Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars

released on Mar 09, 1996

A JRPG entry in the Super Mario franchise in which Mario meets many unlikely allies in order to jump and fight his way through the Mushroom Kingdom and collect stars to repair the Star Road, the pathway that grants people's wishes, which was destroyed by Smithy, the otherworldly entity that hijacked Bowser's castle and threw the Kingdom into disarray.


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Un fantastico inicio para lo que seria la travesia de Mario en los juegos RPG. Con un sistema de comabte simple pero efectivo, con un ritmo de juego lento al principio hasta que desbloqueas a Geno siendo desde este punto una experiencia mucho mas dinamica y divertida.

Me gusta mucho las caracterizaciones de Bowser y Peach aca como personajes

Though I have beaten the game on the SNES several times (this is probably my 4th time beating this game), this was my first time beating it in Japanese! I bought the SFC Mini almost entirely to have a convenient easy way to play this game XD . I enjoyed Paper Mario so much in Japanese that I really wanted to see the localization of the previous game, and it was great fun just like Paper Mario was~. This time I played through with a team of Bowser and Mallow, despite Fast's warnings against it, and came to the conclusion that Mallow is indeed terrible and made the game FAR harder than it needed to be XD

The translation of the English version is quite faithful to the Japanese original, at least as far as my memory serves (and what I occasionally looked up online). Things like Booster's eccentric speech being similarly silly but in a different way (he has his own kind of punny words he uses for himself and switches between SUPER casual and very formal speech a lot), Johnathan Jones speaking much more about the honor of being a manly man's man, and a couple silly naming conventions and puns here and there that didn't make it into the English version. Regardless, the English version is a fantastic companion piece to the Japanese original, in my opinion. Neither is better; they're just both good in similar but different ways.

Dunno if the game was just a lot harder than I remember, or if Mallow and Bowser are just a terrible team combonation, or if the Japanese version is harder than the US version, but the end game was definitely harder than I remember. I still enjoyed it either way though. A nice nostalgic trip down memory lane with a foreign-language twist~

I dabbled with this when I got a SNES Classic but never got very far. Glad they made a remake, because the hour or so I played of this was very janky and old. Although the classic pixel faces cannot be matched.

This review contains spoilers

Gino in smash

Let me be clear, I respect the hell out of what Super Mario RPG does. The introduction of timed presses to deliver more damage, or negate damage coming your way was a great way to retain the reflex-heavy nature of standard Mario games, while at the same time making the RPG combat more engaging, and friendly to newcomers. The idea of each defeated enemy potentially giving you an extra free turn, or a free recovery is another fun method that ensures that each attempt at clearing a sequence might go differently, and potential deaths may suddenly turn into lucky victories.

All these conveniences for the combat itself, on top of various minigames scattered around to alleviate the constant combat, a short length that ensures anybody could finish this game without getting weary, a soundtrack that is just one catchy earworm after another, and lots and lots of personality and bits of humor in the writing. Including the first effective instance of everybody simultaneously realizing that Bowser is the best character in the Mario series, actually. Give him a personality and a bunch of lines to read, and you just cannot under any circumstance hate this guy. He's a total loser with a totally unrealistic goal, and yet while I cannot root for him, I don't really want him to fail either. He deserves something good, I just haven't figured out what yet.

Anyway, all this to say, there is a lot that this game does well, as far as innovation and evolution of the Mario series goes, BUT... and it pains me to have a but in here, BUT while all of it comes together to form a cozy and accessible romp for RPG newcomers, its combat system did not hold enough weight to keep me engaged for the entire runtime, even though said runtime was already pretty short as is.

By the 2nd half of the adventure, I was able to find weapons that completely broke the balance of the game. As a result, battles no longer required any thought. I was capable of trouncing every boss using the exact same party, with the exact same strategy, including both phases of the final boss. After the game ended, I considered the idea that Mario RPG wants you to dictate your own difficulty through the equipment you choose to wear, but coming from older RPG's where equipping the best stuff was paramount to success, this line of thinking was pretty alien to me at the time. That aside, stats and equipment don't have to be the only measure of difficulty in an RPG. And the best types of RPG's incentivize you into pursuing other strategies beyond sheer brute force. And while Mario RPG starts off doing that quite decently, its latter half turns into a bit of a mindless affair, as your amount of tools outnumber anything that the bosses could possibly have.

What doesn't help is that certain attack animations from the enemies go on for needlessly long amounts of time, and if you get to fight a lot of them, that's more time wasted sitting around and waiting for the animations to finish. Combined with the lacking difficulty, every battle turns into a game of waiting until you win.

To summarize, while I do strongly feel that Mario RPG is a game worth experiencing by everybody for its exploration, its sense of charm, and as a potential gateway for newcomers to the genre... the combat turns from one of the game's best features, to a bit of a weak link, and it's one you kinda have to engage with a lot. Not as much as some RPG's out there with their insane encounter rates, but enough to the point where I'd rather be talking to NPC's in a town than doing this. I will repeat this again: Mario RPG does a shit ton of stuff right. Play it. My personal disappointment with the boss fights aside, everybody has a different reason to play a game, and Mario RPG may just align with yours.

Man, maybe I really shouldn't have equipped that OP equipment... It almost feels like that in itself is what screwed up a lot of my experience. Oh well, there's always the remake.

Es un juego bastante decente para ser el primer RPG de Mario, pero, aún así, hubo aspectos que siento que no han envejecido bien.

Viendo el lado positivo, el mundo de Mario aquí se siente bastante carismático. Al no ser un típico juego de plataformas del fontanero, se pudo dar una nueva interpretación sobre este mundo. Podemos ver, por ejemplo, más detalles sobre la relación entre Bowser y sus súbditos, nuevas interacciones entre personajes como Mario y el, e incluso, se dio la libertad de aportar sus ideas originales que no estaban presentes en ese mundo, por ejemplo, la adición de personajes como Mallow, Geno, Smithy, Booster etc. dándole un toque único a este juego.

Centrándome más en el sistema de combate, es uno bastante funcional, el jugador tiene una variedad bastante decente de ataques especiales, y da paso a la estrategia al solo poder elegir 2 en cada batalla (Sin contar a Mario, claro está), lo cual, hace que pienses que arquetipo de personaje te conviene utilizar en x situación. Por ejemplo, si eliges a Peach con poco ataque pero con muchas opciones curativas, o con Bowser, que tiene un gran ataque pero no muchos movimientos especiales. Además, de que no tienes de que preocuparte mucho en ganar experiencia, ya que todos la ganan aunque no estén en combate, e incluso, el juego suele tener una buena curva de dificultad, haciendo que no se tenga que farmear mucha experiencia.

Por último, los enemigos suelen estar bastante bien, incluyendo los jefes, ya que estos no los vas a superar espameando puros ataques, si no que tienes que montar una estrategia decente en base a sus debilidades.

Lamentablemente, y como dije anteriormente, el juego en mi perspectiva, tiene puntos que le bajan su calidad.

Empecemos por un aspecto, en el juego hay 2 tipos de moneda: las normales y las moneda rana, estas últimas son necesarias para comprar objetos especiales, pero, en primer lugar, para comprar ciertos objetos necesitas un ticket que te da Toadofsky, lo cual no estaría tan mal si, en primer lugar, tienes que hacer una melodía mega específica, y segundo lugar, si las benditas monedas rana no se obtienen de la forma más tediosa posible, farmeando en la cascada esa, o buscando secretos en todo el mapa, lo cual, hace que no puedas disponer de estos de forma cómoda. Y el segundo tipo de moneda, las monedas normales, están bastante bien .. hasta que llegas a las últimas estrellas del juego, donde, sin mucho esfuerzo, terminas con el máximo de monedas que el juego permite, haciendo que no debas preocuparte mucho por ahorrar recursos.

Hablando de las monedas, un pequeño nitpick que tengo es que en la tienda, cuando quieras comprar armamento, este no te dice que características suben y bajan, si no hasta que ya la compras, haciendo que tengas medio adivinar que sube cada una. Aún asi, no lo considero tan grave, ya que al final al ir a un nuevo pueblo y ver una nueva prenda de ropa, es algo lógico pensar de que es mejor que la anterior.

Una cosa que no comenté, pero Super Mario RPG, utiliza una cámara con vista isométrica, lo cual, no se le daría tanta importancia, hasta que te das cuenta de que calcular varios saltos precisos aquí es algo complicado, debido a que la ubicación de la cámara hace que sea difícil calcularlos.

Por último, algunas mazmorras, en cierto punto, las siento bastante simplonas, como el castillo de Valentina o la fábrica, siento que son muy ir de un lado para el otro, y personalmente, eso no me convence.

Entonces, ¿Que puedo concluir de este juego? Si bien, me escuche algo negativo en la última parte, no considero a Super Mario RPG como un mal juego, sostengo que sus mecánicas siguen siendo divertidas y que pese a todos los defectos que dije anteriormente, lo sigo considerando un juego decente.

Lo recomiendo.