead for gambling in slot-machine minigames and winning items (power-ups and lives). It had an enemy counter that tallied your number of victims and provided you an Invincibility Star whenever it reached 100. It did away with rebounding superballs and replaced them with the more-traditional bouncing fireballs. And it dropped its predecessor's invincibility music (the Can-Can theme) and replaced it with a tune that was more crescendoing in nature.
It didn't do anything you expected it to.
Also, the game's story, while interesting, seemed strangely anti-Mario. It didn't portray him as the humble little Italian plumber that we knew, no. Rather, it made us believe that success had gone to his head and that he'd become something of a narcissist. I mean, suddenly he had his own castle on his own private island, and it was decorated and furnished with items and monuments that were made in his image?
I couldn't help but ask questions like "When did Mario--who had always shown himself to be a selfless, humble hero--get such a big ego?", "Who built the Mario Zone and all of these adulatory statues?" and "Is any of this canon?"
Back then, this was the kind of stuff that was worth wondering about. I liked to think about Mario's world and try to piece together how he went from living in a rundown Brooklyn apartment building to inhabiting a cute little mushroom house (as per what I'd seen in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!) house to becoming the king of his own castle. This was a time when the Mario universe still had an air of mystery to it. We didn't know how any of the series games were connected. So I'd have fun dreaming up potential links between games and writing about them in my video-game-focused Superbooks (which, not coincidentally, were themed after the Super Mario Bros. games).
But Super Mario Land 2 felt distant from the rest of the Mario games. It seemed to exist in a separate space. Whenever I'd play it, I'd feel as though I was getting a look into an alternate Mario dimension within which the familiar was regarded as mundane. Take, for instance, the traditional Mario enemies--the Goombas, the Koopa Troopers and the Boos: They felt out of place in this world. They didn't mesh with it. In a game that was otherwise filled with strange and unusual enemies like goatfish, giant army ants, vampires, sentient umbrellas, wooden soldiers, boxing sharks, ninja cyclopes, and hockey-mask-wearing goons that were designed to evoke images of Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees, they came off as discordantly, unappealingly plain and ordinary.
The same was true for returning Super Mario Land enemies like the exploding Nokobon, which was originally special because it was so different from the Mario norm but was now wholly unremarkable compared to newly created enemies like the drill-nosed moles, the skeleton bees, and the thieving witches. And because Nokobon's appearance was so oddly fleeting, it felt like a mere cameo, and it was as if the designers only included Nokobon for the purpose of creating a lazy connection between the two Super Mario Land games (in case the player forgot or didn't know that they were directly related).
I was happy that they brought back Tatanga--Super Mario Land's main villain--and tried to create a deeper connection between the two games, but still I couldn't help but feel that he, too, seemed to be out of place in this game. He didn't feel naturally connected to it. There was a certain incongruousness to how he looked and operated (and it didn't help that he looked more like an artist's interpretation of Tatanga than he did the actual character).
It was clear to me from the start that Super Mario Land 2's world belonged solely to the new breed of enemies. They were the ones who defined it. They were the ones who provided it its character. It was an extension of them and their unique traits and peculiarities. And that's why the derivative-feeling old guard wound up feeling so out of place.
Super Mario Land 2 also had a very unconventional musical style. It didn't have multiple stage themes, like all of the other Mario games did, but instead multiple variations of a single theme. And each variation was designed to define a specific environment type's atmosphere and convey to you its tone and mood. So if you entered a beaming overworld stage, you'd be met with a high-spirited variation that started out with a bang and then introduced a joyful melody that was designed to fill you with cheer.
If you were in a stage whose environments were fantastical in nature, the variation was hushed and ambient in a jazzy kind of way, and its soft beats and note strings worked to pique your curiosity and invite you to imagine. If you were in a haunted house or a graveyard, the variation was mysterious-sounding and designed to make you feel tense and uneasy. If you were on the moon, the variation was wistful and whimsical. And if you were at the seashore, the variation was quietly tropical, and it invited you to happily reminisce about your past gaming experiences.
And I found this approach to music-creation fascinating because I'd never been exposed to anything like it. I'd never come across a game whose entire soundtrack was composed largely of variations of a single theme. Some people, I assumed, might have seen this approach as lazy or limiting, but I saw it as a masterful display of versatility and a novel way to connect the player to the world and evoke emotions.
To me, Super Mario Land 2's music was its most defining element. More so than its Super Mario World-like visuals, its interesting story, and its oddball enemy characters, its wonderfully evocative music stood out to me and made me fall in love with the game; and it was the game element that most strongly resonated with me over the two decades that followed. Even today, I can't think of music that has done more to shape a Mario game and my memories of it. I consider Super Mario Land 2's music to be its most strikingly unique, most differentiating aspect, and I'm happy to say that it's the main source of my emotional attachment to the game.
I'll never forget any of the soundtrack's variations. I'll always remember how they go and what they do.
Then there was the actual gameplay, which certainly wasn't secondary to me.
At the start, I was blown away by how Super Mario Land 2 played, and I was awed by its sheer quality. It did so many things right: It controlled really well and managed to convincingly replicate Super Mario World's style and feel, and it did this in spite of the fact that the Game Boy had a comparatively limited amount of input options. It had a big open-world map (which was surrounded on all sides by beautifully animated water--a strong atmospheric touch and the kind of thing I loved to see in games) that invited me to explore at my leisure and take on the game's challenges in any order I desired, which was a surprising departure from the previous games' linear-progression systems. And it had six attractively designed "zones," each of which had its own eye-catchingly unique visual theme, and this, I felt, was a big step up from Super Mario World, whose area maps (outside of a few of them) were largely indistinguishable.
Super Mario Land 2 was the most advanced-feeling portable game I'd ever played. Its every aspect was pushing the Game Boy to the next level and communicating to me that the Game Boy's technology had evolved significantly since the early days. As I played it, I was reminded of second-phase NES games like Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon II: The Revenge and Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse--of games that made huge graphical leaps and were much larger in scope and thus helped to push the console to greater heights.
Super Mario Land 2 was basically the Game Boy's Super Mario Bros. 3, and much like the latter, it delivered on its promise and did so in a big way. "The next phase is here," it told me, "so you better buckle up!"
Super Mario Land 2 had its flaws, yeah, but I didn't really start to notice them until about a year later, after I'd played the game exhaustively. And even then, I didn't think of them as "flaws" but rather "oddities." There were, for instance, multiple stages that I saw as "unchallenging exercises" because they were bereft of any real obstacles and largely empty. Too many of them were like that--including the secret stages, which had both of those qualities and were, in addition, overly long and disappointingly simplistic in design (and their only purpose, it seemed, was to load you up with coins).
Another odd thing was the overworld map's sole standalone stage--the gated stage located in the map's center-left portion. There didn't seem to be any point to it. It didn't unlock anything or count toward any observable total. And my friends and I were never able to figure out why it was there. (Apparently this stage counts toward your completion-rate.)
Sometimes I got the sense that the game's development team was just throwing ideas out there and doing so without any regard for conventionality or common sense--that they'd thrown the rulebook out the window and were simply doing whatever the hell they wanted to, "sound game design" be damned.
And over time, my growing awareness of Super Mario Land 2's numerous "oddities" began to affect how I felt about the game. I started to realize that it wasn't quite as well made as I originally thought. I could no longer deny that it had a number of very troubling design issues. And resultantly, my opinion of it started to gradually lower. And soon it got to a point where I no longer considered it to be in the league of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World; objectively, I knew, it just wasn't as good as either of those two.
To me, the biggest offender was the game's new Bunny Suit, which allowed you to fly through the air and slowly float down to the ground. Conceptually, it was similar to Super Mario Bros. 3's Racoon and Tanooki Suits, which likewise allowed you to float down slowly, but the problem was that it offered you way too much flight control and allowed you to hang in the air for a ridiculously long period of time.
There were an abundance of instances in which you could use the Bunny Suit to basically float over an entire stage and consequently never have to stop to interact with any of its enemies or objects. Doing so required no real effort. Clearing stages by simply floating across them was all too easy. And it was obvious that the designers didn't consider this when they were creating the wide-open-type stages.
I mean, I liked how the Bunny Suit operated and thought it was fun to use, but eventually it got to a point where I felt guilty about using it. When I used special items, I used them to the fullest, thus when I had a Bunny Suit equipped, I was absolutely going to use it to float over entire stages. But, honestly, I didn't want to do that. I felt bad about clearing stages that way. I felt as though I was robbing myself of an actual gaming experience. "Why bother playing this game if this is all I'm going to do?" I'd ask myself whenever I was cheaply floating my way across a stage's empty top portion for the tenth time in a row.
So at one point, I decided to start avoiding the Bunny Suit and instead aim to fully explore stages and actually contend with the game's platforming challenges.
The truth, though, was that there really wasn't much challenge to be found in Super Mario Land 2. It was a rather easy game. Oh, it had some difficult parts (like the scrolling moon stage with its maze of electrified stars and Turtle Zone 2's hidden-exit room, which was uncomfortably narrow and filled with spiky enemies and obstructions), sure, but on the whole, it didn't have much that could seriously challenge a Mario-game veteran.
Also, its boss fights were pathetically easy. Like other Mario games' bosses, Super Mario Land 2's were of the "jump on them three times to defeat them variety," but the problem was that they lacked something that the other games' bosses had--something that bosses needed if they were to be even mildly formidable: a suitable amount of invincibility frames. Super Mario Land 2's had an extremely low number of them, so it was all too easy to string together three successive hits and finish off a boss before it could even initiate its offense!
Really, the game's only true challenge was its final stage: Wario's Castle, which, bafflingly, introduced a huge difficulty spike. It was a long, deviously designed stage that was filled with harrowing, high-precision platforming challenges. It was the game's most difficult stage by a factor of 5, and ordinarily I'd lose 20-plus lives to it. I'd routinely mistime my jumps in the room that had those moving propeller platforms and consequently fall into the lava, and if I wasn't repeatedly screwing up in that room, then I'd instead be doing so in the rooms that had three Wario-faced rebounding balls, with which I'd struggle because I was nervous and because the rooms were cramped and mobility-limiting. I could never beat the bouncing balls cleanly; they'd always find a way to sneak a hit in and relieve me of my precious power-up.
I mean, I was fine with difficult stages, sure, but I wasn't so much a fan of those that came from out of nowhere--of those that were inexplicably 5- to 10-times harder than anything that came before them. A game having a complete lack of logical gradation only served to make it feel noticeably unbalanced.
That's exactly what Wario's Castle did to Super Mario Land 2.
So yeah--Super Mario Land 2 had many puzzling "oddities." I couldn't deny that.
Still, though, I liked it a lot, and I played it quite frequently. I kept returning to it because it had a special power: It could reliably provide me me an uplifting, feel-good gaming experience whenever I needed one. It could always lend a sense of cheer to a monotonous car ride and fill me with feelings of positivity that would last for the rest of the day.
And that quality made Super Mario Land 2 a reliable "road game" and one of the best companions a kid could ever have. For the majority of my youth, it was my chief go-to road game, and it played a huge role in helping me to endure those horribly long 150-mile car rides to our usual New Jersey and Long Island destinations.
It didn't matter if I finished it before or after we reached exit 100. Beating it wasn't the point. I played it because I loved to soak in its uniquely evocative graphical and musical qualities and think about the messages they were sending. "What are they trying to tell me about this game's world?" I'd wonder. "Why are they so determined to break from the norm?"
Of course, it was also customary to listen to and joyfully absorb its ending theme (which wasn't as touching as Super Mario Land's, no, but was still pretty heart-warming) for about 5-10 minutes or at least until we were nearing the next toll booth (because, again, I didn't want the toll booth attendant to see me swaying in rhythm to 8-bit video-game music and think that I was a freak or something).
For the next four years, Super Mario Land 2 was a mainstay in my life. It was with me everywhere I went. But as times began to change, and it started to slowly disappear from my life. And it started doing so for the expected reasons: (1) The Game Boy's release-schedule was drying up, and thus I was playing fewer and fewer Game Boy games. (2) Recently the N64 had arrived on the scene and started demanding all of my attention. And (3) I was getting older, which meant that I wasn't traveling with my parents as much.
Also, Super Mario Land 2, while it had the power to fascinate me in a uniquely wonderful way, just wasn't as good as the console Super Mario Bros. games. If I was looking to play a top-tier 2D platformer, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World were far better choices.
So I just didn't have the time or the opportunity to play Super Mario Land 2 anymore.
Outside of the few times I loaded it up on an emulator for experimental purposes, I didn't see again until September of 2011, when I downloaded it from the 3DS eShop (at the time, I was on a retro-game-buying frenzy, and I was buying almost everything that Nintendo was putting on the 3DS Virtual Console). But even though it had, by that point, been absent from my life for over 16, I hadn't forgotten anything about it. I could still vividly recall all of its uniquely evocative visual and aural qualities and how they made me feel--how I used to obsess over them and constantly try to figure out about what, exactly, was making them hit so differently.
And I'd since figured out why Super Mario Land 2 felt so different from all of the other Mario games. The answer was right there in the game's credits, to which I never paid close attention when I was a kid: The Super Mario Land games were, I learned, produced by Gunpei Yokoi and friends--the famed R&D1 development team) that was the creative force behind the Metroid series. That's when it all made sense to me: Super Mario Land 2 was so richly evocative because it was created by people who were masters of crafting hauntingly atmospheric, highly immersive worlds that could connect with you on an emotional level.
At that point, I no longer had to wonder why Super Mario Land 2's visuals, music and environmental design resonated so strongly with me. I now understood why the game was able to evoke such strong feelings and emotions and inspire me to wonder about its world in such an impassioned way: It was made by the Metroid team!
In the current day, Super Mario Land 2 still resonates me in the same way. It still has the power to evoke strong emotions from me and inspire me to wonder about its world. It does that with its wonderfully evocative visuals and music and also with its other memorably distinct atmospheric touches--things like the Pumpkin Zone's specimen-filled bottles; the Mario Zone's exterior being comprised of a twisting clocktower, a giant playroom, and an area made entirely of Legos (well, actually, they're Nintendo's knockoff N&B blocks, to which Yokoi and friends pay tribute here); your having to traverse a toothy whale's exterior by working your way around and through its hanging uvulas and sticky digestive fluids; the image of a conquering Wario marching about the castle's rooftop; and the unlocking of the Space Zone secret stage, which entails two amusing little map changes: the smiling moon's coming to bear an angry expression after the stage-representing comet crashes into its head, and its becoming sad after you clear the stage--probably because it now realizes that the wound is permanent (poor guy).
All of these elements come together to form one of the most unforgettably unique Mario games in existence.
And even if I were to never again return to Super Mario Land 2, my feelings for it wouldn't change. I wouldn't forget what it means to me. I'd still fondly remember all of its wonderfully unique visual and musical aspects and feel the same way about them. And when I'd think about it, I'd always be reminded of what it meant to the Game Boy's evolution and the many ways in which it demonstrated Gunpei Yokio's genius.
No matter what the situation is, I'll cherish Super Mario Land 2 because it's the perfect symbol of what Mario can be when his creators endeavor to take him to new places and gleefully eschew convention. Sadly, Miyamoto and his crew will probably never create anything like it. They're too stuck in their ways.
But if they were to ever open their minds and make an earnest effort to closely examine Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins and understand why it's so impactful, they'd learn a very valuable lesson: Sometimes the best thing you can do for Mario is turn his world upside-down.
Nice long writeups you got here!
ReplyDeleteNice long writeups you got here!
ReplyDeleteWell, they're much longer than what I've had listed in my notes all of these years. I don't believe my original "Dis game good. I likey a LOT" drafts would have cut it.
DeleteAlso, tell that "Unknown" fellow I'm on to him. His fiendish mind games will never bring down The House of P.