Is New Super Mario Bros 2 actually a bad game?

[Guinea]

I remember enjoying it a lot. I think a lot of the criticism comes from it being the third "New" series game, and people getting fatigued then. This shows when NSMBU is considered the best game in the series, and yet it had the worst sales.

The coin gimmick, maybe a lot of people saw this as "what's special about the coins when you get so many?", but I think the intention was one of two things. All players could simply enjoy the insanity of the gold rush, and expert players could craft routes to maximize the coin score. Both of these aspects just felt so incredibly awesome, that I miss this in the later games. Maybe I'll make a Mario Maker 2 level inspired by this game...

It dropped the ball in some areas though, e.g. the coin scores not really amounting to anything other than a different title screen, so there was a huge disappointment involved after they teased this to be important.

In the end of the day, whatever your opinion of this game is, it's still a professionally made Mario game, and those are apparently so good, that people went out to buy the no-online 3DS version of Mario Maker, just because it contained a set of Nintendo-made Mario levels