New Super Mario Bros. 2
I've been playing the first 2 NSMB games since I was pretty young and I saw ads for this game years ago and thought it was cool. Today I finally played it, and it's OK but it's nothing really that great
It's meant to be a direct sequel to the first NSMB, which is a bit confusing since growing up I personally felt like NSMBW was already an upgraded sequel to the original, hence its deceptive name as the third NSMB game in the subseries. However, it honestly feels to me more like a 3DS port of the Wii game, I guess mostly because it's got the Koopalings and it looks and sounds closer to NSMBW than NSMBDS. Speaking of the Koopalings, I'm glad they're back albeit I'm annoyed they replaced two Koopaling fights with one having a twist and instead one Koopaling fight and one repetitive and way too easy rhino fight. I still don't see why they just didn't give this game a normal saving system, instead of this odd Quick Save thing that can lose you a lot of progress if your battery runs out suddenly. The story is still bland. Also I feel this game is really short, I played for about 90 minutes today and I'm already on World 4 (and I'm doing cannonless)
As for this whole obsession with coins, which is the main reason I thought this game was cool from the trailers, I personally don't feel it really does anything. Like, it makes the game really easy cause you get so many 1-ups from all those coins, which I don't mind very much (I tend to be quite favourable of easy games). Specific things like gold rings, gold flowers, and gold brick helmets (not my first time seeing gold brick helmets cause I played 3D World before this game) are ok, but not really changing my opinion of the game very much. I'm really glad to see the Tanooki Leaf featuring in this game, but oddly it comes at the expense of removing many of the cool powerups the previous game had: Ice Mario, Penguin Mario, Propeller Mario, Blue Shell Mario. 1 million coins seems like something big happens, but I'm only ~5% of the way there right now and I'm not sure I'll be reaching it anytime soon.
I also dumped a .3ds of my cartridge and gave it a spin in Citra, and it works pretty well there
So yeah, NSMBDS was ok, NSMBW was a good upgrade, and then this just feels like a 3DS version of NSMBW with a few differences here and there that ultimately don't make the game much better or worse than NSMBW. Idk, if this game is already feeling repetitive I've not heard NSMBU is any better and as for the Switch it is literally a port of NSMBU and not counting Mario Maker 2 (as awesome as Mario Maker 2 sounds, I don't have it yet even though I do have a Switch now) or the 35th Anniversary things the Switch still doesn't have and doesn't show any sign that it's going to get afaik an original 2D Mario game but whenever that does come, I hope they change things up a bit more