Originally released way back in 1996 and marking Mario’s final appearance on the SNES, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, developed by Square, became the blueprint for the Mario franchise’s sporadic forays into the world of RPGs. The Switch remake is, in essence, the same game with new visuals and a re-recorded soundtrack. Outside of a new combat meter that adds in a party-based ultimate attack (a nice, if minor, addition), Super Mario RPG remains mostly unchanged in terms of gameplay. Luckily, this doesn’t much matter for a game as quick, funny, and consistently engaging as this one.
Much of Super Mario RPG’s creative spark, as well as a great deal of its many fantastic jokes, comes from the tension between its simplistic Mario roots and Square’s more layered storytelling approach, namely across its storied Final Fantasy franchise. This tension exists most clearly in the way that the game handles the roster of preexisting Mario characters. Initially, these characters are presented in the same one-dimensional fashion they were in previous Mario titles. Over time, though, they tend to subvert those expectations to some extent.
Mario himself is as upbeat and heroic as ever, but he’s also a bit of a stinker—often sticking his mustachioed nose where it doesn’t belong and being chided by more responsible adults for jumping on shop counters or taking things that don’t belong to him. Bowser, on the other hand, begins the game as his usual aggressive self before being kicked out of his castle by the bigger, badder Exor, leaving him uncharacteristically vulnerable. This leads to a particularly cute scene in which Bowser puts on a tough face because he’s too embarrassed to let Mario see him cry.
The narrative is defined by small moments like that, rather than by its broader plot, which is a relatively straightforward story about saving the world from Exor—a giant, anthropomorphic sword—and his army of weapons. The most memorable moments are instead more like isolated vignettes, and they’re usually played for laughs. In a particularly representative example, Mallow—a cloud-shaped creature who believes that he’s a tadpole—returns home to a pond full of tadpoles that, unlike Mallow, actually look like tadpoles. Here, Mallow is informed in dramatic fashion by his adoptive grandfather, Frog Sage, that he is not, in fact, a tadpole.
Perhaps the game’s most distinctly Mario-like quality is its refusal to bore you by getting in any rut for very long. Environments are always changing, not just in appearance but in structure, with densely populated towns giving way to maze-like caverns, magical forests (a la The Legend of Zelda’s recurring Lost Woods), and castles overrun with enemy forces.
The game is also replete with diversions from your usual RPG bits of business. Between combat encounters and conversations, you’ll find yourself speeding down train tracks in a minecart, writing sheet music for a very particular composer, and racing a rude but extremely cool Yoshi. Despite the relative simplicity of each of the game’s individual elements, the pace at which it doles out its considerable variety makes the sizable RPG uncommonly light and breezy.
Super Mario RPG’s combat itself also has a couple of key qualities that help to maintain this sense of immediacy. For one, there’s the complete lack of random encounters, with enemies instead visibly roaming the world. This makes combat something that you can usually avoid if your reactions are fast enough, and turns grinding (which is rarely necessary outside of fighting two to three extra battles in a given area) into more of an active choice.
Then there’s the game’s widely celebrated “action command” system, which allows the player to boost the effectiveness of combat actions by making well-timed button presses, as well as giving a short window to block most enemy attacks. This is great for the obvious reason that it keeps you engaged during even basic combat encounters, but it’s yet another example of how Super Mario RPG both seduces and keeps you on your toes with variety, as the flurry of new enemy types, party members, weapons, and attacks means that you’re constantly pushed to perfect different timings, never finding your balance for very long.
It would be easy, and in some ways fair, to complain that this remake is a slightly disappointing half-measure—just a bit of new paint applied to a game that’s almost 30 years old. In many ways, though, the light touch taken with this updated version just serves to showcase how vibrant the original Super Mario RPG has always been. And in a year that brought no shortage of sprawling RPG behemoths, from Starfield to Baldur’s Gate 3 to Octopath Traveler II, this one’s spryness and wit stand in sharp, refreshing contrast.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Golin on November 17.
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