New Super Mario Bros. 2 is one of the newest big titles released on the Nintendo 3DS. This time around, Bowser has kidnapped Princess Peach, but besides that, the Mushroom Kingdom is overflowing with coins! Now Mario must rescue her, and also collect 1 million coins! Why? Who knows?
When it comes to the story, there is nothing new what so ever. I would try to put the coin side quest as a main plot point, but besides you trying to get 1 million coins, there’s no backstory to it, and no explanation on why we must get that many coins. It’s an incredible challenge. Not because of difficulty, but because of the time consuming grinding you will be doing. The whole game was incredibly short. I beat all of the worlds in less than 4 hours.
Gameplay is still the same. Control is still fun, and the levels are designed the old Mario way: some fun and entertaining, and others a bit lazy feeling. The core system used now is based around trying to get coins. There are now golden Flowers, which turn anything Mario fires at into gold coins. There are also gold rings, which make enemies turn to gold at your touch, letting you get a bunch of coins when you defeat them. Even with this though, getting to 1 million will take you a long time. I’ve spent exactly 8 hours on the game, and I’ve collected a little less than 50 thousand coins. I loved playing this, but getting to that million is just too much of a grind for me. You will end up playing only a handful of levels over and over, just because they give the most coins the fastest. It’s a shame. If they just increased the amount of coins from defeating golden enemies, and maybe increased the frequency of golden flowers, it could have been faster, easier, and even more fun. It still is fun if you play it in small chunks of time.
The soundtrack of this game doesn’t sound any different than previous Mario games. That isn’t a bad thing, but a bit more originality would have been appreciated. I really loved the visuals however. The 3D still gives a bit of a head ache after a while, but the style of the game was really easy on the eyes. Besides that, nothing is new.
New Super Mario Bros. 2 is a risk of buying. If you love grinding for hours and hours, then this is an absolute must-buy. If you hate repetitive game play, chances are very high you will have wasted your money. Even with the grind, in my opinion, NSMB2 is a must have in anyone’s 3DS collection.
3/5
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