Super Mario Bros. 2
Nintento Entertainment System
September 1988
Still to this day, what the American continent originally got as a sequel to the first Super Mario Bros. on the NES stands as one of the oddest entries in the franchise. It's not much of a secret that this game was made by taking another game, namely Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, and slapping Mario characters on it. Actually, I think it's the most-repeated "mind-blowing fact you don't know!!" (clickbait look intentional) in the history of gaming. The reason this was done was allegedly because the actual Super Mario Bros. 2 ("The Lost Levels"), which Japan got, looked identical to Super Mario Bros. 1, with the main difference being that its difficulty was through the roof.
Since it adapts a game with four playable characters, SMB2 marks the first time we can actually play as Princess Toadstool (who wouldn't become known as Peach in the English version of Mario games for a few more years) or as Toad. All four characters play a little differently, as well; Mario plays like usual, Luigi jumps a little higher, the Princess can float thanks to her dress, and Toad has greater strength so he picks items up faster, but his jump is abysmal as a tradeoff.
With its bizarre inception, you could think that this game struggles to fit with the remainder of the franchise, and... well, with its gameplay that involves uprooting plants and tossing things to attack, you'd be right. In this case, it's fairer to say that the Mario franchise retroactively accepted SMB2 (often referred to as Super Mario USA to differentiate it from Japan's The Lost Levels) into its canon. Mainly by transplanting some of the enemies into the larger franchise; Subcon, the game's dream world, is where we first met, among others, Bob-Ombs, Ninjis, Pokeys, Shy Guys, Snifits and Birdo, some of which reappeared as early as SMB3. However, its major bosses have remained divorced from the series, with fewer in-game references to Wart than you can count on one hand. (He does appear in other places of Nintendo canon however, with one notable appearance in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening!)
This game's other major secret is also well-known; namely, that this game was Mario's dream. Beating Wart shows a quick cutscene of Mario sleeping, thinking up the events. Gives Wart's appearance in Link's Awakening an interesting double meaning. However, as far as I can remember, I don't recall ever actually getting to the end of this one. Blame it on the weird mechanics that felt too different from classic Mario fare, but when given the choice, I would usually go for SMB1 or 3 instead. Probably 3. It's been a while so I don't remember perfectly, but I think I never got past Fryguy, the fourth boss and the most annoying of them. Which doesn't mean it's a bad game; it's pretty good. Just not what I was looking for in a Mario game, I who also had access to Super Mario World, making it sit in its corner as the oddity it is.
I definitely played it a lot more than I played The Lost Levels, though! That one's a masochist's game.
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