Mario Superstar Baseball brings an energetic and arcade-like spin to America's favorite pastime. It features a vibrant cast of Nintendo favorites, each with unique abilities and wacky special moves that add extra chaos to the field. The core gameplay is easy to pick up but offers surprising depth with its character chemistry system. While the single-player Challenge Mode can get repetitive and the baserunning controls are sometimes clunky, Mario Superstar Baseball is a lively and entertaining sports game, especially for multiplayer sessions with friends.

Ok so here's the thing. I wanted to try this game and give it a fair chance, but between the input lag on my controller for the emulator I was using, the pretty hard to get used to controls and mechanics, and my heavy childhood nostalgia for the Wii game, I just couldn't get into this one and make any meaningful progress. I won't be rating it since I didn't really complete it like I did the other games and I'll put it in the dead middle of the ranking of the Mario Sports/Kart series list when that comes out. Sorry Mario Superstars Baseball, it's not you it's me.

The presentation in the game is pretty fantastic. I love how all the captains have their own team names and banners. A small selection of fields, but with a lot of personality. And the character roster is pretty insane. You can play as the freaking Noki's from Mario Sunshine.

I do like how team composition matters. Different characters have chemistry with others, which will let them work better together, e.g faster throwing when fielding, and if the batter has chemistry with people currently on bases it will make them hit harder...or something. So not only is the roster great, but it even gives you a great reason to experiment with it.

Characters even have different swing styles which affect hit boxes and timing, and the effort that went in to making the large cast feel unique is kinda crazy.

The "story" mode, aka challenge mode has some good concepts. You pick a team captain, and face off against other teams, with missions throughout the match where if you pass the criteria, you recruit characters from their team. I've noticed that if you recruit their team leader before the rest of their team though that you can't challenge them again to get the rest of their teammates, which kinda sucks.

But also in challenge mode you can play mini-games. They vary in quality but provide a nice distraction. With this you earn coins to buy special types of pitches and swings for the "main" characters (basically anyone who is a captain, though they don't have to be the captain in that specific challenge mode).

But damn is this game hard to play. I couldn't figure out the batting in this game at all (which granted as someone who has never played a baseball game outside of Wii Sports may have something to do with it), but 99% of the time I hit the ball it just flies straight into the opponents hands. And the thing is the game has an "easy" option for batting where it shows you the outline of your bat hitbox, and the sweet spot for hitting the ball. But when I get a perfect hit in that sweet spot the opponent still catches it with ease? Like yeah I suck ass, but if you have a system in place specifically to help bad players like me at least make the damn thing intuitive instead of telling me I hit it perfectly when I just handed the opponent the ball tied up in a neat little bow 😭

When it comes to pitching I'm not sure if there's really any control over that. You have a few different ways to pitch but how can any of them affect gameplay? Surely the AI isn't going to be fooled by any specific throws. The best case scenario is a rock-paper-scissors type thing where the game decides "if you throw X type it'll hit, but if you throw Y type it'll get a strike". Worst case is that the game just decides whether or not the batter will hit regardless of how you throw. And the AI likes to get homeruns a lot, even on standard difficulty. I have no idea if you can prevent that at all, but having the opponent get 3 points in a row instantly makes me feel kinda hopeless.

Fielding felt very clunky. For one thing the AI has the obvious advantage of being able to control everyone at once, while a human player will be running to the ball with one character, then control will suddenly switch, so you start running the opposite direction with another. And throwing the ball to people felt very slow and would often just result in the ball landing randomly on the ground. Meanwhile the AI seemed to be able to throw the ball perfectly into the hands of the person who needed it as it flew across the whole field in milliseconds.

The funny thing is I went in to practice mode specifically for fielding, and you still have to go through he pitching part. You'd think it'd be set up so the AI always hits the ball in a way that lets you catch it or at least put it on the field for you to try and get them out. But no, you have to sit through countless strikes and home runs. I'm here in a game mode that you specifically told me was to practice fielding, why are you letting my opponents hit the ball so hard it makes it literally impossible to do anything with?

This game does almost everything right, but why is it so hard? Even some of the mini-games on easy can provide a challenge. I wanna like the game, but between being unable to figure out the batting, even with the in-game helper trying to provide tips, it always ends up gravitating towards the opponents. And pitching just feels like a waste of time where the result is determined without you doing anything.

I bet the game would be extremely fun with friends though.

Some might say that this is a silly Mario Sports game. That it is a disposable title, made to be a good gift to get the kids in 2005 and then quickly be forgotten. It fulfills a quota of getting Mario out there to play all of the sports. No. This is what all baseball games aspire to be. When you're not just considering pure statistics, trajectories, timing. It's about managing resources. It's about counterpicking your opponent to take away their resources. It's about building a team to field all of your positions to best counteract everything your opponent can do. Mario Baseball starts at the character select screen, and continues on as a game of constant wagers between you and your opponent, calling bluffs to use your star powers to ensure runs, or faking your opponent out to make them whiff their opportunities. Of loading a lineup full of killers to force them to walk Bowser, only to immediately follow him up with Birdo who injects chaos into the ballfield. And then you actually hitting the ball and pitching and stuff feels pretty good, too. By far the deepest system of any of the Mario spin-offs, and it's got Pianta. I love that guy, he's stupid!

My thoughts have changed a lot on Superstar Baseball over the years. Baseball has always been one of my favorite sports, but I was actually pretty disappointed with this game when it first came out. I got it for my birthday shortly after release, and I distinctly remember feeling bad about putting that on my wishlist, since it being full price meant my folks had spent a good $50 (a significant part of my birthday funds; we weren't poor by any stretch of the term, but we lived well within our means) on a game that just... didn't appeal to me. I ended up putting a lot of time into it, and I think my father did as well, but it sure never held me the way Mario Power Tennis did insofar as Mario sports titles went.

It feels a little funny saying that now, because boy, did I have fun with this revisit.

I hate to admit it, but I think I didn't really get it as a kid because the game requires patience to master. There are optimal ways to play the game, and you're able to consistently break the AI once you know 'em, but getting there involves learning a LOT of different characters' playstyles, optimal pairings, optimal positions, etc. Grinding is baked into the road to this game's mastery in the same way it's baked into fighting games. Since I mentioned Power Tennis, that game by contrast has way less to learn - a couple playstyles, each character's power shots, court features, and that's about it.

But of course, these days it's that complexity that makes Superstar Baseball so interesting. As luck would have it, I streamed this for Designing For right around the time the modern metagame started to develop. Being coached through juuuuuuust how robust the Chemistry system was was really eye-opening. It's not just a trinary "Like/Indifferent/Dislike" system, it's on a full 100 point scale, with each of the 32 unique characters having a different score for each of the 31+ other characters. You have to put a LOT of careful consideration into how Chemistry interacts with characters' special abilities and different fielding positions, more than anything.

Another thing I don't think I appreciated enough as a kid were some of the oddball roster picks. Being a frequenter of Super Mario fansite "Lemmy's Land", I was very used to hoping for NES/SNES throwbacks in an era mostly interested in celebrating recent successes. I was very put off by the excessive Mario Sunshine padding - THREE Piantas and THREE Nokis? Of course, now I wish we saw more stuff like that in Mario spin-offs. It's lovely seeing legacy characters like Chargin' Chuck and Pauline finally get their due in Mario Golf: Super Rush, but imagine how out-there it would've been to see someone like a Jaxi or Shiverian pop up. Ah, I would've thought myself crazy for suggesting such a thing 15 years ago...

I never played Mario Super Sluggers, but I've heard that it's more arcadey compared to Superstar Baseball and far less technically complex. That's too bad. I get the feeling I would've preferred Sluggers as a kid had I played it new, but these days, it's that technical complexity I really respect and miss from Mario spin-offs. I'm not familiar enough with side games to say if this is the last really great Mario sports title (people liked Strikers Charged, right?), but surely this must've been one of the greats.