YMMV / Doki Doki Panic

• Adaptation Displacement:
  • For decades, the only substantial information on the festival this game was created as a tie-in for, Yume Kōjō, was entirely unknown outside of Japan, and to this day, searching the name of the event will give you links about the game instead. A YouTube channel called GTV Japan has made two videos covering the festival itself.
  • Significantly more people have played Super Mario Bros. 2 than its original incarnation, even in Japan where it was eventually released as Super Mario USA, despite Doki Doki Panic's existence being very well-known among retro gamers nowadays.
• Anti-Climax Boss: This game's incarnation of Wart, despite being fundamentally the same boss fight as in Super Mario Bros. 2, is a pathetically easy final boss due to only requiring four hits to defeat, along with it being very easy to throw vegetables down his throat. For SMB2, the number of hits required to defeat him was increased to six, along with his attack pattern being tweaked so as to make it harder to damage him.
• Common Knowledge: Due to the game revolving around a Badass Family saving their baby twins, many people claim that Lina is Imajin's sister. She is actually his girlfriend.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Mama was simply an Action Mom, and her character was replaced with Luigi. Coincidentally, a few years later, the animated version of Super Mario World launched an episode called "Mama Luigi", which would later become an internet meme thanks to various YouTube Poop videos.
  • Contrary to popular belief, Lina is Imajin's girlfriend, not sister. Which actually makes her future replacement (Peach) more fitting.
  • One enemy, the Porcupo, is a blue porcupine that resembles a hedgehog.
• Mainstream Obscurity: As of the late 2010s, it is no longer obscure information that Super Mario Bros. 2 is a Dolled-Up Installment of this game, to the point that those who still think otherwise have become a source of mockery; but good luck finding someone who has actually played the original game^note The emulation community is a good place to start, what with being Famicom Disk System-exclusive and all.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Did you know that Super Mario Bros. 2 was originally a different game called Doki Doki Panic?"^Explanation This fact, while once considered a legitimately interesting and scarcely-discussed piece of Mario-series trivia, ended up becoming the subject of backlash in the late 2010s and early 2020s thanks to how damn-near every video game-related trivia outlet and know-it-all fan kept repeating it as if it was still a hugely obscure fact, even after the info was spread so heavily that it became common knowledge. As a result, it's often now brought up mockingly as a way of making fun of those who still treat it as obscure information, as well as in response to other reiterations of once-obscure but now well-documented pieces of trivia about popular video games.
  • Claiming that Doki Doki Literature Club! is somehow connected to this game and Super Mario Bros. 2.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The items that were replaced by Koopa shells in SMB2 are disembodied blackface heads. The goofy smile alleviates it somewhat, but even so.
  • The 1-Ups in this game were the head of your chosen character (what is it with this game and heads?). SMB2 changed this to a type of mushroom^note Although they were simply orange-brown with "1up" on them, as opposed to the now-standard green 1-Up Mushrooms.
  • The gate at the end of each stage, which resembled a hawk in SMB2, was originally a slightly scary tiki-like mask. World 7's vegetables were also meaner-looking, and the mushroom blocks were rather unnerving masks.
  • Inverted with Phanto, who looks like a generic opera mask in this game and lacks his infamous Nightmare Face from SMB2. Strangely enough, the instruction manuals for Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Advance, as well as Phanto's appearance in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, would use the original Doki Doki Panic design.
• Padding: You have to beat every level with every character to see the true ending, meaning you have to play through the game four times. It's not a wonder that SMB2 changed this to only requiring the player to beat the game once and gave players the ability to switch characters between levels.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Thanks to Nintendo. It's not quite as polished as the game people know today, but it's still SMB2 at its core.
• Values Dissonance: The aforementioned Blackface Shrunken Head (called "Big Face" in this game) was not considered to be nearly as taboo in 1980s Japan as it would be in America.

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