Doki Doki started out as a Mario game

[Weltall]

Super Mario Bros. 2 was always very special to me. I owned the first and third games, never the second, but I did play the hell out of it nonetheless. Before I got my Genesis at the age of 11, summers consisted of my sister and I being allowed to rent three NES games every three days for the duration of break (a local drugstore/market named PharMor rented them at $1.50 each for three days). Ostensibly, the idea was that one of us would get to pick two games one time, the other got two the next time. In practice, we would always pick one each and Super Mario Bros. 2 would be the third by mutual consent. Why we never actually bought the game is a valid question, probably because it seemed a waste to buy a game we'd rented so many dozens of times. In any case, eventually, we got a Super NES and Super Mario All-Stars, rectifying the problem forever.

For me, a third of why I loved it so much was because it was the one I could not slap in (after blowing on it for a half-hour) and play any time I wanted. A third was because it was that much different than the two games which sandwiched it. The rest was because I was a faithful viewer of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, which used at least as much material from Super Mario Bros. 2 as it did the original, and the characters in the show visually resembled their depictions in the second game much more than in the original. Plus, all four playable characters shared screen time. It defined the show for me in ways the original did not. For all those reasons, it has a very dear place in my heart.