It’s my understanding that the decision to not localize SMB2 for the West was made at Nintendo of America. SMB2 isn’t merely hard, it’s unfair. They put invisible hazards in the way, warp pipes now take you back instead of forward, some of the mushrooms are poisonous now. SMB1 is beginner and child friendly, SMB2 is for serious enthusiasts. The West found a taste for that, but it kinda took Twitch streaming to explain to gamers what they’re in for. Nintendo wouldn’t have gotten any points for tricking hundreds of thousands of parents into handing a Kaizo ROMhack to all the little Joshuas and Tiffanys of 1986. So they Doki Doki Panicked.

I think the real insult came not from Nintendo but from Squaresoft. Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest for the SNES was marketed as a simplified, “Entry-level” JRPG, made specifically for Americans, written in English from the start and not translated from Japanese. Simplified combat system, no random encounters, added action elements. Because Americans might not “get it.” It’s not like Japan got the idea for RPGs from imported copies of Ultima and Wizardry, which are themselves based on DnD. Being more charitable, you could see the angle they were coming from: the Japanese do virtually all of their gaming on console, while Americans tend to play more action-oriented games on console and more cerebral games on desktop computers, so they were trying to make an RPG for the American console gamer. Which still failed miserably. After all, Final Fantasy 1 on NES sold well here. So. I don’t know, maybe try not having bad ideas?