Super Mario All-Stars
From Japanese to English

Say what? | Title screen | Select Game screen | SMB2 madness

Say what?

Right before the "lights" come on and illuminate the title screen, the crowd of Mario characters seem to be chatting up a storm. For some reason, the crowd chatter sound clip was changed for the English version. Compare and contrast:

• "Crowd chatter" .WAV from Japanese version
• .WAV from English version

It's not like the original clip sounds more "Japanesey" or anything. In both versions, you can't really make out any words anyway, so I have no clue why it was changed.

Title screen

Not many differences here except that in the Japanese version, if you press Start during the "darkness," the screen immediately fades into the Select Game screen. In the English version, pressing Start during the "darkness" will turn on the "lights," and then the screen fades out.

Select Game screen

Barely noticable is a slight difference in color and shadows. The Japanese version shows Japanese box art, as expected, but take a close look at the SMB "Lost Levels" box in the English version. Here's what the Japanese SMB2 box says: "Famicom Disk System"; (first line) "Super Mario Bros. 2" (second line). With that in mind, we can see they didn't exactly translate the Japanese SMB2 box, but instead made up their own for the English version.

Now we choose SMB2 and uncover more slight differences. In the Japanese version, the words "File A, B, etc." were pinker. In the button configuration, the picture of the controller correctly reflects the Japanese Super Famicom controller's button color scheme of green, blue, yellow, and red.

SMB2 madness

Remember that "Lost Levels" was really Japan's version of Super Mario Bros. 2, yadda yadda yadda. The "For Super Players" phrase comes from the gold seal on Japan's SMB2 packaging. The phrase reappears in Super Mario Bros. Deluxe's "Super Mario Bros.: For Super Players" mode, which is in fact the original Japanese SMB2, A.K.A. "Lost Levels."

Again, our version of SMB2 was released in Japan as "Super Mario USA," so of course these title screens in the Japanese and English games would differ.

Say what? | Title screen | Select Game screen | SMB2 madness