Game Discussion of the Week: Super Mario Bros. 2

Those definitely always felt to me like that, but I would imagine it was mostly a case of they wanted to do something different to not bore people. I'll make a thread about it.

Yes, the tendency was making games harder in the west because of rental - renting games was illegal in Japan, so they didn't have that problem there, but in most western countries you could rent a game instead of buying it, so developers would make a game harder while localizing it as an incentive for people to buy the game. I also remember Streets of Rage 3 and Panzer Dragoon being harder than the originals.

That's why I think it's false the argument that Nintendo didn't localize the real SMB2 because it was too hard - western games tended to be harder than the japanese ones and Nintendo wasn't afraid of publishing hard games (look at Zelda 2). I think their marketing department or even the developers themselves just realized it was not a good game to move the Mario brand forward on accounts of it being exactly like the original. It might even have been something like the Sonic CD/Sonic 2 situation, where the japanese and american divisions have different views on how to move a franchise forward.

This is the impression I've got as well, especially with Sega produced games for the Genesis and Saturn. I remember being surprised by Comix Zone's difficulty and the extremely scarcity of Dynamite Heady's checkpoints, not to mention the western version of Astal on the Saturn being supposedly much harder than the japanese version. Outside of SMB Lost Levels I don't remember Nintendo games being like this, except maybe Yoshi's Story's localization but that was more because of player feedback that the japanese version of the game was too easy.

Personally I didn't mind the difficulty hike of the western versions of these games, since I love a good challenge and NA Streets of Rage 3 is my preferred version of the game for this reason. There are a few cases where it ruined the game for me, though, like with the NA version of Dynamite Heady which came across as just poorly thought out in terms of the difficulty.