Re: Polygonzo’s post about Mario Land 2, I played it on release and had a quite different reaction. Especially playing it soon after Super Mario World, it came across as lonely, hostile, mysterious and off-kilter. There were big empty-ish environments on a zoomed-in small screen, and Mario’s physics were the floatiest they’ve ever been, so every level felt a little bit like the surface of the moon. Wario came across as a menacing horror-movie-like evil twin.
The game still had a ton of ideas and core playability, so the cognitive dissonance didn’t sink the overall experience for me. Still, I wonder if that was one reason “SML3” switched to starring Wario. Nintendo was by then trying to define Mario’s brand in a more narrowly wholesome way and it’s tricky to do wholesome in low-res monochrome.