Just to be 100% transparent, I absolutely love the sequel to this game, Mario Strikers Charged, and I'm not going to pretend like I haven't played that game before this because I have. I will admit to any bias that it may seem like is present in this review because of my love for it's much improved follow up, I'm only a very nostalgic human and things like that are going to happen.

All that being said the thing I respect most about Super Mario Strikers is its unique tone for the Mario franchise. The serious and gritty tone of this game turns the likable and goofy cast of Mario characters who are just looking to have fun sports competitions to kill time in these games into bloodthirsty, petty, and hypercompetitive athletes who would love nothing more but to slam their opponents into an electric fence and gloat about the goal they scored while they were frying. It's an extreme tonal shift from anything we've ever seen in the Mario universe before and one that we will never see again and I absolutely love it.

In terms of gameplay though, the game isn't quite as enthralling. The gameplay consists of two teams comprised of one unique captain and three of the exact same kind of sidekicks playing soccer against one another but with items and the captain exclusive super shot kind of move that lets you score two points if you get the timing correct. It's fun enough but die to several factors the gameplay quite often just got repetitive and not that fun to trudge through for me. The lack of variety in sidekicks and what they can do or why you would choose one kind over the other is a bit of a problem and once I settled on a kind (Toads in specific, if you're not choosing Toads you're doing something wrong) I never felt compelled to deviate from them. The goalie on the team (being a Kremling from Donkey Kong Country which I thought was cool) was frustratingly bad at his job and most of the time would refuse to leave the innermost box of his goal to get the ball which would more often than not lead to an opponent player coming up and scoring due to his annoying negligence. And the captain specific super shot, while cool on paper, is just way too hard to pull off and way too unrewarding once you do. There's also just nothing at all interesting about the stadiums you play in, they all have different backgrounds but no gimmicks that make them more challenging and no real reason to choose one over the other, they don't even have unique music tracks which would feel like at least the bare minimum to make them stand out.

In terms of single player content the game has a basic championship mode where you go through four cups of tournaments and at the very end you get the game's only unlockables, a new captain and sidekicks in this weird and generic looking team of robots that were made by Bowser to be good at Soccer I think, and the option to do Super versions of all the tournament cups you just did which is basically just harder versions of the cups, really lame unlockables that don't make playing four cups worth of really repetitive matches worth it.

Super Mario Strikers is a game I respect for its unique take on the tone and cast of a Mario Sports game but one whose fun but repetitive gameplay and lack of real depth eludes annoys me and makes me think that this game was just a proof of concept for the much better game in this series that they wanted to make.