Despite being such a Mario nut, and a general enjoyer of RPGs, Super Mario RPG has always been one of my blind spots. I've got very little experience with any of the SNES Squaresoft library beyond 10 or so hours of Final Fantasy VI on my SNES Classic a couple years ago. Leading up to release, I was feeling a fairly mild inclination towards it, weak enough that I probably would've been find passing over the $60 cost for a couple months to focus on the other games in my backlog. But then, in the days after release I see my friends posting screenshots and clips from the game, seeing how charming the writing actually was. Then the game being added to the website Wario64 keeps shilling, so I could get it for only $40??? I'm certainly not one to be immune to FOMO.
Perhaps it is good going into a game like this to remember that it served as the foundation for the Mario RPGs, spawning two series of games I love dearly. Every starting point will have it's growing pains, and part of the appeal will be that it was doing something entirely novel for its time. But even now, Super Mario RPG's reputation precedes itself, a game still spoken of in the upper echelons of the Mario RPGs even by those who played it far after its novelty had faded. Some YouTubers may even say the game raises the bar for what a rpg is able to be! So it leaves me a bit surprised to dig into this game and find something... really light?
The game has a pace of a bullet train, blasting from area to area, never letting a point linger on for a second too long. Ideas, characters, entire areas are introduced, toyed with for not a second longer than desired, then sealed away for something completely different. There’s an appeal to it in a way, being taken on this nonstop ride where any of the sparse few intolerable parts last a couple minutes at most. Let me be clear, despite everything I’m going to discuss, I still liked the game. It’s a good, highly well made and seeping with charm, but my experience felt like I was going on autopilot with a light smile on my face. Very similar to how I digested End Roll a couple months back, but when that was a dinky little RPG Maker game, versus a big, prestigious, full-price remake—it stings a bit more.
The game for its most part follows a pretty standard formula for the first two-thirds of the game: going through a short overworld area, reaching a new town with a problem to solve, trekking through a short dungeon (which is more or less the same gameplay-wise as the overworld area), probably a minigame or two somewhere in there, then meeting the boss and fucking them up. Over this entire loop that spans roughly an hour each iteration, there’s never really an attempt to give texture these areas and characters. They’re just another stop on the journey to reach the ending. The Smithy Gang especially feels like they got the short end of the stick, with there being like 20 boss dudes in their ranks but nobody gets more than 5 minutes of screentime including the fight itself.
Of course, it’s all a Mario game; naturally the focus will be predominantly on the gameplay versus the story and world, which I’m perfectly fine with! Wonder is my favorite game I’ve played thus far this year after all. Yet I look at the following Mario RPGs and even at their thinnest (ignoring Sticker Star), they provide just a bit more to their world that I can chew on that feels like it goes a long way. The first chapter of Paper Mario 64 has several Koopa Bros encounters leading up to their fight, which helps flesh them out juuuust enough to feel like actual dudes versus just bosses in the way.
The exceptions to this are when the game takes a break from the star hunt during Booster Tower and Nimbus Town, which are not-coincidentally the best areas of the game! Booster and Valentina are fun characters that contribute to several fun scenes and add in a bit more texture to their corresponding dungeons as a result. I really like how Valentina tied in as a micro-antagonist to Mallow’s storyline concurrently to the main story. It’s kinda funny both of them have to do with marriages being done under false pretenses. Yet, them being a diversion to the star hunt does make the pacing feel weird when the game redirects itself. Star Road is an area that conceptually should have a lot going on—it’s Geno’s home!—but because Booster was the focus of the chapter, it ends up just being a place where you grab the star and… that’s literally it. In contrast, Valentina comes at the end of what’s already the largest gap between stars in the game. Then the game springs another dungeon upon you, then its boss fight, then another boss fight immediately after! While the volcano dungeon was good enough and I certainly didn’t mind going through more content, the contrast to what the game had set up for the first 5 stars is really jarring. It makes throwing on yet another thing to do before you reach the star feel a bit long in the tooth, despite the game being so brief.
Boss fight after boss fight… oh does the game love throwing them at you one after another towards the end. At least the game gives the curtesy to refresh you after each one, but it does get a bit ridiculous after a certain point. In some cases, like at the end of Bowser’s Castle, you fight a boss, watch a cutscene, then are immediately thrown into another boss. Or the very end of the game being one long corridor where you fight FOUR bosses in a row right before the final boss, with the middle three being pallete swaps of each other. I get what the joke they were telling there was, but also come on man.
This all wouldn’t really be an issue if the combat wasn’t so easy to steamroll for the most part. It’s another reason of why so much of the game felt like I was going on autopilot. You have a fair few options available and a massive cast of enemies each with their own weaknesses you could consider, but why bother with them when Mallow’s AoE attacks and a few normal hits will take out just about anything within a turn or two. Fortunately, there’s an inherent pleasure to pulling off the timed hits and defeating the enemies quicker, but again, I just wish for a bit more meat to it than that. And the thing is…. there is! Smithy and Culex’s fights ratchet up the pressure enough to force you to engage with the mechanics presented to you, prepare strategies and react to stuff that happens in the battle. I think those two fights were the only time I seriously used Peach in the entire game, where otherwise a DPS approach was simply more pragmatic, but she was truly the MVP for them. They were genuinely great fights, and so it’s a tad frustrating realizing the combat system as it exist has some pretty great potential, but (at least from the base game content) is tragically underutilized. I haven’t done the post-game rematches yet, but I’ve heard similarly good things about them.
Yes, I know Super Mario RPG is meant as a baby’s first RPG, but so are the first two Paper Mario games and the entire Mario & Luigi series. I think those games did a better job engaging in combat throughout the entire experience compared to this first attempt.
Though even many of the boss fights that weren’t mechanically engaging at least offered a secret actual appeal. Sometimes the game decides to eschew a fight… for a stage play. There’s a delight to seeing the chef twins panic over their wedding cake possibly being alive, or Johnny challenging Mario to a tussle mano a mano. Not just the game’s writing is excellent, but its choreography is too. I was constantly giggling at the antics these stubby characters were getting up to with their silly little animations. Every scene has at least one bit that’s incredibly charming about it, and that’s by far the game’s biggest strength. The charm persists in seeing how the game plays with elements of the series from when it was barely a decade old. As a Mario nut, seeing Mario go through a choice of numbered doors in Bowser’s Castle and instantly knowing it’s a reference to World’s final level, yet it still being it’s own spin on the idea, is immensely gratifying.
Super Mario RPG does himge pretty hard on it being a Mario game for it’s appeal… and that’s okay! Mario is a funny little dude who everyone loves to see do funny little stuff, and this was the game to crack the nut on that. Even if its actual game structure leaves something to be desired, it still left me with a smile on my face almost the entire way through. As long as I don’t stew on it too hard (which I did in this review lol), the game remains a simple pleasure and, again, that’s perfectly okay!
Perhaps it is good going into a game like this to remember that it served as the foundation for the Mario RPGs, spawning two series of games I love dearly. Every starting point will have it's growing pains, and part of the appeal will be that it was doing something entirely novel for its time. But even now, Super Mario RPG's reputation precedes itself, a game still spoken of in the upper echelons of the Mario RPGs even by those who played it far after its novelty had faded. Some YouTubers may even say the game raises the bar for what a rpg is able to be! So it leaves me a bit surprised to dig into this game and find something... really light?
The game has a pace of a bullet train, blasting from area to area, never letting a point linger on for a second too long. Ideas, characters, entire areas are introduced, toyed with for not a second longer than desired, then sealed away for something completely different. There’s an appeal to it in a way, being taken on this nonstop ride where any of the sparse few intolerable parts last a couple minutes at most. Let me be clear, despite everything I’m going to discuss, I still liked the game. It’s a good, highly well made and seeping with charm, but my experience felt like I was going on autopilot with a light smile on my face. Very similar to how I digested End Roll a couple months back, but when that was a dinky little RPG Maker game, versus a big, prestigious, full-price remake—it stings a bit more.
The game for its most part follows a pretty standard formula for the first two-thirds of the game: going through a short overworld area, reaching a new town with a problem to solve, trekking through a short dungeon (which is more or less the same gameplay-wise as the overworld area), probably a minigame or two somewhere in there, then meeting the boss and fucking them up. Over this entire loop that spans roughly an hour each iteration, there’s never really an attempt to give texture these areas and characters. They’re just another stop on the journey to reach the ending. The Smithy Gang especially feels like they got the short end of the stick, with there being like 20 boss dudes in their ranks but nobody gets more than 5 minutes of screentime including the fight itself.
Of course, it’s all a Mario game; naturally the focus will be predominantly on the gameplay versus the story and world, which I’m perfectly fine with! Wonder is my favorite game I’ve played thus far this year after all. Yet I look at the following Mario RPGs and even at their thinnest (ignoring Sticker Star), they provide just a bit more to their world that I can chew on that feels like it goes a long way. The first chapter of Paper Mario 64 has several Koopa Bros encounters leading up to their fight, which helps flesh them out juuuust enough to feel like actual dudes versus just bosses in the way.
The exceptions to this are when the game takes a break from the star hunt during Booster Tower and Nimbus Town, which are not-coincidentally the best areas of the game! Booster and Valentina are fun characters that contribute to several fun scenes and add in a bit more texture to their corresponding dungeons as a result. I really like how Valentina tied in as a micro-antagonist to Mallow’s storyline concurrently to the main story. It’s kinda funny both of them have to do with marriages being done under false pretenses. Yet, them being a diversion to the star hunt does make the pacing feel weird when the game redirects itself. Star Road is an area that conceptually should have a lot going on—it’s Geno’s home!—but because Booster was the focus of the chapter, it ends up just being a place where you grab the star and… that’s literally it. In contrast, Valentina comes at the end of what’s already the largest gap between stars in the game. Then the game springs another dungeon upon you, then its boss fight, then another boss fight immediately after! While the volcano dungeon was good enough and I certainly didn’t mind going through more content, the contrast to what the game had set up for the first 5 stars is really jarring. It makes throwing on yet another thing to do before you reach the star feel a bit long in the tooth, despite the game being so brief.
Boss fight after boss fight… oh does the game love throwing them at you one after another towards the end. At least the game gives the curtesy to refresh you after each one, but it does get a bit ridiculous after a certain point. In some cases, like at the end of Bowser’s Castle, you fight a boss, watch a cutscene, then are immediately thrown into another boss. Or the very end of the game being one long corridor where you fight FOUR bosses in a row right before the final boss, with the middle three being pallete swaps of each other. I get what the joke they were telling there was, but also come on man.
This all wouldn’t really be an issue if the combat wasn’t so easy to steamroll for the most part. It’s another reason of why so much of the game felt like I was going on autopilot. You have a fair few options available and a massive cast of enemies each with their own weaknesses you could consider, but why bother with them when Mallow’s AoE attacks and a few normal hits will take out just about anything within a turn or two. Fortunately, there’s an inherent pleasure to pulling off the timed hits and defeating the enemies quicker, but again, I just wish for a bit more meat to it than that. And the thing is…. there is! Smithy and Culex’s fights ratchet up the pressure enough to force you to engage with the mechanics presented to you, prepare strategies and react to stuff that happens in the battle. I think those two fights were the only time I seriously used Peach in the entire game, where otherwise a DPS approach was simply more pragmatic, but she was truly the MVP for them. They were genuinely great fights, and so it’s a tad frustrating realizing the combat system as it exist has some pretty great potential, but (at least from the base game content) is tragically underutilized. I haven’t done the post-game rematches yet, but I’ve heard similarly good things about them.
Yes, I know Super Mario RPG is meant as a baby’s first RPG, but so are the first two Paper Mario games and the entire Mario & Luigi series. I think those games did a better job engaging in combat throughout the entire experience compared to this first attempt.
Though even many of the boss fights that weren’t mechanically engaging at least offered a secret actual appeal. Sometimes the game decides to eschew a fight… for a stage play. There’s a delight to seeing the chef twins panic over their wedding cake possibly being alive, or Johnny challenging Mario to a tussle mano a mano. Not just the game’s writing is excellent, but its choreography is too. I was constantly giggling at the antics these stubby characters were getting up to with their silly little animations. Every scene has at least one bit that’s incredibly charming about it, and that’s by far the game’s biggest strength. The charm persists in seeing how the game plays with elements of the series from when it was barely a decade old. As a Mario nut, seeing Mario go through a choice of numbered doors in Bowser’s Castle and instantly knowing it’s a reference to World’s final level, yet it still being it’s own spin on the idea, is immensely gratifying.
Super Mario RPG does himge pretty hard on it being a Mario game for it’s appeal… and that’s okay! Mario is a funny little dude who everyone loves to see do funny little stuff, and this was the game to crack the nut on that. Even if its actual game structure leaves something to be desired, it still left me with a smile on my face almost the entire way through. As long as I don’t stew on it too hard (which I did in this review lol), the game remains a simple pleasure and, again, that’s perfectly okay!