loading . . . Game Review: Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (Game Boy) Download as PDF 📄 Download as ePub 📱
Recently I beat a game that I have owned since about 1997, when I first bought it with my chore money as a kid. It’s time to review **Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins**!!!
First the name: While the NES and SNES full-sized consoles had the Super Mario _World_ series, the ones with _Land_ in the title were aimed at the portable Game Boy console. Sort of a Disney World/Land situation, if that makes sense. This installment has a “2” in the title because it follows after Super Mario Land, which was the first Mario title for the new-for-the-time handheld. Both games are excellent and very fun, but if you grew up with the Mario sequels, this second game is going to be closer to what you’re used to. Unlike the first, SML2 has an overworld and several bosses, and Mario’s sprite has been enlarged (as have the other sprites in the game) so that he’s easier to see. This has since become a bit of an unspoken rule in Game Boy graphics–in order to make things more legible, all the sprites are made bigger, which, if done right, will seem so natural that it’s not noticed, but it seems that Nintendo didn’t realize this until they got to the second title in the series. This is fair, though, since it usually takes a while to get really comfortable with programming for new hardware.
As a child, I didn’t have much money for games, and my parents never bought them for me, so I saved for ages in order to buy my Game Boy Pocket (translucent version), and one game (the Pocket didn’t come with Tetris like the original DMG did!). I didn’t have much knowledge about the games that Toys-R-Us had on display, but picked Mario because I was familiar with the franchise and figured it would be a good choice. I ended up playing it over and over again through the years, but never did beat it. I remember finding it so very difficult as a child, and although I did get to the last level multiple times, I couldn’t ever get to the final boss (in this case Wario, not Bowser). So I would go back through all of the levels and beat them again, for fun mostly, but also because I would rack up lives that I could use to burn through that last _ever so difficult_ castle level.
Playing back through it as an adult was a fun and interesting experience! I still remembered many of the level secrets that I discovered as a kid, and all of the levels were so familiar to me. And although I’ll admit I wasn’t that great at games as a kid (and I’m probably still not that good today), I do think some of the difficulty had to do with the Game Boy Pocket’s unlit LCD screen, which I really struggle to look at today. While the Pocket has more contrast and far less ghosting than the DMG, it’s still really, really difficult to play on, so for Christmas this past year, I requested a Modretro Chromatic from my partner, and I am so very grateful that people are making hardware that is easy for people with bad eyesight to play! With it, I can focus on the games and I don’t have to cozy up right next to a light bulb to see what I’m doing. It’s also way easier to take pictures of, which I always like to do when I reach credit screens, so I can keep a record of everything I’ve beaten.
I will say it’s not a very difficult game, and I managed to complete it this time over the course of a couple of days (playing for about 20 minutes at a time, as my day allowed). However, it’s a blast and extremely well designed. Almost the entire map (minus a few secrets) is available to you from the very beginning, so you can hop around and play each of the six mini worlds in whatever order you like. Each of them has a different theme (Turtle world, Mechanical World, Haunted World, etc) along with about four separate levels each, and at the end of the last is a short boss fight. Beating the boss grants you a coin, which will fly off the map and slot itself into the final level’s castle gate. Once you’ve collected all six, the gate opens and you can go defeat Wario!
Wario lives in a castle very much like Bowser’s–maybe he bought it from him after Bowser kicked off to some place nicer. It’s definitely challenging, but if you can make it through each of the castle’s traps, Wario himself isn’t too bad. Afterwards, you’ll get a nice little theme and a view of the outer castle as the credits play. The game doesn’t save after this, and there’s no reset, so you’ll need to turn the Game Boy on and off to play again. I was expecting some sort of star on the save file screen (there are three slots to use), but this is one of those older games that stays perpetually at the last level after being beaten. This always bothered me for some reason, like I wanted the cartridge to have proof that I had gotten to that credit screen that I could point to. Zelda: The Ocarina of Time did this too, and it used to drive me crazy, both because you didn’t get the Triforce like in other Zelda games, and because it left the Hyrule castle grounds a barren, depressing, ruin. Ah, well…I know in my heart I beat them both.
The music is unsurprisingly great: Nintendo delivered again! However, this title doesn’t have the famous Mario theme that it’s so well-known for now. It’s got it’s own unique melody, which for each of the other levels has been remixed into their own unique songs. Ever before I decided to revisit this title, I would still frequently get them stuck in my head occasionally, because they’re so drilled into me. One of my favorite tunes is called “Athletic”, but the best one I think is titled Star Maze, and is featured on an outer space scrolling level. Being an early Game Boy game that isn’t Pokemon, I feel like the soundtrack here often gets overlooked, which is unfortunate.
Screenshot of the ending, in case you’re like me, and like to save it for yourself as a surprise
* * *
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins is, despite its very unwieldy name, a great little game and definitely one that’s worth picking up if you’re into collecting Game Boy cartridges. Somehow most games for the system are still pretty affordable on the secondary market, so you can probably pick it up without shelling out too much these days. That said, emulation technology is excellent these days, and the entire Game Boy library fits into 800MB, including all regional releases (!!!), which is a hell of a lot of gaming for less than 1GB! So I won’t shame anyone for picking up the ROM and playing it that way. Either way, it still holds up great after all these years. https://www.thefrugalgamer.net/blog/2026/05/20/game-review-super-mario-land-2-6-golden-coins-game-boy/
