Month of Mario: Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (NES)
The name Super Mario Bros. 2 refers to different games depending on the country you’re in, Japan and the United States experiencing a very different follow up to the platformer that helped cement Nintendo and Mario as juggernauts of home gaming. While America and the rest of the world ended up getting a vegetable-throwing adventure through a dream world with a range of unique creatures and stages, Japan’s game was in many ways more of the same, the game even looking just like Super Mario Bros. until you stumble across the rare new additions to the formula. The story goes that Nintendo of America feared that localizing the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2 would damage the brand as it was far too difficult, but this sometimes comes up as a lack of faith in American audiences to handle a hard game. What is often left out is the fact that back in Japan, there version of Super Mario Bros. 2 was even marketed as being frustratingly hard and they stamped the game box to mark it for “Super Players” because they knew many of the design ideas they included were aggravating tricks. It would be some time before people across the world would get to see this anger-inducing sequel, it’s international release christening it Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels perhaps specifically because it didn’t often look or feel different from its predecessor save for those occasional moments where the difficulty spikes in a rather annoying way.
Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels doesn’t even shake up the justification for why Mario once again finds himself running through the Mushroom Kingdom. Princess Peach had been captured by King Koopa, the evil turtle king’s troops taking over the land and turning people into objects with magic only the princess can revert. Seemingly not a sequel in terms of story and more a retread, Mario runs off to follow a very similar formula right down to the game’s worlds capping off with a castle level where you will face off with the Koopa king only to learn the princess isn’t being kept in that particular place again and again. Mario’s a strong runner and jumper, meaning he can adeptly leap over gaps, onto baddies, and bash bricks on his way to save the princess, blocks sometimes containing power-ups like a Mushroom that allows him to take a second hit as well as making him much larger. Fire Flowers give him a way to fight back even against creatures like the fanged Piranha Plants though, Mario able to hurl bouncing fireballs in front of him while under its effects.
All of this sounds pretty familiar to someone who played Super Mario Bros. 1, and in the early levels, it does almost feel like these are just more levels in the familiar style. There are the deviously placed Poison Mushrooms, discolored mushrooms sometimes hidden in blocks that will instantly kill you if you grab them by mistake, but you’ll be running into many familiar faces on land and in the water. You might see a foe like Lakitu earlier, the pesky cloud-riding turtle hurling spiky-shelled minions down on you constantly in a level, and the game will sometimes do something a little cheeky like having the Blooper squids fly around the sky or the Koopa turtles walk around underwater. In fact, quite a decent amount of levels in Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels are well-designed and not even trying to play into the game’s focus on aggravating players or testing the skills of people who had already played the first game to death. You might find a tight squeeze where some launchers fire a lot of Bullet Bills on screen at once, but working around them feels manageable and like a nifty little challenge. You might find yourself surprised when the already pesky Hammer Brothers will start darting straight toward you, but they were already a bit of a problem in the original Super Mario Bros. with their fast and hard to predict movements so players familiar with them would likely already loathe them without that light alteration to their behavior.
Exploring underground caverns and castle interiors will have unique elements like elevator platforms or spinning fireballs, but most stages in Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels can look fairly similar and are mostly differentiated by the creatures being focused on as obstacles. However, there are definitely memorable levels to be found in Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, although it’s almost always going to be for the wrong reasons. A trick like a Poison Mushroom or charging Hammer Brother makes you wary but doesn’t harm the experience overly much, but without warning, you’ll be running through a level and sometimes find the way forward isn’t easy to parse. Perhaps it’s a leap of faith, perhaps you’re meant to find hidden blocks by jumping around and hoping, but what makes these moments rough is that the screen scrolling in this platformer can sometimes make engaging with these ways forward more difficult or even impossible. Sometimes getting the necessary height or position can involve a running start you lose access too since you had no reason to suspect you shouldn’t keep moving forward until the ground runs out. These are at least moments where you stop and have to ponder what to do, but a far more common and meddlesome problem emerges when many points in the game suddenly demand a spot-on jump to cross an unassuming gap. You might have a small block to build up speed on and need to time your jump just so to clear an innocuous gap or you’ll fall just short or bonk your head on something, including hidden blocks placed specifically to kill you. While the hidden block can be viewed as an amusing trap, the tight gap jumping instead just feels like it’s there to drain your lives. It is possible to continue after a Game Over although unfortunately at the start of the four level world rather than whatever stage you’re on, meaning even if it’s one unexciting obstacle leading to trouble you might have to tromp through a whole set of levels in one of the simpler yet most egregious ways Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels tries to test your patience.
Almost any time you encounter one of the moments where the game wants a precise jump it ends up a pace breaker since you need to line it up properly, but there are other ideas the game implements that take a decent idea and run it into the ground. Some stages in Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels require you to pick the right path or the level will loop on itself until you figure out the proper way through guesswork. While a decent idea when included once as figuring out what’s going on is a bit more thought-provoking than something like needing to find hidden blocks, this game unfortunately overuses the concept without much iteration, just leading to more levels with repeated guesswork as you keep hoping you picked the proper path each attempt rather than doing much of particular interest. Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels does have other unique level concepts and ones that are unfortunately almost always poorly designed when they crop up though. Wind levels are added to the mix, the air pushing against Mario to make his jumps go farther but often the landing spots are small and easy to miss for it. It is mostly a quick and unexciting break from the familiar physics and a nuisance you’re always happy to be past, but the springs are a bit of a different beast. To clear certain long gaps, Mario must leap upon a spring and time a jump to get maximum height. Sometimes, this height is so incredible that Mario disappears from the top of the screen, completely unseen until he finally sails back down a while later. However, while he’s out of view, you need to be holding the directional pad to the right, because even though you are taking monumentally huge leaps skyward, you might only have enough hangtime to barely land at your destination. Even small springs can feature these tight jump requirements, where again the challenge is to be holding right long enough and hoping it’s enough. At least the wind levels give you room to adjust your jump if you fear overshooting or undershooting, but springs are barely interactive and yet can lead to failures if you mistime the start jump or simply hold the direction input for the improper amount of time.
As the game wears on and more tricks, traps, and ineffective concepts keep springing up, you start to see the balance truly tip away from providing the enjoyable platforming challenges of maneuvering around understandable enemies and hazards. Sometimes it can be outright funny to learn how the game tries to screw over a player, the hidden warp zones that return from the original game this time not only sometimes taking you backwards instead of forward through worlds, but they even lock you out of a bonus ninth world should to utilize them. This basically just encourages playing the game through fully so it feels like knocking it for this little joke would be foolish, but the game truly expects a ridiculous amount of devotion if you want to see a set of 16 completely unique levels identified as Worlds A, B, C, and D. To unlock these stages requires beating the game 8 times over without warp zones, a tedious feat in a tedious game and not nearly rewarding enough since it’s not like the game suddenly gets incredibly inventive or creative with these additional levels. Already in your first run there will be times where you have to take secret paths to reach the exit that further drag things out as you scour stages for what you’re even meant to do, but even if you do memorize things, it’s not like doing it eight times over will suddenly make it entertaining.
Mario’s own movement being a little looser than in the original Super Mario Bros. doesn’t help with the increased need for precision, but a true masochist might want to see how the even slipperier Luigi handles as this game marks the moment Mario’s brother truly differentiates himself beyond his choice of clothing. Luigi is able to jump higher than Mario but comes with the caveat that he’s got worse traction, meaning while he can sometimes reach places better than his brother, he might not stick the landing and go sliding off. When sticking the landing is so often key to the game’s worst moments, the sections made easier by the additional jump height don’t make up for the new frustrations unique to his play control. The version of this game featured in Super Mario All-Stars unsurprisingly makes a good amount of changes to tidy things up such as making the letter worlds accessible just after beating the game once, continues start you at the current level instead of world, and the repeating maze sections more clearly indicate if you’ve made the right or wrong choice. It’s not really enough to polish the game up into something broadly effective, but it is more palatable than the original and you can at least rest easy in that version knowing that clearing a cruel obstacle isn’t something you’ll need to do repeatedly.
THE VERDICT: Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels has some of the unmistakable Super Mario Bros. DNA in it that leads to quick and entertaining athletic levels where you weave through enemies, clear gaps, and utilize your power-ups to clear breezy but challenging obstacles. However, then a needless layer of antagonistic elements are slopped onto it steadily over the adventure, from new unexciting ideas like wind and springs to rehashes like repeating mazes that lose their luster through multiple appearances. Levels start to become defined by traps and tricks that aren’t interesting to overcome and often involve guesswork and trial and error, the tedium draining the player’s will to go on as more and more of the regular fun is shoved aside in poorly designed approaches to adding difficulty to a formula that works much better when it’s playing fair.
And so, I give Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels for the Nintendo Entertainment System…
A BAD rating. Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels is defined by its worst moments but not filled with a constant cavalcade of them even as you start to near the end. There are regular levels where you are challenged in fair and interesting ways, and if this was Super Mario Bros. but with enemy placement cranked up a bit, it would be enjoyable. Those moments where you’re running through a level and having fun too often run into the sudden roadblock of an unexpected trick that throws off how the game is played through. You suddenly need to take an all too careful jump that is easy to fail, or you do a spring jump where you just wait and hope you held right long enough to clear it. You might realize you ran forward a bit too far and now finding hidden blocks to reach a high place isn’t really going to work out, or you find that wind straining your already existing slipperiness a bit too far. People often get caught up a bit too much on elements like the Poison Mushroom or backwards warp zones when they are the kind of cheeky trick that do not really drag the experience down. Instead, it’s the multiple moments where you need to line up a perfect little jump or run through a level bumping blocks until you find the secret exit that really wear you down, these interruptions far less amusing obstacles conceptually since there isn’t much interesting intent behind them. They’re traps pure and simple, moments meant to make you fail rather than test your skill because they aren’t really designed for much beyond trial and error. Hammer Bros., despite being hard to predict, at least ask you to try and find the gap in their hammer throwing. Bloopers move through the air and water and try and chase you down, but you can bait them into moving and then run past. These are challenges, while trying to have enough running room to clear a gap is just something that is true or not or ties to a very basic reflex test.
Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels is often compared to the fan phenomenon of making Kaizo hacks of video games, Mario games in particular. In these games, deliberately unfair elements are included to frustrate players, the idea being the game is difficult often by flying in the face of good game design. People enjoy Kaizo hacks, but they are often given the tools to do so like save states or infinite lives. The challenges presented are often in your face, brutal tricks that you are meant to cry foul when you encounter because they are deliberate in their cruelty. Difficulty, even the flagrantly unfair kind, can be accommodated so facing it is at least a bit entertaining, but that’s not really the case here. In fact, comparing it to Kaizo might be giving it a little too much credit. This instead feels like a weak experiment in designing a sequel that mostly catered to a small percentage of players who had mastered the original. Not enough of Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels is unfairly difficult for that to feel like the point of the game, some levels are designed with intelligently placed obstacles, but too many are complicated in weak and uninteresting ways that produce difficulty that isn’t exciting to overcome. It can’t be just more enjoyable Super Mario Bros. because of its bad moments, but it can’t be a deliberately rough ride because of the smooth sailing found in a decent portion of the game. Ultimately though, the harsh truth is, there’s not much value in this game because it hues too close to the original and doesn’t complicate things enough in interesting ways. New mechanics are unexciting or better handled elsewhere, and when even official Nintendo sources tried to identify inventive new ideas added to each installment in the Mario series during a retrospective look back, they struggled and labelled upside-down pipes as its big contribution. If you want simple fun you go back to the first game, if you want new and unique ideas you move along to Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, or even the American Super Mario Bros. 2. Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels throws in unambitious and annoying speedbumps that aren’t exciting to overcome or even the kind of major challenge you feel satisfied for conquering. It’s just Super Mario Bros. made worse, its most interesting tricks surface level while the others just get in the way of what could have been a good time if there hadn’t been a misguided effort to court so-called Super Players.