Gripe about What You're Playing 2: Bellyache-tric Boogaloo

[4-So]

I just tried Super Mario Bros 2 for the first in my life. I think I hate it. I never grew up with an NES, so nearly its entire library is new to me, except for the rare NES entries in certain game collections like Castlevania. Everything in this game wrong. You can’t jump on guys to kill them. The jumps themselves don’t feel right. There are cherries that do…something?

I can understand that people who played at or around when SMB2 came out were probably rolling with the punches. Who knew what a videogame sequel was supposed to be at that point? Anything could happen. For someone like me who has every post-Mario World safely downloaded in my brain, I can’t parse this nightmare world where you throw a potion that creates a door to Shadesmar, or a scary mask chases you when you pick up a key.

SMB3 is not like this, right?

Forgive me if this is common knowledge, because it seems to be at this point, but SMB2 feels strange because it's really Doki Doki Panic.

Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic

Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, usually referred to as simply Doki Doki Panic, is a Japan-exclusive platform game developed by Nintendo in cooperation with Fuji Television for the Family Computer Disk System to promote its event called Yume Kōjō...

www.mariowiki.com

SMB3 is more of what we think as traditional SMB. (I'm on the Super Mario World side in the great SMB3 vs. SMW debate but SMB3 is an absolute joy.)

 

[Second Duke Revier]

Yeah, apparently Nintendo determined that the "real" SMB 2, Mario: The Lost Levels, would be too hard to bring over to America.

And...they weren't wrong. But the Lost Levels were also just kind of a drag, design wise. The SMB 2 the world got was far superior to it, imo.

 

[Torzelbaum]

Yeah, apparently Nintendo determined that the "real" SMB 2, Mario: The Lost Levels, would be too hard to bring over to America.

And...they weren't wrong. But the Lost Levels also just kind of a drag, design wise. The SMB 2 the world got was far superior to it, imo.

I was thinking that you could say the stages in Lost Levels are like some of "those levels" that people have built in Mario Maker.

 

[FelixSH]

I think we got the better deal. SMB2 is such an interesting game, specifically because it works so different than other Marios. Also, if nothing else, you now know the origin of Peachs floaty jump, the scary mask or Shyguys.

 

[Violentvixen]

I definitely like SMB2 better than 1. It was so exciting to do something so different from anything else on NES at the time. Also as FelixSH noted so many character qualities, enemies (Birdo for example) and other tropes are from this game. Yes, it's a reskin but I had no idea at the time. I get coming back to it being even weirder now I guess, but honestly this just took me back over 30 years to the playground to hear someone complaining about this game, amusing.

 

[R.R. Bigman]

I knew about the Doki Doki Panic reskin nearly my entire life, but once I played SMB2 I honestly forgot after seeing the familiar characters like Shy Guys and Birdo. It feels more like a Weird NES Sequel than a completely separate game with Mario spliced in. I will give it more of a chance before I move on to SMB 3.

 

[Purple]

Having actually played Doki Doki Panic, while it's the obvious jumping off point, enough stuff changed in the conversion to SMB2 that it's really a profoundly different experience (the original game, notably, does not have a run button, which enables shortcuts and generally changes so much about the flow in SMB2, and the structure was that you had to beat every level as every character, not any character, and it was a lot less friendly with bounces off throws).

But anyway, the real reason we got the SMB2 we got is a combination of 3 things:
- Doki Doki Panic was one of the best games from Nintendo at the time, but it was a licensed game with characters from a TV station's one-off event, and retooling it to something they owned outright made sense even without the west in the picture.
- The Japanese SMB2 is just kind of a bad game.
- The timeline on all of this is SO MUCH WEIRDER than you'd think it is.

In the US, we had the NES, and it was just the NES. A box that came out on October 18, 1985 that you put your big chonky carts in and all these games came out on it in an order, with Super Mario Bros. as the very first game (unless you got one of those test market ones).

In Japan though, there were three real distinct eras. You had the original Famicom era, which launched with Donkey Kong, and Super Mario Bros. was this sort of last hurrah, here's the biggest and most complicated game we can cram onto this thing.

Then you had the FDS, which was meant to breath new life into it with a memory extension and the awesome enhanced storage space of a whole 112 KB! Plus you could save games! This came flying out the door with all these awesome heavy hitters that would not fit on an NES cart- Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, the bad SMB2, and- then it was kind of just a joke because chip manufacturing costs started coming down like RIGHT when it hit, and the thing was so DoA that in foreign markets they just kinda realized there'd be no point in releasing it. Bunch of early bangers then it kinda became the cheap shovelware/rerelease house... with Doki Doki Panic being one of the better later releases.

And then you had the situation the NES was in from the start where you can just shove more memory and bigger ROMs and batteries right on the cart and so by October 23, 1988 we can released the big fancy amazing Super Mario Bros. 3... 6 days before Sega released the Megadrive (or Genesis to you and me).

So here's Nintendo in the U.S. SMB1 is still freaking amazing and people love it, but it was a 2-year-old game when it launched here. The writing is on the wall that the add-on with the sequel isn't going to last so we're skipping that hardware and just waiting for everything on it to get rereleased on cart before bringing them over, and while we're at it, gotta modernize the original Dragon Quest to use battery saves, get that sucker localized (way too late to impress people). After all that retooling, we're not getting anything out the door until September 88 in the U.S. SMB3 is out. Sega's got a 16-bit competitor out, and even if it takes a while to make it over, the PC-Engine which was a pretty real competitor in Japan is on the way. You don't want to be all weird and skip directly from SMB1 to SMB2, but you sure as hell aren't gonna release what's essentially the hard mode expansion pack to this now 5 year old game that was shackled by restrictions that are hard to get your head around today, with all this new shiny flashy competition with more colors and CD audio and such. Gotta wedge SOMETHING in that slot while we wait another year to bring 3 over, so why not the other real good platformer from the same team?

This is also a very long winded way to explain that SMB2 has a better looking Mario than SMB3. Art wise, 3 came before 2.

 

[RT-55J]

Of the Mario 2s, I prefer Lost Levels to Mario Madness (because I'm a sicko), but both are still good times.

The ending of SMB2 where you see a freakishly well-animated Mario snoring while the credits scroll still blows my mind whenever I see it.

 

[MetManMas]

Lost Levels is less a sequel and more the Zelda 2nd quest to Super Mario Bros.

Yes, it changed up the tiles. Yes, there are poison mushrooms. Yes, there are things like Luigi having different physics than Mario and the bounce off enemies getting a little closer to how it would be in later games. But on the whole it is largely a new set of Mario 1 levels with harder layouts, stricter time limits, and a few meaner tricks.

It is very much a game for people who want a more harder Super Mario 1 and I absolutely get why Nintendo passed on that in favor of throwing produce at a frog king

 

[FelixSH]

I knew about the Doki Doki Panic reskin nearly my entire life, but once I played SMB2 I honestly forgot after seeing the familiar characters like Shy Guys and Birdo. It feels more like a Weird NES Sequel than a completely separate game with Mario spliced in. I will give it more of a chance before I move on to SMB 3.

It's also ok, if you don't like it. But the way you wrote it, it seems a bit like you want it to be a "normal" Super Mario game, and look at it through that lense. So yeah, maybe give it another try. But if it's not for you, than it's not for you.

 

[Dark Medusa]

wait wait wait hold on though, are we glossing over the fact that the mario things spliced in are just the playable characters and, like, the star, because Birdo and Shy Guys originate from Doki Doki Panic right?

 

[Purple]

wait wait wait hold on though, are we glossing over the fact that the mario things spliced in are just the playable characters and, like, the star, because Birdo and Shy Guys originate from Doki Doki Panic right?

Well, the protagonists, koopa shells, mushroom blocks, and 1-ups. The star (if I recall correctly) and POW blocks are in both just since... you know, same dev team and all. Oh and in Doki Doki Panic the end of level doors looked like this:

There was kind of a general purging of the mask imagery (especially the ones they changed to shells). The doors somehow just became a new thing, and Phantos... actually did get a tweak but just a general glow-up?

 

[Torzelbaum]

Differences between Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic and Super Mario Bros. 2

 

[Torzelbaum]

Now in video form!

 

[Becksworth]

Yeah, apparently Nintendo determined that the "real" SMB 2, Mario: The Lost Levels, would be too hard to bring over to America.

And...they weren't wrong. But the Lost Levels were also just kind of a drag, design wise. The SMB 2 the world got was far superior to it, imo.

A week late to this conversation, but I believe the "just kind of a drag" part was the bigger deal. Supposedly, they let Howard Phillips play the Famicom Disk System Super Mario Bros. 2 and he was just unimpressed given Zelda, Metroid, and other more technically advanced games had leap frogged ahead in the schedule in the west. Given they would have still needed to rework it for cartridge release, they decide the dev time was better used refitting Doki Doki Panic to be a stop gap Mario game while Mario 3 was still in development.

 

[SpoonyBard]

Finally getting around to Dragon Quest XI and I'm enjoying it fine, but my god the Pep Up mechanic and everything that depends on it can go die in a fire.

Bad enough the effect is triggered randomly, bad enough there are some skills that can only be used while in a pep up state, bad enough there are some double character attacks that require *both* characters to be in a pepped up state, but one of those abilities is Itemized Kill which is for all intents and purposes the only way to realistically get rare steals from enemies.

And I'm early on in the Hotto region pulling my goddamn hair out trying to get both hero and Erik in a pepped state without it falling off of one so I can have a chance to get a rare steal from one of the enemies in the area.

Sorry but this mechanic fucking sucks and I hate it. Yes I know there are ways to more reliably get pep up later in the game but that doesn't help me right now and it doesn't make the mechanic any less bad.

 

[Bongo]

Is there even any rare steal that's worth trying to get that early in the game?

 

[SpoonyBard]

Wizard Staff, Robber's Gloves. Poison Moth Knife if you want to save some gold.

Really I'm just frustrated an ability with such a specifically useful mechanic is locked behind such an annoyingly difficult state to achieve. Even if these items are obtainable a little later they're available now, but only if I can get the goddamn stars to align.

Hell, just making Itemized Kill only require Erik to be in a pepped state would make this so much less obnoxious.

 

[JBear]

I would suggest that you are chafing so badly because you are pushing hard against the game's design intent. That it is so difficult to make the stars align suggests to me that it's not something that you're intended to make occur but rather something to be taken advantage of if it happens to occur, much like real stars aligning. You're staring at the sky and grunting really hard and getting upset that you can't make a celestial rarity occur. I played that game for like 300 hours and I think I can count the number of times I stole on one hand.

 

[Octopus Prime]

There is also a sidequest that requires a specific Peo Up combo attack against an uncommon enemy that’s a real pain, especially in 2D mode where that monster shows up at all is up to the RNG, let alone when you’re psyched up for it, but that sidequest isn’t, like… useful

 

[jpfriction]

It does check a box in a list, though, which can be maddening to leave unchecked for those of us with the appropriate brainworms.

 

[SpoonyBard]

Look I get what you're all saying, I know I'm making it harder on myself than I have to, but that also doesn't mean that tying an ability with a unique mechanic to such a unreliable system was a good decision, to say nothing of the sidequest coming up.

But more imporantly this is the griping thread so I'm griping.

 

[Paul le Fou]

The place where Promise Mascot Agency fails to compare to Paradise Killer is the writing, in two ways. One, PMA is very wordy. Conversations can feel like they drag on, especially when you're listening to the Japanese voices as well, which are not fast. And the quality of the writing doesn't quite match Paradise Killer's, in the sense that PK is absolutely bugfuck nuts with its eldritch gods and its weird world, not to mention its compelling mystery and twists to unveil. PMA is much more grounded, even though it does get wacky with its mascots, it's a much more normal brand of comedic wackiness and I feel like it's just not as strong or compelling as PK. (They did hire an editor though, thank christ, and their Japanese partners did a really good Japanese localization and almost-full JP voice acting, which is also really good.)

 

[Becksworth]

Psilosybil dares to ask "What if Crash Bandicoot, but no power ups and an attack hit box that will give you Lagoon flashbacks?"

 

[Patrick]

I recently tried my hand at Nuzlocke challenges. For anyone not familiar, this is a self-imposed challenge for Pokémon games with 2 rules: 1) you can only catch the first Pokémon you see in each area, and 2) if a Pokémon faints you must release it. I was also using some common hardcore rules: 3) your levels are capped at the level of the next gym leader, and 4) use set mode in battle. The other common rule is to not use items in battle, but I ignored that one.

My first attempt was in Pokémon Emerald. I totally underestimated how hard it would be and ended up losing like half of my team to gym leaders repeatedly. It never stopped me from progressing, but it put me in a state of constantly rebuilding from scratch with sometimes poor choices for later gyms. I spent a lot of time grinding up new Pokémon and got pretty burned out after the 7th gym. I always had a good enough team, but never the perfect team. I finally decided to abandon the run. I gave one last attempt to beat the game with a single over leveled Linoone, but I messed up at the Champion and got wiped out.

My second attempt was in the Emerald Seaglass romhack. I talked about this in the romhack thread, but the visuals are overhauled, and among many other changes it lets you add in unlimited rare candies. I still followed the same rules as above, but I no longer had to grind up levels. This run went way better, to the point where it started to feel too easy. Some of the later gyms were more difficult, and I lost a few Pokemon to trainers who I was unprepared for, but not nearly as many as my first run. But, in my battle with Wally on Victory Road I made a mistake that led to him completely wiping my entire team, which counts as a failed run.

These two attempts took a bit over a month. I really liked a lot of the things about the challenges. The increased difficulty forces you to learn and take advantage of the core battle system, which is extremely good. I enjoyed planning my team out, most of the time. Permadeath adds real consequences to fights. The random nature of your team forces you to use less ideal Pokémon, which leads to more appreciation of the huge roster. On the other hand, losses feel extremely brutal. It just sucks to lose Pokémon you like, and it sucks to try to figure out how to get through a gym without one or more that would have been useful if you hadn't lost them. And seemingly random trainer battles can end up being hugely consequential, so you have to always be fully engaged. Plus, I don't have a ton of free time and this ate up pretty much all of it. And, it feels tuned toward the kind of people who love looking up specific movesets and understand which moves are most likely to be used when... basically people who are more dedicated to these games than I am.

It does more than take easy Pokémon games and make them challenging - it makes them brutally difficult. It's really cool that such simple rule changes can transform it so much. If I tried a third run, and if I was dedicated to it, I know I would do even better and I would probably start beating these regularly. But I recognize that this is just not my thing.

 

[Baudshaw]

I kinda feel a similar way to ironmans in Fire Emblem. Just a more high-stressed way to play the game.

 

[lincolnic]

Blue Prince needs a better save system, at least if you're playing on PS5. Game crashed in the middle of a run? Enjoy starting that day over. Oh, you put your console on sleep mode in the middle of a run and the system software updated overnight? Enjoy starting that day over! Why can't you just start me back in the previous room or something?

I'm only griping about this because both of things happened to me between yesterday and today right after solving a very time-consuming puzzle. I didn't love having to do it three times!

 

[Adrenaline]

Yeah you should at least be able to suspend a run while it's ongoing.

 

[Violentvixen]

On the other hand if you want to quit and reload because the first rooms you drew were garbage it's nice that it doesn't! But yeah, if I remember correctly save and continue forces you to end the day, there's no way to save as you go which is silly.

 

[4-So]

I'm trying real, real hard to enjoy Hollow Knight but it's making it incredibly difficult. So many baffling design decisions, like everything being a fucking charm or whatever they are, the Dark Souls-ish Geo currency, limited benches + re-traversal, the general difficulty, etc.

At this point it feels a lot like Tunic only in the sense of "highly-praised game actually total fucking dogwater to 4-So."