Review of Super Mario Bros. 2

I really love this game a lot I always did, the music, the visuals, and of course the gameplay always gives me a big warm nostalgic feeling inside like few other games from my childhood still can, it's not particularly a hard game at all, nor is it too easy, but just a tremendously fun breeze to play through. The version I prefer is the graphically superior port that was included with the Super Mario Allstars compilation, but it's the same basic game, and as a kid I never even knew it wasn't the 'real' Super Mario Bros 2, but what does that really matter anyway? To me it looked like a Mario game, it felt like one, maybe a Mario game that was vastly different to the original, which I did notice but I never really wondered why because it didn't matter and still doesn't because this game is great! "The Lost Levels" my be far more challenging but it certainly wasn't anywhere near as fun. I always had a blast with it as a kid playing for hours on end, I loved the strange vaguely Arabian aesthetic and vegetable motif, and the uprooting objects to hurl at your freaky enemies to beat them aspect was such a novel and completely different way than jumping on their heads, you could ride on the enemy's heads in this game! There were so many endearing little touches, like the scary enraged sun that will hunt you down like a dog unless you drop his key, how all the bosses were so weird and unique to the game, like a giant crab, a bomb tossing rat with shades, and the last boss was a big toad king who you defeat by throwing terrible vegetables down his gullet until he croaks! And done to death as the old twist was, I found the "And-it-was-all-a-dream" reveal at the end to be really sweet and somehow fitting here, Mario even saves the day in his dreams... I never played as Mario though, I always played as the princess, as her ability to float came in very handy! It was cool how the four characters weren't merely sprite swaps but actually did all have their strengths and weaknesses. It's all decidedly quite odd to be sure, like the Alice in Wonderland of Mario games, but it somehow worked! Whether you considered it a real Mario adventure or not, what remained true was that at its heart it's just a fun classic video game. X