I hear people talk about how Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3 were super different from the original Super Mario Bros.—and each other—and how the New Super Mario Bros. series is a blight upon that legacy. But NSMB2 here feels more like a game commonly ignored in those comparisons: The Lost Levels, the true and original Super Mario Bros. 2. Just like that Famicom Disk System original, NSMB2 recycles much of its predecessors' visuals, music, and gameplay structure, but uses that solid foundation to do more interesting things in the contents of its levels.
It's evident as early as World 1-1, where the familiarity of Super Mario Bros. 3's colored blocks are joined by scores of bouncy music blocks, and 1-2's underground stylings are accented by dozens of POW blocks. World 1-3 features the return of the Super Leaf, but also scatters green block snakes here and there, again highlighting more advanced series elements extremely early on. It feels like a game that acknowledges how familiar its structure has become, and decides to spice things up from the very start. Much like your first "aaaah!!" when The Lost Levels surprises you with a Poison Mushroom, you'll smile when NSMB2 swings a question-mark block away from your fist at the last second, sticks a coin-producing block on your head right when you think you've exhausted its contents, or plays with your expectations of how a world-skipping cannon should behave.
The much ballyhooed "WHOA COINS" twist is the real hook here, though you sorta have to make an effort to sell yourself on it. Despite their emphasis, collecting coins doesn't really matter at all. You don't get anything for them besides the usual 1ups—you just get to watch a running total get larger and larger and finally top off approximately 5% of the way to the humanly unattainable one million goal. If you accept that the coins are basically their own reward, though, they're pretty fun to get. There are so many secret little caches, so many bundles of scratch that you can cause to materialize, so many powerups that fold the very foundation of spacetime to reveal arcane simoleons from an otherworldly plane, that it's easy to get carried away by it. YEAH WOO watch that chedda fly!
It's yet another surface embellishment upon a basically unchanged foundation. There's an argument to be made about 2D Mario these days, that maybe it's okay that the structure remains rigid. Brandon talked about it a bit before, in the context of Tetris. Maybe 2D Mario has been around for long enough, and by virtue of only appearing once per piece of hardware it's okay to just be a recurrence of the "same old"—your chance to experience new content within those Solid Mario Rules. You know what you're getting, it's like picking up another of the four billion published crossword puzzle books down at the CVS cause you feel like busting through a few word games. "This is what it is," but familiarity is a positive in this context.
The foundation's been polished up, at the very least. The original New Super Mario Bros. and New Super Mario Bros. Wii were... pretty ugly, really. Sorta anemic, often artistically defunct. NSMB2 isn't some crazy change, but it's been tweaked in all the right ways, and the style actually looks nice and cohesive overall now. I think the series, with New Super Mario Bros. U waiting in the wings, has finally graduated to "not ugly." Perhaps even actually good looking! It's super crisp and nice on the 3DS, particularly if you keep the 3D slider around 2/3 of the way up, so the blur effect it adds can produce its neat effect, but doesn't completely smudge away the detail in the backgrounds.
I'm havin' fun with it. It's no revelation, but it's comfortable and well made. Levels move in more directions than usual, familiar themes play host to heretofore-unseen structures and platforms, and secrets are hidden fiendishly enough to keep me scratchin' my head. It's definitely "More New Super Mario Bros.," but The Lost Levels showed that you can exploit a solid foundation to produce a very particular and more fleshed out sort of experience. It's kind of a neat idea, I don't mind it—particularly with New Super Mario Bros. U coming up to provide yet another take. Between the two it's an embarrassment of riches, really. And even at its most redundant, more Mario is still pretty okay.