I played, finished, and enjoyed both quite a bit. But like the rest, I think SMB2 USA is the better game. But also like a lot of folks here, I played the game years later, so we played SMB2 Japan with a perspective of having already played the series up to Super Mario World. So it's hard to say how my opinion would be different if I played it when it came out.

I kinda want to get the originals and play them on the disk system, but Doki Doki is a bit expensive. SMB2 Japan was considerably cheaper though.

What some people don't realize is that the US Super Mario Brothers 2 was the Super Mario Brothers 2 we were supposed to get. The Mario Brothers team was working on a prototype which would have become Super Mario Brothers 2. However, they needed more time to get it working right so in the meantime just basically made an updated Super Mario Brothers 1. After making Lost Levels they returned to the prototype and created Doki Doki Panic for Fuji TV.

played and finished both, both sucked but doki doki sucked less.

Even if The Lost Levels had had better (and more approachable) level design, the color palette alone kills the joy out of the game. I keep going back to it and wondering what the developers were thinking when they made it. It's like all of the life of Super Mario Bros was drained out of the title.

Doki Doki Panic is just pure joy and weirdness. It showed that Nintendo is ready to continue shaking things up. Granted, none of us knew the backstory at that point, but seeing this left field approach to Mario was amazing. Not to mention the fact that so many of the Mario tropes come from this title, I really wouldn't have had it any other way. Here's to hoping that Mario Bros 2 is exactly what we're getting in Mario Maker 2.

I was introduced to The Lost Levels by the SNES Super Mario All-Stars cart back in the early 90s - when you still either had to have a magazine subscription or learn through word-of-mouth that SMB2 was actually Doki-Doki Panic and The Lost Levels was actually the true SMB2.

As such, I thought The Lost Levels was basically a hard-mode expansion of SMB, and what we Americans knew as SMB2 was always SMB2.

It wasn't until I started going to the forums on Nintendo.com that I learned the truth.

Anyways, I say all of that to back up the point that everybody else is making about The Lost Levels - y'all say it feels like an expansion, I'm saying that, thanks to my ignorance at the time, I legitimately thought it was exactly that back then.

DDP is, for an outrageous number of reasons, the superior game, and the better contribution to the series.

Well, that's about the most one-sided poll result I've seen on VGChartz, lulz.

Add me to the "Doki Doki Panic" crowd. Lost Levels was too frustrating for me, while DDP's more manageable difficulty and greater charm and imagination made it more fun. (Worth noting I never played the NES originals, experiencing both through the Super Mario All Stars remaster bundle on SNES)

DDP is by far the superior game. It's widely different from SMB and SMB3 but a very fun game. It's also very progressive featuring what must be the first trans video game character in history.

I played the NES original of SMB2USA, but yeah, I first played SMB2JAP with Mario All Stars.  I did manage to track down the original famicom disk system copy of SMB2JAP though.

Doki Doki Panic for me and it's not even close.

Doki Doki Panic easily. It was an actual new game and it felt like a new adventure. Also being able to play one of four unique characters was a great feature that really made the game stand out. It was tons of fun and is an eternal classic of a game. Videogamedunkey rates it as the best game of the year every year.

The Lost Levels kind of feels like a troll game. Calling it an expansion of the first game is being kind. The game is hard in unfair ways. Not cool man.