Beginner-friendly RPG is true to the original, but with new graphics and sound.
Even among the many standout titles in the Super Nintendo’s game library, the RPGs developed for the system by Squaresoft (now Square Enix) are special.
Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI are probably the crown jewels, but Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy IV are nearly as revered and influential. Trials of Mana and Live A Live would only officially come to North America decades later in the form of remastered rereleases, but dedicated fans had already translated them unofficially, such was their desire to share these games with more people. Even lower-order releases like Final Fantasy Mystic Quest or the SaGa series have an appealing story idea or battle mechanic at their core.
But my most beloved Square game as a pre-teen wasn’t any of those. It was 1996’s Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars.
Developed primarily by Square with oversight and assistance from Nintendo—two titans of gaming at their creative peak—Mario RPG combined a unique battle system and an RPG-style story structure with the familiarity and approachability of the Mario series. And it was a potent gateway drug for me. I showed up because of Mario, and I stayed to play most of Square’s SNES catalog after that. I probably wasn’t the only one.
Nintendo and Square had a messy breakup not long after Mario RPG was released, and Square shifted almost all of its attention to Sony’s PlayStation consoles for years afterward. Spiritual sequels like Paper Mario and the Mario & Luigi series riffed on some of Mario RPG‘s ideas, but Nintendo never revisited the specific version of Mario’s world created for Super Mario RPG outside of occasional Virtual Console rereleases.
The Switch’s Super Mario RPG remake—also called Super Mario RPG, but without the subtitle—isn’t a sequel, but it does shine a spotlight on this weird gem of a game that, while successful, always felt like it got a little lost as a late-run Super Nintendo game released as the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 eras were taking off.Advertisement
One part Super Mario, one part RPG
- The game combines some of the jumping bits from Mario games… Nintendo
- …with a turn-based JRPG battle system. Nintendo
- Pressing buttons at just the right time can power up your attacks… Nintendo
- …or defend you from monsters, reducing the damage you take. Nintendo
- The isometric perspective occasionally makes the game’s jumping puzzles trickier than they ought to be. Nintendo
If you’re unfamiliar with the source material, there are two parts to Super Mario RPG. The Super Mario part asks you to navigate throughout the game world by running and jumping and grabbing coins, occasionally bonking floating blocks with your head to get stuff out of them. The RPG part involves powering up your characters by leveling up and finding new equipment, managing an inventory full of recovery and power-up items, and turn-based battles you enter by bumping into monsters on the map.
The game is much heavier on the RPG than on the Super Mario, but it’s the appealing fusion of the two that makes it a beginner-friendly turn-based JRPG for anyone new to the genre. A fun script also helps, though people familiar with the original localization may note some changed enemy names and a couple of changed or dropped lines (one boss’s name is no longer a reference to the jazz standard “Mack the Knife,” and no characters mention Bruce Lee).
The Switch version of Super Mario RPG is a lovingly crafted and extremely faithful recreation of the Super Nintendo original. Because the source console was only capable of limited, low-resolution 3D rendering, Nintendo and Square used an isometric perspective with a fixed camera to give Mario RPG a three-dimensional world. That perspective is fully retained in the remake.
The game’s Mario-style platforming segments were always a bit clunky because of this oddball perspective, and lots of the game’s jumping sections retain that clunkiness. It is, at least, easier to nail a diagonal jump with a joystick than with a D-Pad, but there will still be some sections you need to try multiple times just because it’s not always clear where you’re going to land.
The graphical updates are much appreciated in other areas, though. Some of the game’s original sprites were just a bit too complicated to be legible on the SNES, and they’re much easier to make out as high-definition 3D models.
What the RPG part of Mario RPG brought to turn-based battles was something called “timed hits,” a way to incentivize staying engaged as you battle rather than just jamming on the “attack” command to wipe out monsters. Hit a button at the exact right time, and your attacks do more damage or reduce damage to yourself. The exact timings vary depending on your attack, the weapons you have equipped, and the monster you’re fighting, which will keep you on your toes.
New to the remake is a gauge that fills as you successfully execute timed hits; the more you do in a row, the faster the gauge refills. Once it hits 100 percent, you can unleash a powerful attack that varies based on which three of the available five characters you have in your active party (Mario always has to fight, but the others can be swapped at will).
It’s fun, but it’s not difficult
- Powerful triple attacks are one of the new additions that can make the game easier than it already was. Nintendo
- Different combinations of characters each get their own unique attacks and animations. Nintendo
- Geno is back. Long live Geno. Nintendo
If there’s one thing to criticize about Mario RPG other than finicky isometric jumping, it’s that it was fairly easy to beat compared to other Square RPGs of the era. This was partly by design—Square wanted Mario RPG to sell better outside of Japan than its other games had, and Japanese game developers in the ’80s and ’90s regularly assumed that their games would need to be toned down in difficulty for a US audience.Advertisement
If you have experience with RPGs, you may find that the changes to the remake only make an easy game easier. Besides the aforementioned triple-attack gauge, exceptionally well-timed hits also do a bit of splash damage to enemies other than the one you’re targeting; exclamation points briefly appear over characters to tell you exactly how to time your hits; and “special enemies” with higher-than-normal HP show up regularly to dispense Frog Coins, a rare currency that can buy the game’s best recovery items (Frog Coins were present in the original but were handed out a lot less freely). And this is before you even consider the “breezy” mode that reduces the overall difficulty even more.
And for people who know the original like the back of their hand, I can admit to feeling a certain disappointment that the rereleased game is so faithful to the original. Not that the visual and audio upgrades aren’t lovely (original composer and all-around game music savant Yoko Shimomura returns to give the old soundtrack some extra texture and lengthen some of the original game’s very short loops). And I did enjoy some of the new additions, like the cleverly written bestiary that fills out as you use the Thought Peek ability on new monsters.
But after Nintendo went to the trouble of totally recreating the game in 3D, I was hoping for a bit more to do post-game or perhaps a more challenging new game+ mode. There are a handful of fun boss battle rematches available once you clear the main game, but only a handful, and that’s mostly it as far as new content goes.
For people who haven’t played it in a while, the Super Mario RPG remake is a fun opportunity to revisit a game you remember fondly. For those new to RPGs, this game is a great and low-stress introduction to the form, much like the original game was for kids in the ’90s. The worst thing I can say about it is that it’s a little short, and for people who know the original, you might come away wishing that there was just more Mario RPG to play. Though that may just be me continuing to pine for the true sequel this game never got.
