Super Mario RPG's charm and clever writing hard carry its mediocre combat and atrocious minigames

I never finished this game back on the SNES when I rented it from Blockbuster. I’m glad to see an old classic get a new coat of paint, a few balance tweaks, and some postgame content (that I will never bother to do).

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (1996) was too much for me to handle as a kid, much less in a single Blockbuster rental. The nostalgia center in my brain was screaming “finish the game!” when I saw it in the Switch eShop as Super Mario RPG (2023).

Much like the later Paper Mario, the writing is silly and on point here. It’s that kind of jokey irreverent dialogue you get in Earthbound or even Undertale. I love a good comedy, and this one is timeless.

The new characters, Mallow and Geno, are definitely cute. I think that Geno’s fanbase is perhaps overblowing how cool is he is quite a bit. Not to “yuck their yum” or anything, but he really doesn’t get that much characterization. He’s just kinda there be cool. Which is totally fine. Funny enough, I think Bowser gets the best writing in the whole party. The mental gymnastics he has to perform in order to convince himself to work alongside Mario never stopped amusing me.

For pacing, I completed the game and secret boss (looked up how to find him) in 20 hours on the normal difficulty. I appreciate a game that doesn’t overstay its welcome a lot. Beyond that, there were minigames to get better at (more on that later), and an entire guantlet of postgame bosses I skipped.

The combat was… well… fun at times, but overall not my jam. I’m not quiet about not liking timing mechanics in my turn-based RPG mechanics. Mercifully, the remake will give you a visual cue the next time you use an attack, if you fail to hit the timing mechanics on your previous use. Annoyingly, most new weapons you equip have completely different timing than the last, so you’re constantly losing muscle memory. Weapon upgrades are often minor, so until you practice the new timing mechanics heavily, weapon upgrades often resulted in me doing less damage on average than before I upgraded. Seriously, the timing mechanic basically makes your attack a critical hit, so this game is actually pretty heavily “skill based” in a mechanical sense. To make matters worse, Mario gets the skill “Super Jump” which lets you hit your opponent up to 100 times if you can keep the rhythm down. Between wireless controllers and poor visual cues, this is actually quite tough. For good reason, mind you, since getting 100 hit combos consistently would make the game mind numbingly easy and slow the pace down horrendously.

For whatever reason, the game seems to be balanced such that melee attacks are by far your best option in most situations against bosses, because so many of them lack an weaknesses at all, and magic attacks are both expensive and weak for single target damage if you aren’t a timing monster. This made the combat feel even more dull against bosses a lot of the time.

It’s not like I never had fun with the combat, but it was just weird in a way that still didn’t click with me after 20 hours. Once I got Peach (the dedicated healer), I generally just had her use all the FP (flower points, a party-wide resource) to heal, while everyone else took turns fishing for critical hit melee attacks against the boss. Quite tedious if the boss in question wasn’t an ongoing comedic experience.

Don’t get me started on the minigames either. None of them were roadblocks during my journey, but they all felt incredibly janky and unsatisfying. The Yoshi race in particular is probably the worst rhythm game I’ve played in my entire life. You have to tap completely offbeat from the drums, and the tutorially seems completely bugged to endlessly roast you, demaning you “try again” (even though I won the race first try).

The music, visuals, and writing absolutely heroically saved this game from being $60 of regret for me. Instead I’ll just mark it down as: good, important, and flawed.

I managed to grab an invisible edge of this beanstalk, leading me to believe that the cloud level was actually a diabolical level of platforming hell. After ages of trying, I accidentally activated an invisible platform that trivialized the jump I’d been wasting so much time on. Classic old school Mario bullshit lol.