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Super Mario Bros. 2 (J)


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Yea, agreed.  The Japan version of Super Mario 2 was actually Doki Doki Panic (a game that was made for a very large company in japan) modified, and they changed to all the Mario and all his friends. 

 

It was claimed that it was insanely hard...  At the time Nintendo was new in the US market, they had one or 2 people they would send games over to in the US to test for the US market (would of been a great job in the day) and they said it was too hard and people would not enjoy it and it would make Nintendo look bad (this is not too long after the video game crash of the 80's so they were not going to take ANY chance). 

 

This is why the easier and prettier version came over to the US but, a lot of the features of that game came over to Super Mario 2...

 

I'm going to have to find the original ROM to play it on my NES that is modified with a NESRGB kit... but, in a way, not looking forward to it... :)

Edited by TheCoolDave
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11 hours ago, 0078265317 said:

Would of been nice to see this however bitd.  Who are they to decide its too difficult.

 

The "they" in question would have been video game magazines of the time. They would have rated SMB2J as "too hard", and it would have sparked some controversy because not everyone reads such magazines. BITD, parents bought NES games for their kids, and they would have bought SMB2J without asking any question, simply because it's a sequel to the beloved NES pack-in game. Nintendo would have felt the heat from many parents for releasing such a frustrating game onto the unsuspecting populace.

 

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They could of released both SMB2J and SMB2USA in North America, but just called the Japanese version "Super Mario Plus" or something like that and say its for the people who mastered the first game. 

 

I own the disk system version of SMB2J, and its as hard as people say it is. But there are other games that came out during that time which were way harder (Ghost and Goblins, Megaman, Legend of Zelda and Punchout).

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4 hours ago, TheCoolDave said:

Yea, agreed.  The Japan version of Super Mario 2 was actually Doki Doki Panic (a game that was made for a very large company in japan) modified, and they changed to all the Mario and all his friends.

Large company indeed - it was one of the major TV networks (Fuji TV - same one that has always aired the Dragon Ball series).

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14 hours ago, 0078265317 said:

Would of been nice to see this however bitd.  Who are they to decide its too difficult.

 

It wasn't just the extreme difficulty, it also did little to move the series forward. It's like a SMB ROM hack. The reskinned Doki Doki Panic was a much worthier sequel that felt like a real progression.

 

 

 

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Plus, Miyamoto said, if I'm not mistaking, that they tested game mechanics for a later SMB game in Doki Doki Panic. So the Occidental version is quite legitimate.

I think I read somewhere that in fact, Doki Doki Panic was originally SMB3, and that when Fuji TV asked for a game, they reskinned and completed it as Doki Doki Panic. Then when SMB2 Jap was refused in the US, they re-reskinned the game into a Mario game.

You can see that it's a rushed game in that many animations are very crude or non-existant in Doki Doki Panic : plants moves on 2 frames, birds have 2 or 3 frames, waterfall have few frames (and as such appears to flows crazy fast) the luck game is almost "text only" and the world cards are less detailed.

 

In fact, several things came from SMB-USA : Mario and Luigi being physically different - in SMB2J, they are, like in SMB1, just palette switch.

The hability to carry items; even tho it was modified for SMB3, Doki Doki Panic was a test bed to see if carrying items rather than randomly tossing a turtle shell that was dropped here was interesting.

Birdo and Shyguys were made canon, Toad was introduced in the series, princess Toadstool given her current appearance.

And all those things were tested and approved, it's not a hastily reskinned game.

 

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22 hours ago, CatPix said:

You can see that it's a rushed game in that many animations are very crude or non-existant in Doki Doki Panic : plants moves on 2 frames, birds have 2 or 3 frames, waterfall have few frames (and as such appears to flows crazy fast) the luck game is almost "text only" and the world cards are less detailed.

FDS games were a bit limited in memory size, so some of these issues can be chalked down to the format, as the switch to cartridge (and abandonment of the save system) saw an increase in available memory.

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I guess some issues could be explained by this, but for example the spinning game could have been made better; Doki Doki Panic only use one side of the floppy so it's not a space issue, and on such a screen there was plenty of RAM left to do something. Also due to mechanical constraints, the loading time is always of 8 seconds so there's no point putting less details to reduce loading time.

For the reduced animations in levels, it could be a very likely explanation.

Though, Metroid run on FDS and that is a game with much more details and animations.

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After some hunting... I found Doki Doki Panic (Japan), the ORIGINAL FDS rom !  I'm going to drop it on my everdrive N8 (as the original game was for the FC, not the SNES) and see how hard it actually is. 

 

This was the original game... the one they claimed that was too hard for the US market..

 

I've never played it before, only saw some YouTube videos on it..

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On 10/4/2019 at 5:24 PM, mbd30 said:

 

Exactly. It wasn't a ripoff but a reskin of one of their own games.

 

Not to mention it was improved over the game it's based on. It's hard to go back to Doki Doki after you've played SMB2 USA.

 

I agree with your other post too. SMB2J did little to move the series forward.

 

15 minutes ago, TheCoolDave said:

After some hunting... I found Doki Doki Panic (Japan), the ORIGINAL FDS rom !  I'm going to drop it on my everdrive N8 (as the original game was for the FC, not the SNES) and see how hard it actually is. 

 

This was the original game... the one they claimed that was too hard for the US market..

 

I've never played it before, only saw some YouTube videos on it..

I think you are confusing things here.

 

Doki Doki Panic was its own game, eventually reworked and re-released in North America as Super Mario Bros. 2 in 1988.

 

The actual Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 was released for the Famicom Disk System in 1986. This is the one people refer to as being "too difficult", and the one that didn't see release in North America until it was reworked for the Super Mario All-Stars collection on the SNES.

 

 

smb2j.png

Edited by Austin
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