Super Mario RPG Review
15.11.2023 - 19:01
/ thesixthaxis.com
As someone who has been gaming a (very) long time, I get the benefit of seeing games come around again, especially those from my childhood. I even, occasionally, get to see games that I never got to play on the original platform for whatever reason get shiny new releases. So, when a remake of Super Mario RPG was announced for Switch – a game that wasn’t originally released in Europe for the SNES, and that I only played on the Wii eShop release. I was all in.
Super Mario RPG starts the same way that almost every Mario game does, with Princess Peach being abducted by Bowser. Mario triumphantly arrives to rescue the fungal monarch, but after a tussle with Bowser the plot takes a sharp left turn. Cue Bowser’s Castle flying in the sky embedded by a huge sword with a creepy face and our cast (including Mario) being flung across the world.
This kicks off a story that is markedly different from your standard Mario fare. For one thing, it is very funny at various points, especially considering that Mario doesn’t talk in the game and communicates via jumping or through dumb little mime-based skits instead. It still feels like a Mario game, but is taking itself far less seriously – which is becoming more of a theme recently (looking at you, Wonder).
Super Mario RPG plays out like a standard JRPG. It might be less novel since we now have the Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario series, but this was the actual first JRPG with Mario. You’ll be wandering around a large world, searching for magical McGuffins, completing quests for various odd folks, stealing from said folks’ houses, and getting into a whole load of turn-based battles.
If you touch an enemy in the overworld you’re thrown into a battle with both your party and the enemies standing in neat little rows taking turns to beat the hell out of each other. The set-up here is simple, with each of your party members having a standard attack based on their current weapon and a set of special abilities that use the communal pool of Flower Points (FP) to use in battle.
These special abilities can be straight damage like Mario’s Jump, can heal your party members like Mallow’s HP Rain, or cause status boosts or effects on your allies or enemies like Geno’s Geno Boost. You can restore your FP with various Syrups or by resting at Inns, and if you find Flowers in chests and the like, you can increase your maximum to allow for even more uses of these abilities and shake up your strategies.
Super Mario RPG isn’t quite that straightforward though. Every attack and ability in the game has some sort of contextual enhancement with a timed press of the A button. For example, with the basic attacks of each character if you press the A button just before the hit connects, you’ll greatly