Sometimes when life takes you away from a game for a bit - it helps you gain some perspective on it. Whenever outside factors force me to step away from a title, I always assess whether I want to dive back in or move on. After all, momentum is quite important to my play habits, if I lose that flow state sometimes it's tough for me to engage again.

I think I'll call my time with Super Mario RPG here - having played about half the game. I like it; there is a breezy quality to the simple narrative, battles, and overworld environments. The remade visuals are quite stunning too - but it's hard for me to escape my desire for this pseudo-remaster/remake to instead be a re-imagining.

As the game which established the Mario RPG formula I can't take particular issue with how basic the action command battling is, for example. But I can wish that, in the context of a remake, this new version complicated the systems a bit to find parity with Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi.

I just feel like battles become quite repetitive, that there's a disjunction between the beautiful visuals and the otherwise stilted presentation. I think I really was ticking off the Stars largely because of that aforementioned momentum. Failing that, I don't see much reason to pick SMRPG back up. I'd rather, if anything, dive into Paper Mario (N64) which I've played but never finished.

The charm is wonderful, but I don't think the charm is going to carry me any further.