In Super Mario Land you play as Yoshi, carrying baby Mario through various cartooney landscapes, some of them looking suspiciously a lot like a kid's crayon drawings. Yoshi can turn into various vehicles like a Helicopter, or a Bulldozer. Everything looks like a Crayon Drawing like I said, or a primitive landscape, and there's lots of somewhat immature comedy to be had in the form of deflating a fat boss with pinstripe shorts on, getting Yoshi high off dust bunnies floating around the forest, and watching scads of Shy Guys come out of pipes with a lot more fanfare than they did the pots in Super Mario Bros. 2 for the NES.

However, all was not that great. First off, Nintendo was losing ground to Sony's Playstation by this time, which was getting more popular as the Animie/Final Fantasy/JRPG thing was just starting up in America, as well as the N64 taking a chunk of what was left of the SNES's relatively short lifespan on the market. So SMW2 kind of lost some ground, and it was kind of the beginning of an era where Mario was not a huge, universal cash-cow anymore, being overshadowed by Lara Croft and Parappa the Rapper.