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the_dengle said:

And it irks me a bit how much people want to compare SMB1 & 2 West and use that as evidence that Mario games are supposed to change dramatically from one installment to the next. The second true SMB game was Lost Levels, practically identical to SMB1 except for level design, whereas SMB2 wasn't a Mario game at all until it was localized. It was actually initially released as a completely different game. It's not as though someone at Nintendo at that time said, "We need to drastically change the Mario series to bring new experiences to the players." What they said was, "I bet we can get this really weird game to sell well in America if we replace everything in it with Mario stuff!"

The comparison isn't whether it SHOULD change, but the effect of the change. SMB 2J struggled (relatively speaking), SMB 2W did really well.