There seems to be an extremely seedy underbelly to fandom these days. You can find people hating on anything, things you would never suspect people hating. I have, personally, been stunned at the backlash towards one of the best games to ever come out of the Nintendo Entertainment System… Super Mario Brothers 2. More specifically, a comment that the Japanese version would’ve been better to bring over, because it was more of a traditional Mario format, and that what we got for SMB2 was too far of a departure for most fans to take. These people are what us rational folk would like to call "insane".

I think what bothers me about the whole thing is that the Japanese SMB2 (and for the sake of my fingers, the Japanese version will be referred to as SMB2J and the American version as SMB2US for the rest of the article) is ridiculously hard. As in, way too hard for most to consider. SMB2J is unnecessarily cruel in many spots, and you can forget about even playing as Luigi, because while his higher jumps are worth considering, his lack of traction and constant skidding when you’re trying to stop running so you don’t fall into pits make him extremely frustrating.

Add the negative warp zones, which actually send you backwards in the levels, an actual powerdown in the poison mushroom, as well as the presence of wind in some stages which can greatly harm your jumps (several of which are damn near impossible), and SMB2J is basically a cute novelty that would have led to many thrown controllers. It also had all of it’s charm stripped from it, and you can feel that Shigeru Miyamoto didn’t do too much with this game because in most of his games, you were responsible for your own failures. In SMB2J, you could conceivably do nothing wrong and still die, and that’s the most frustrating aspect of it all.

So why does SMB2US get so much hate heaped upon it? Well, because it’s different, and I think we as a whole fear change. But really, the game was rather novel once you got over how different it was. Each character had their own strengths and flaws so you had to use strategy for each level, since you would pick between characters before you went into the level. The game was, for the time, visually stunning and had a lot of variety to it. Plus, it had the Miyamoto charm to it, which is extremely hard to explain with words but anyone who has ever played several games designed by Miyamoto will surely know what I’m talking about.

Even better was the fact that Nintendo was actually targeting an at-the-time small audience, female gamers, by including Princess Peach as one of the playable characters. Sure, she was weak and slow, but if you needed to jump across big gaps, she was your girl. In a genre that usually saw the girl as the poor damsel in distress, making Peach playable and an actual heroine was a smart move. Granted, they could’ve actually went after the female gamers more if they had announced that Samus Aran was female instead of making it a twist at the end of Metroid, but that’s a different tangent.

For many fans, that first impression is the keeper. The first time many of us played SMB2US was after months of hype, including being the cover story of the very first Nintendo Power, and cracking open the game and finding the gameplay to be completely different from the first game was confusing to a lot of us. For those who didn’t get to read the first Nintendo Power or, heaven forbid, the actual instructional manual, and actually have the differences explained to you, jumping on a Shyguy in the first stage must be awfully confusing. "But I stomped the Shyguy… why didn’t it die? What do you mean, I have to throw a turnip at it? The hell with this game."

Once you got over the first stage of confusion and realized what changes were made and how you had to adapt, though, you were fine. It’s just amazing that, after almost twenty years, people still can’t seem to forgive Nintendo for SMB2US and regard the game as the black sheep of the Super Mario family. Sure, the game is different, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Maybe they should give it a chance again sometime and realize what they’ve been missing out on. I know it worked for me… I was one of the haters for a long time. If you own a copy or have a Wii (as SMB2US is available on the Virtual Console), give it another shot with an open mind… it does wonders.

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