I wonder if perhaps this is just how the game was designed - if maybe technical limitations meant there could only be twenty levels, and then the framing story was written to explain away the missing level. The adventure of Doki Doki Panic revolves around the player essentially rewriting that final page of the story.Īgain, there’s nothing in-game that would explain why there is no level 7-3. His hand emerges from the book and pulls the twins in - again, for some reason - and a pet monkey named Rūsa alerts Imajin, his parents and his girlfriend, and they all collectively also jump into the book to save the kids. When the twins fight over who gets to hold the book, the last page of this story is torn out, and in a rather meta twist, the removal of that page means that Mamū was never defeated. The book containing this story, the instruction booklet continues, finds its way into the hands of two twins, Poki and Piki, the younger siblings to the game’s main character and Mario analogue, Imajin. Only when the residents of Mū learned Mamū’s secret weakness - vegetables, for some reason - do they send him back where he came from. However, a villain named Mamū seized control of the dream machine and used it to make monsters. In order to ensure only good weather, the residents of Mū build a machine that makes for only good dreams. If you open the Doki Doki Panic instruction manual, you’re told of a storybook describing the land of Mū, where the kind of dreams people have at night determine what the weather will be the following day. The answer lies in the backstory for the game.

Whole characters not vital to gameplay got cut, and with them went the explanation for why there is no stage 7-3. The cast of characters created for that game was replaced with characters who would be familiar to Americans who played the first Super Mario Bros., but it wasn’t exactly a one-for-one substitution. 2 is a modified version of what was released in Japan as Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic (夢工場ドキドキパニック, “Dream Factory: Heart-Pounding Panic”). Of course, the game we westerners call Super Mario Bros.

Super mario bros 2 2 player