Because I am truly, truly unworthy of love I knew I needed to replay Mario RPG in preparation for the remake of Mario RPG. So I could compare them properly, you see. You know how it is.
I've absolutely got the nostalgia vision for this sucker, as it was my first serious interaction with an RPG of any sorts. I think I did rent Ys 3 before this but I didn't understand what experience points were so I thought it was just very hard. Also since I was about 7 years old I distinctly remember that I encountered several English words for the first time with this one. Fertilizer for instance. That one threw me for a loop let me tell you. And it's a real word, too, not like vigor which you'll only ever see in video games.
Definitely, you can't really go back. There's so many secrets and little details in Mario RPG, and only like a few of them are completely obliterated by Woolsey only having five minutes to translate them. I spent hours mastering all the little minigames as a kid before I understood things like "you have a limited time on this earth and this game is dead easy. You cannot possibly think that getting your koopa climb time down another second to gain one point of damage is worth it." I didn't do any of that shit this time, but I did finally beat Culex. Turns out that even he isn't really very difficult in this baby game. And yet, that babyness was great for child me, who still had a difficult time with many of these easy bosses that you can kill with your eyes closed. I don't know how I had that difficulty, but it did happen. That cake was tough!
Also, I appreciate a lot of the jokes way more now. I was charmed! Mallow is a great little pal, love that guy. Bowser is taking his first steps into being a great little pal too! Geno barely exists in the narrative yet managed to obtain thousands of fans who were not bothered by his fucked up doll hair that kinda looks like a big nose! Mario as a shapeshifting pantomime artist is going to be wild to see in HD assuming they aren't cowards about it.
But ultimately I think this is held back by the fact that the combat just stops being particularly engaging towards the end. I was flagging pretty hard after a certain point and started using emulator fast forward a ton. The fact that the game moves super fast and is fairly short is a big plus though. Give me these little like 15-20 hour things holy shit. God. Nintendo was so fuckin right when they made the shithead chameleon in Super Paper Mario demand 200 hour games. They were right to identify that as a demand made by perverts
I've absolutely got the nostalgia vision for this sucker, as it was my first serious interaction with an RPG of any sorts. I think I did rent Ys 3 before this but I didn't understand what experience points were so I thought it was just very hard. Also since I was about 7 years old I distinctly remember that I encountered several English words for the first time with this one. Fertilizer for instance. That one threw me for a loop let me tell you. And it's a real word, too, not like vigor which you'll only ever see in video games.
Definitely, you can't really go back. There's so many secrets and little details in Mario RPG, and only like a few of them are completely obliterated by Woolsey only having five minutes to translate them. I spent hours mastering all the little minigames as a kid before I understood things like "you have a limited time on this earth and this game is dead easy. You cannot possibly think that getting your koopa climb time down another second to gain one point of damage is worth it." I didn't do any of that shit this time, but I did finally beat Culex. Turns out that even he isn't really very difficult in this baby game. And yet, that babyness was great for child me, who still had a difficult time with many of these easy bosses that you can kill with your eyes closed. I don't know how I had that difficulty, but it did happen. That cake was tough!
Also, I appreciate a lot of the jokes way more now. I was charmed! Mallow is a great little pal, love that guy. Bowser is taking his first steps into being a great little pal too! Geno barely exists in the narrative yet managed to obtain thousands of fans who were not bothered by his fucked up doll hair that kinda looks like a big nose! Mario as a shapeshifting pantomime artist is going to be wild to see in HD assuming they aren't cowards about it.
But ultimately I think this is held back by the fact that the combat just stops being particularly engaging towards the end. I was flagging pretty hard after a certain point and started using emulator fast forward a ton. The fact that the game moves super fast and is fairly short is a big plus though. Give me these little like 15-20 hour things holy shit. God. Nintendo was so fuckin right when they made the shithead chameleon in Super Paper Mario demand 200 hour games. They were right to identify that as a demand made by perverts