Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins is a popular Player's Choice Game Boy video game. It is the sequel to its more popular predecessor, Super Mario Land, and also marks the debut of Wario, a character who would quickly become one of the main characters of the Mario series. Like it's predecessor, Shigeru Miyamoto was not involved in the making of this game. Rather, the game was directed by Gunpei Yokoi.

Story
The plot (which takes place directly after the first Mario Land game) sees Mario returning to his estate after rescuing Princess Daisy only to find that it has been taken over by an old enemy, Wario while he was in Sarasaland. The six golden Coins (Mario's keys to the castle) were spread throughout Mario Land, and the game revolves around Mario traveling across his estate to collect the coins, then defeating Wario and regaining his castle.

The game begins with a simple "tutorial" level to help the player learn the controls of the game. After this is completed, the player must travel through seven different "zones" to collect the coins:


 * The Tree Zone: The Boss of this zone is a giant bird called Radonkel
 * The Micro Zone: (The North American version of the game mistakingly listed this zone as the Macro Zone) Mario is shrunk and must defeat the giant rat Ricky
 * The Pumpkin Zone: Mario must defeat the witch Sabasa
 * The Mario Zone: Mario has to journey through a giant statue of himself and face the Three Little Pigheads at the end.
 * TheTurtle Zone: Mario has to go inside of a Whale and fight an Octopus
 * The Space Zone: Mario has to don a space suit and journey to the Moon. The boss of this zone is Tatanga, the final boss of the original Super Mario Land, indicating that Wario may actually have orchestrated Daisy's kidnapping.

And finally, he must enter his own castle and defeat Wario.

Each zone (besides the castle) features multiple levels.



Gameplay
In many ways this game was closer to the original Super Mario Bros. than its predecessor. The previous game included a few vehicle levels that put Mario at the wheel of a plane or submarine; these are removed in this game and replaced with the more traditional underwater levels (Mario's space travel is actually a version of the underwater levels, with the same principles). The games power-ups are a bit of a variety: the Super Mushroom performs its usual ability, but the Fire Flower gives Mario the ability to shoot Superballs. There is also a Carrot which transforms him into Rabbit Mario. The Starman turns Mario invincible, but instead of jumping up and down erratically, it stay still on the ? Block. Defeating one-hundred enemies will cause a Starman to fall down to Mario. Collecting coins allows you to play a roulette-type game where you can earn lives; this is different from other games where collecting one-hundred coins earns a 1-up. The graphics are also notably more advanced than Super Mario Land, although all colors are still in black and white. Mario is portrayed by an actual sprite instead of block pixels.

The game is one of the first Mario games to have two different difficulty levels. The level can be chosen by picking Mario's size with the Select button before picking which file to save to.

If Mario loses all of his lives, he will also lose all the golden coins he has collected, and will have to fight their guardians once again.

The games enemies appear to have been translated much better than the first Super Mario Land, as its enemies include Goombas and Koopas, as opposed to the first games Chibibos and Nokobons.

Like Super Mario World, the game's locations can be traveled to and from by an overworld map. This gives rise to a few secrets, including "shortcuts" which allow Mario to traverse the map more quickly, and a casino where Mario can gamble his coins to earn more lives.

Sequels & Prequels
After the introduction of Wario (who quickly became popular) the Super Mario Land series shifted its attention to him. The next game, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, featured Wario as the protaganist, with Mario only making a minor cameo at the very end of the game. The next game in the series was simply titled Wario Land II, thus making Wario Land the final entry in the Super Mario Land series.

Although this game marked the first appearence of Wario, dialouge in the instruction boklet suggested that Wario was an old enemy of Mario who was jealous of his fame and fortune. In the comic book inspired by this game, Mario Vs. Wario, Wario was said to have been one of Mario's friends when they were both children. However beacuse of the numerous indignities Mario (unknowingly) forced Wario to suffer, Wario swore revenge on him (which led to the events of both Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins).

Trivia

 * There is an easy way to avoid losing all the player's golden coins even if the player lose all of their lives. Simply reset the game before the "Game Over" screen appears, and the player will restart the game right before she/he entered the level in which the player lost their last life.
 * On the File Select screen, if the player is deleting a file, Mario will transform into Bomb Mario.
 * The music for this game was done by Kazumi Totaka. If the player waits on the game over screen for 2 minutes and 30 seconds Totaka's Song will play.
 * This is the first Mario game to feature a stage with an outer space setting.