Platform Game Review: Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins is a bigger game that is more aligned with the mainline Super Mario games than its predecessor.

In this game, Mario's nemesis Wario appears for the first time. Wario is an evil doppelganger of Mario who stole the latter's castle. Mario has to complete many levels in order to collect the six golden coins that are needed to confront Wario and take back his castle.

Mario's sprite is aligned with the Nintendo Entertainment System sprites and the flowers once again are fire flowers that grant the ability to throw fireballs rather than bouncy superballs. This removes the ability to collect coins in small places, but the levels are designed in a way that wouldn't need them anyway. As in Super Mario Land, the rest of the power-ups from the main series are here including the super mushroom that makes Mario large and starmen that grant temporary invincibility. Due to the monochrome graphics of the Game Boy, the 1-Up that grants an extra life is a heart rather than a green mushroom.

The game makes up for this by making the game huge compared to the first Super Mario Land. Mario traverses the island that makes up his titular land, traveling through six zones with a total of thirty-two levels. This is much larger than the twelve levels within four worlds that were in the original game.

Like Bowser, King of the Koopa, changes radically in size depending on the game, Wario does so here as well. In the boss fight, which is the first time Mario confronts the twisted thief, Wario is gigantic. This makes it a more satisfying ending, however, as beating a large opponent felt like a win for our mustache-sporting land owner. Wario would take his defeat toward higher heights as the next game was Wario Land, and Mario land became a relic of history.

Like Super Mario Land before it, fans have released a fan patch for Super Mario 2: Six Golden Coins that converts the game to full color for use on the Game Boy Color. As with the other fan patch, this colorization is extremely well done.

Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins is a great game that improves on every aspect of its predecessor. If you are able to play the game using the Super Mario Land 2 DX fan patch, such as playing the cartridge on the RetroN 5 with the patch loaded from an SD card, I highly recommend playing the game this way. However, even if you are only able to play it with monochrome graphics on the Game Boy cartridge or on the Virtual Console for Nintendo 3DS, I still highly recommend it. This game is a game that deserves to be played by all Super Mario fans.

Final Verdict:

5 out of 5

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