This review contains spoilers
The original Mario RPG is one of my favorite games of all time. It's very near and dear to my heart and didn't need a remake, in my opinion — it's perfection.
But because I love the original so much, I had to play the remake, and while I was pleasantly surprised and really enjoyed my time with it, there are some changes that weren't great.
We'll start with the bad so we can end on a positive note. The new music is awful. It doesn't hold a candle to the original soundtrack, which is just incredible. The new tracks are all too grand, too big, trying too hard to sound "better," and the recordings sound so distant and far away. While I briefly sampled every new track whenever I'd get to a new area, I would quickly switch the music back to the original OST every time.
The various naming and localization changes are strange and unnecessary, and eliminate some of the charm. Frog Sage is so boring and sterile; the same can be said of Cinder Toad compared to Hinopio. That's on top of weird edits, like changing the description of the Fire Dress from "a determined woman's dress" to "a determined-person's dress" (no need for the added hyphen there, either).
The other changes, however, I'm fine with. The triple attacks are cool, and it's neat that different party combinations unlock new attacks. I liked the quality of life changes, like enabling Mario to run by default instead of having to hold down a button to make him run. Some people might find that the splash damage of some attacks makes combat too easy, and I can respect that criticism, but perhaps the answer to that are the random "special enemies" that appear to increase the challenge.
While on the subject of challenge, I will say that the new post-game boss rematches were fun, but definitely a spike in difficulty. Some were certainly more difficult than Smithy. So be prepared to possibly have to do a bit of grinding to take on some of them. One change Nintendo absolutely should've implemented is the ability to skip dialogue or intros for some of these bosses; you'll inevitably have to fight some of them more than once, and having to sit there mashing A to try to skip through dialogue just to start the fight again is a major annoyance.
Overall, I think this was a fine remake that's better if you don't hold it up against the original too much. That's such a high bar to clear, and this game has plenty of great things about it that it makes it perhaps a bit unfair to constantly compare it to one of the best games to ever grace a Nintendo console. And yes, it is a remake so to some degree you HAVE to compare it to the original, but this is all just to say that it's a fun game on its own and while it can never be as amazing as the SNES title, it's a great game that I really enjoyed.
But because I love the original so much, I had to play the remake, and while I was pleasantly surprised and really enjoyed my time with it, there are some changes that weren't great.
We'll start with the bad so we can end on a positive note. The new music is awful. It doesn't hold a candle to the original soundtrack, which is just incredible. The new tracks are all too grand, too big, trying too hard to sound "better," and the recordings sound so distant and far away. While I briefly sampled every new track whenever I'd get to a new area, I would quickly switch the music back to the original OST every time.
The various naming and localization changes are strange and unnecessary, and eliminate some of the charm. Frog Sage is so boring and sterile; the same can be said of Cinder Toad compared to Hinopio. That's on top of weird edits, like changing the description of the Fire Dress from "a determined woman's dress" to "a determined-person's dress" (no need for the added hyphen there, either).
The other changes, however, I'm fine with. The triple attacks are cool, and it's neat that different party combinations unlock new attacks. I liked the quality of life changes, like enabling Mario to run by default instead of having to hold down a button to make him run. Some people might find that the splash damage of some attacks makes combat too easy, and I can respect that criticism, but perhaps the answer to that are the random "special enemies" that appear to increase the challenge.
While on the subject of challenge, I will say that the new post-game boss rematches were fun, but definitely a spike in difficulty. Some were certainly more difficult than Smithy. So be prepared to possibly have to do a bit of grinding to take on some of them. One change Nintendo absolutely should've implemented is the ability to skip dialogue or intros for some of these bosses; you'll inevitably have to fight some of them more than once, and having to sit there mashing A to try to skip through dialogue just to start the fight again is a major annoyance.
Overall, I think this was a fine remake that's better if you don't hold it up against the original too much. That's such a high bar to clear, and this game has plenty of great things about it that it makes it perhaps a bit unfair to constantly compare it to one of the best games to ever grace a Nintendo console. And yes, it is a remake so to some degree you HAVE to compare it to the original, but this is all just to say that it's a fun game on its own and while it can never be as amazing as the SNES title, it's a great game that I really enjoyed.
2 Comments
@MOONTRIPS Thank you so much! I really do appreciate that. But yeah, the new OST just doesn't hold a candle to the original. One of the tracks that really bothered me was the Kero Sewers theme. In the original, it's kind of quiet and eerie, which captures the sense of being in a dark, dank sewer where threats are lurking around corners. The new version is way too loud and grand and doesn't at all represent the essence of the environment like it should. It's like the only instruction the composer got was "make the music sound better," and their idea of doing that was just to make orchestral versions of everything. If Nintendo didn't make it possible to switch between the new and old soundtracks, I don't think I would've rated this game as highly as I did. That's how important I consider in-game music, and how important this soundtrack in particular is to me. It's one of my all-time favorites of any game.
MOONTRIPS
3 months ago
great review.