This game is magic, but it's kind of like a magic show that goes on for too long, where you want the magician to stop and let your parents take you home.

AlphaDream's pre-Mario & Luigi outing is somehow even zanier than a lot of things in that series.

(I'll get this out of the way too, the final dungeon goes on for waaay too long.)

However, this feels like unfiltered creative energy, while Superstar Saga feels like it's more filtered, polished and focused creative energy. Like water put through a sieve and partially de-mineralized, thus more digestible.
As a result, the game can fly too close to the sun with regards to how nonsensical and unapologetically left-field it is - and it often wears thin later on in the game. It felt like they were a desperate street magician always pulling thousand of tricks out of their hat in order to get passerby's attention. Impressive, but ultimately 'clingy' if that makes sense as an adjective for a game.

The story is interesting but majorly confusing - and not that it has to be the most well written for a JRPG intended to be excessively lighthearted. Still, I came out of this at the end kind of bone-weary of all the jokes, and really, really wishing for some of the plot points to be explained or even a dredge of character development. Characters like Rellek and Sofubi (names in the wonderful English translation) don't really have that much depth to begin with, or motivations other than "this journey sounds cool, I'll join you now K?"

The battle system is not all fun and games either. You basically attack only with techniques called Gimmicks, and you get more Gimmicks as you progress through one way or another (there are multiple ways to attain them). All of the Gimmicks require you to do a kind of Warioware-esque microgame in order for them to have much power.

Yet, I just really wasn't a huge fan of this system. Imagine a Mario & Luigi game where you can only use Bros Attacks. Then add that there are like (at least) 35 different Bros Attacks to choose from and ones for each character + you have multiple party members to juggle. I don't think this is the most optimized or polished RPG system, not by a long shot.

Yet, despite all these faults, it's a three star game because it's quite amazing, for AlphaDream's "first" attempt at this kind of thing. Yes, they had another amazing debut game for the Game Boy Color, "Koto Battle", but I'd say this is the first game of theirs in this kind of extremely zany style. I wonder how they managed to imbue this game with the kind of stylistic organization that would become a hallmark of all their later games (until the companies sad alleged going-away recently)? It's undoubtedly wondrous. It's really hard to describe, and you can only understand by playing it. The bouncy music, the feeling that I'm in the imaginings of a strange and unique child (like I was). Whimsical, almost mad genius-like (like I wasn't). Daydreaming their own strange fairy tale based on the ones they hear in school.
It's not without cliche though, and it actually has a lot of those damsel-in-distress plot points, but overall for it's stylistics alone it's bumped up half a star from what it would be.

Overall, I'd recommend you play this after you experience at least a few of the Mario & Luigi games - for then you will appreciate how far AlphaDream had come since this release, and you'll also see a lot of the lineage of those games here.
It's ultimately a pretty imperfect and sometimes annoying game - but endlessly charming, surprising and enjoyable. If the PS1 game "moon", as the story goes, was a deconstruction of RPG's from without, this game is a deconstruction from within and using RPG mechanics. It's about as flawed as something attempting that can be - yet it's worth taking a look at, even a brief one, for seeing an attempt at that sort of thing, a really colorful attempt.

(My play time upon completing the game was about 14 hours 53 minutes)