The thing I like about Lost Levels is how it more or less forces you to complete every single level if you want to truly beat the game. As with most fans, I first played it in Super Mario All-Stars, and I found it pretty brutal. That game took me a few months to complete, and I remember finally doing it and wishing I had a camera so I could take a picture of the screen for a Nintendo Power "reward" for doing it.
When they finally released the Famicom version on Virtual Console I snatched it right up. Yeah it's incredibly similar to SMB1, but that's part of why I liked it. I will say that SMB2 (USA) does feel more like a sequel than Lost Levels, which always felt more like an extra "challenge pack" for the first game.
One thing I have noted is that it's thanks to SMB2 (USA) that the Mario series has all the throwing it has. SMB2 really emphasized it, but all the major Mario games since that one have had it, though usually in the form of tossing shells and so on. Heck even Yoshi's eating and spitting mechanic can be viewed as a deviation of SMB2 enemy throwing, and who can forget tossing around the Bob-omb King in SM64?
Sunshine... I remember being a bit disappointed in it, but later on I appreciated it more. I still love the Galaxy games, but it's true that Sunshine has more exploration. My biggest disappointment with that game is the limited acrobatics when compared to Mario 64. I never felt that FLUDD added as much as was taken away in that sense. I personally still rate Mario 64 as the better of the two, but Sunshine certainly deserves more credit than some give.
Of all the Mario RPG games, my personal favorite is still the one that started it all, Super Mario RPG. I have always just loved how "alive" the world is with all the details programmed into it. I loved all the little things the programmers thought of, and all the changed dialog if you decide to keep going back to old towns as the game goes along. When I got it into my head to try jumping on the head of some NPC running in circles, succeeded, and then after a few laps Mario just jumps off, gets dizzy and collapses, I just kept laughing at the idea that the programmers had actually thought of details like that. I also liked the original characters created for the game. Geno is still, to me, the coolest character in the Mario universe.
On other Mario 2 USA details, here's another commonality it already had. Those Trouters are basically a different kind of flying fish that let you jump on them, often appearing in similar sorts of places.
Funnily enough, as a kid (I didn't have the manual for it at the time) I didn't realize those mushroom blocks were supposed to be mushrooms. I imagined they were big acorns. Also, I never saw it as simply "it's all just a dream". I interpreted it as "Mario isn't just dreaming, he and 3 of his friends are trapped in the world of dreams itself and need to defeat Wart so that all people everywhere can have good dreams again".
