Why I Love Super Mario Land 2
Both of Mario's initial handheld entries mean a lot to me. I played both of them tons on that blurry Game Boy screen and made more substantial progress in them than the console games at the time. Still, even from the start you could tell there was something different about them - Nintendo R&D1 clearly wanted to have their own spin on the formula, either due to technical constraints or different design sensibilities. Superballs, exploding koopas, shoot em up stages - and the music, goddamn. Still one of the finest selections of 8 bit bops out there. It's a short but sweet time and the ending combined with that credits tune puts a smile on my face every time (not unlike another Game Boy heavy hitter, Kirby's Dream Land).
Then the sequel came along and made the first attempt look like amateur hour. I'll always love Land 1, but it's hard to deny the giant strides Six Golden Coins took in presentation and game feel. The characters were way bigger, the coins were nice and chunky, Mario's home turf (I guess) was an open world you could explore in any direction you wanted to.
While it resembles more of Super Mario World on the surface, the locales were even wilder and the enemies stranger than ever before. You might hit up the Tree Zone first thinking you're in for standard World 1 grass land stages and before you know it you're hanging from slime jumping on the inscrutable Cowfish. Take a trip through a hill on the world map that shrinks you down to enter the Macro Zone, where you can explore a house, climbing on books and going up through the chimney. Explore an egotistical monument to the plumber himself, dodging gears, saws and pissed off teddy bears on rolling balls.
Sure, there's still goombas, mushrooms, a token new power up, (Rabbit ears that make you fly, naturally) all the stuff that grounds it into being a Mario game but so many unique touches that give it a taste of its own. Flies that look like enemies but harmlessly hover away from you just out of reach, a little witch that pops up sometimes to try and steal your extra life, a random level on the world map that stands alone by itself and has no real reward or point to its existence other than just being there, if you want it.
and what a world map! Going into each zone gives you a lovely little stage preview screen (i'm particularly fond of Pumpkin Zone's almost Mighty Max-like clamshell design) and for the cherry on top, finding the hidden stages in a zone will add an extra detail to the area like flowers sprouting in the Tree Zone or the Whale in Turtle Zone half-waking up. I haven't even mentioned how the game introduces Wario, one of the greatest characters in the franchise, who basically hijacks the series starting with the sequel.
Basically, at the time Super Mario Land 2 was another great entry that just happened to be portable. There was every expectation that further games would continue the magic and by pretty much all metrics the 3D efforts did, but you couldn't help but feel the New Super Mario Bros series missed the boat by having such formulaic level designs. Oo, a desert land, water land, volcano... yeah, it's a well trodden argument at this point, but I hope you can understand why the argument was worth having. I enjoy playing them but such paint by numbers stuff wasn't the order of things, even when things were in black and white.
Oh yeah, i've been getting into RetroAchievements lately, so feel free to follow me on there - I need recognition for mastering Richard Scarry's Busytown.
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