One thing that is unique about this game is the cartridge. It's yellow, instead of the usual black that most GBA games have. It's yellow because this game is a port of the 8-bit Famicom Disk System version, a Japanese system that would play floppy disks. The floppy disks are yellow, so the yellow cartridge is fitting for this game. Much like how the Classic NES Series games are gray to imitate the old NES cartridges.
Here's a picture I took of the uniquely colored cartridge alongside the equally unique box:
Pretty cool, huh? You don't see games like that often.
Now as for the game itself. It's like the first Super Mario Bros., with a similar game engine, but with more difficult levels. The Mushroom, Fire Flower, and Starman are all here, it has the same enemies, and has the same physics, but it's harder. For one thing, there's a new item -- a Poison Mushroom -- that does the exact opposite of a Mushroom: It shrinks you!
And the levels themselves are harder. There are plenty of pits abound, and the game throws lots of different challenges at you. You'll come across Lakitu and Hammer Brothers simultaneously, have to jump on really small platforms, flying Cheep-Cheeps in the most inconvenient locations, and you'll even find backwards warps! Evil. This game really got creative with the different challenges, which is why it's my favorite Mario game. It's not for everyone, though, because the challenge gets insane, especially at the very end of the game. But I loved it.
There are extra levels too. Instead of 32 like in the original SMB, there are 52 in this game, but the last 20 are hard to find because you need to unlock them in different ways. Four of these 20 are very easy and only serve as bragging rights, but the other 16 are arguably the hardest Mario levels ever. But I won't spoil anything...
Overall, I like this game, and I recommend it if you can find it. Fortunately, it's recently been released on the Wii Virtual Console, which is the first time the 8-bit version has been released outside of Japan. That might be the easiest one to find, if you have a Wii. Failing that, there's always the SNES version on Super Mario All-Stars.
So... this is the only Japanese game that I've ever imported. There are about three others that I wouldn't mind to own either, one of them being the GBC version of DKL3 (and none of you would probably care about the other two I have in mind since nobody's ever heard of them...). How about the rest of you? Do you have any Japanese games? Or just foreign games in general?
Of course, I've also got DKL3GBC, but that's on an emulator.
If you don't know what it is, google it, it's hard to explain everything since it's probably the weirdest game ever created.
