Mario's incursion into new genres continued with the Square/Nintendo collab of Super Mario RPG, that also paired action game precision with JRPG menu selection. Its combat is essentially Beyond the Beyond done right: Turn-based gameplay that grants bonuses upon synchronizing inputs to the impact of one's offense (e.g. heightened stats, extra turns) and defense (guarding), but with guaranteed damage rather than purely chance-driven side effects. Instead of magic types, Square's version of timing-oriented battling offers variety in a more tactile context. Weapons and abilities are characterized not only by their effects, but also by their skill check, and those variations are enough to distract from its below average pool of options (whether skills or allies) while helping them disguise what is - ultimately, the same battle approach of many console RPGs at the time (i.e. partitioning damage). What follows is straightforward and almost barebones, albeit with something to do in-between commands, an apparently simple feature which ends up distorting combat's flow (focused less on the menus and more on the animations) and tension (stemming from performance over prediction).

Outside battle mode are small, isometric 3D stages with traces of platforming and on-map mobs, alongside numerous ventures into minigames, unique scenarios, secrets (invisible blocks) and even Zelda-style challenges. The rest is - instead, little more than JRPG traditions dressed up with Super Mario's vibrant, colorful aesthetic, although with a few major exceptions: Stat-allocation (whose inherent replay value benefits from the game's length), the charming cast and above all a prevailing cartoony sense of humor. If its low difficulty leaves a bit to be desired, the experience is nonetheless well-produced and radiates wacky fun.

I fail to see the charm in this. The music is excellent and some elements of its visuals are at least good, but that’s pretty much all there is. It is extremely combat focused and while it isn’t nearly as reliant on tedious grinding as other big RPG’s of its time, it is mostly uninspired and flat. Mastering the timing of the basic attack is always the winning strategy, that and healing, and it never asks much more of you, and I just never felt enamored with the gimmick to compensate for the lack of a more engaging system.

I love that it’s short and simple and ideal for novices but I would’ve loved more a better though out combat.

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~

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.

I DID IT I FINALLY BEAT MY FIRST JRPG

This has been a genre that has eluded me for far too long. A lot of things factored in to that, most of it being the ungodly long runtimes and my former distaste for turn-based combat, but something about Mario RPG made it all click for me in a way I never thought possible.

Most of the time, when I went to try a JRPG, it would be Pokemon. I don't know why, but for some reason I thought that would be the best path in. It's an IP I'm already incredibly familiar with, so that would help. What those games (falsely) taught me was that JRPG combat is bad, but you get through it for the other stuff. I don't even know if I could consider Pokemon combat "bad," but it's not for me.

Mario RPG showed me what a good turn-based combat system can do. 1v1 battles are boring as hell turn based, but with a full party you have so much more room to actually do some minor strategizing, even if it's not all that deep. Combine that with the slightly more active and "skill based" timed attacks and you have a recipe for something that will actually keep me engaged across a long runtime.

But that was the other huge thing: by presenting a great JRPG in a short (sub-20h) context it manages to make me feel so much less stressed about how many other things I could be doing instead. This thing is also paced immaculately, where no matter what was happening in the game I couldn't wait to pick it back up every day.

There's also just... So much charm here. They do SOOOO much with so little in terms of animation and sprite counts, and at least once every dialogue I said to myself "wow, I never would have thought of that." The visuals are charming, the music fantastically catchy, and the dialogue is witty in all the best ways. I wanted to spend even more time with all of these characters. Geno and Mallow are so much more fleshed out than they have any right to be, and I love how all the legacy characters get characterized here with funny, very stylized dialogue.

I feel like this game has opened Pandora's box for me. I'm going to spend a little more time with Mario first, diving into Paper Mario, but I'm finally starting to feel ready to dive into a "true" JRPG. I can't believe it.

simplesmente maravilhoso!
square é boa demais nos rpgs e com esse aqui não foi diferente, gráficos bons até hj (na minha opinião) e uma boa trilha sonora. apenas a movimentação do personagem que achei de certo modo estranha, principalmente em sessões de plataforma que eu não consigo ter noção de profundidade.
a história não é das mais incríveis e mirabolantes mas ainda sim é muito boa, e os personagens são bem carismáticos, sem contar em ver o bowser junto com a galerinha do bem. uma pena eu não conseguir jogar o remake

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.

(This is the 118th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

I've spent the past two months or so playing Super Mario RPG whenever I got the time since I'm currently spending a semester abroad. Finding the time to sit down and play this has always been a treat because Super Mario RPG is such an easy going, chill and funny video game. It should probably be in every Top 10, if not Top 5 SNES RPG list out there, and is definitely one of the best starting points to RPGs for newcomers, if the Mario setting sounds interesting to you.

The story is that there is something called the Star Road, where wishes are fulfilled. One day, when Mario once again goes to Bowsers Castle to rescue Princess Toadstool, a massive sword falls down from the sky and onto Bowser's Castle. The sword tears through the Star Road and scatters seven star pieces throughout the land, and it is Mario's job to collect them to repair the Star Road. You get the help of companions like Bowser and Princess Toadstool, but also two characters that I think are new to the Mario universe in Mallow and Geno.

The story is rather simple and character development, while there for Mallow and Geno, happens pretty quickly when they get their moments and isn't at all fleshed out, which makes sense considering the game is aimed primarily towards young gamers. Still, you got a wholesome party to support you on your journey, and that makes for a chill time almost throughout.

I say almost because like all RPGs of its time, Super Mario RPG requires you to grind for levels at certain points. At least that has to be the case, as I literally couldn't get past a certain fight against the Axem Rangers very far into the game. For a game like this where progression is otherwise very easy, this was a shame. Because the thing with Super Mario RPG is that it is not just a simple RPG in terms of knowing where to go, the low number of items and skills to keep track of or the battle difficulty for 90% of fights. It's also lacking in combat depth, so it would have just been tedious for me to go back and grind for an hour or two to get past the Axem Rangers, only to probably be in a similar position with even later bosses. Additionally, while the game has a parry-timing feature, in that you need to press the A button right when you are attacked to reduce or null damage, a lot of attacks by tougher bosses are unblockable, and I feel like focusing more on the timing would have resulted in a better flow. That said, whenever the parry-timing was usable, I had fun with it and as someone who loved that in the South Park RPGs, I was happy to see the feature appear here.

The soundtrack includes great tunes and remixes and the map design overall is solid. My favorite part about the game has to be the constant mini games and challenges the game throws at you to keep things varied. They added a lot to the humor often times too.

Overall, I'm definitely keen on playing the remake of this some day and I enjoyed my time with it. It's just a shame that I didn't see the necessity to grind coming. As someone who falls victim to this many times when playing (old-school) RPGs, I didn't expect the original Super Mario RPG to have any grinding included as well, but whether you see this as a bad thing will obviously be a subjective opinion. I'm thinking the remake is more lax in that regard, and considering that it seems very faithful to the original, I don't think there is much reason to track down the original anymore. Unless you'd like to emulate over paying for the full remake, in which case the original certainly holds up well.