Mario & Luigi Superstar saga is the first of a long lineage of Mario & Luigi RPGs that were both faithful sequels to Super Mario RPG on SNES, but also a variation of the Paper Mario RPG series that took concepts from both. Since Mario & Luigi games were always released on handheld consoles, it's reasonable to assume M&L as I'll refer to it from here on, was meant as the portable RPG series, while Paper Mario would be the home console series... at least until Sticker Star. With that in mind, M&L might come off as an afterthought or not nearly as ambitious or high quality comparatively, but not only does it succeed expectations, it's incredibly transformative of the Mario world and really sets itself apart from its contemporaries.

M&L Superstar Saga is as ambitious as it is transformative. The emphasis of Superstar saga is the simultaneous control of Mario & Luigi, and how they put their skills together to traverse and clear puzzles, or separate and tackle objectives with their own more limited skillsets. While ultimately the pacing can be reduced to a crawl in many sections requiring constant "Bros. Moves", the level design is very proactive to keep these capabilities in mind which allows for more creative concepts in level design to keep it interesting and unique. Cycling through the Bros. Moves can be a chore, and swapping the positions of Mario & Luigi grows tiresome especially when it's required to do multiple times in one section, which is probably why the next few entries do away with it, to remove intrusive requirements for progression. With that said, all the animations and interactions Mario & Luigi have with each other using these abilities are incredibly charming and pretty funny, especially if you don't have a specific ability yet and attempt to use the action combination, you can see Mario or Luigi get rather angry with the other, which I really like.

The story and general world building of Superstar Saga are simple, but present some very interesting ideas. A neighboring kingdom of the Mushroom Kingdom, BeanBean Kingdom pays Princess Peach a visit in an attempt to enforce relations and presumably peace. All for it to be a ploy for Cackletta, a rather infamous individual in BeanBean Kingdom, to steal Princess Peach's voice for undisclosed reasons at the start. It's incredibly interesting to have a villain other than Bowser to be the catalyst for Mario & Luigi's adventure, even having Bowser take on a supporting role much like in Mario RPG, unfortunately not playable this time around. While I could tear apart the inciting incident about how the implication of a neighboring kingdom harming another that could easily lead to misunderstandings, war, and many other ugly consequences, I won't because Mario isn't that deep of a franchise, nor would it exactly fit with Mario's upbeat energy and vibe, so we'll continue on. Mario, Luigi (against his will), and Bowser set out for BeanBean Kingdom to stop Cackletta and retrieve Princess Peach's voice, this all goes awry when Fawful, Cackletta's... understudy? Minion? Friend? I don't know, but anyway, Fawful stops them in their tracks, and the real adventure begins from there. While I won't delve into everything here, the story presents a lot of concepts the Mario series has never tackled before which I liked. One thing that really stood out to me is the rather dark undertones this game has, there's definitely a few settings and incidents that come off rather grim or disturbing which was a fantastic subversion for Mario and how the game itself is presented.

Exploring BeanBean Kingdom is great since it presents a lot of settings that haven't been in a Mario game before, but do play it safe with staple environments like a desert and some woods, though the history and purpose of these settings is fleshed out enough and significant enough to Beanbean Kingdom to make them stand out and feel justified. There's also some interesting concepts of Mushroom Kingdom immigration which I find particularly fascinating and wish they delved into that more, but I'm glad it was there at all. As I mentioned, BeanBean Kingdom has extensive history, and you get to go through many historical areas such as ruins, castles, and forgotten structures it really helps the setting of BeanBean Kingdom feel like it's existed for a long time, and has significance in the Mario World without ever being acknowledged or explorable until this game. While it can get a bit repetitive at times, I very much enjoyed exploring these areas and gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation for the setting, since the developers really tried to do everything they could to accomplish that, and I think they definitely did it well.

Combat is very creative while taking notes from other Mario RPG's. Contrary to Mario RPG and Paper Mario that give player input on lowering damage by guarding at the right time, Mario & Luigi takes this concept and expands upon it. In M&L you can potentially avoid taking a single hit of damage through the entire game if you understand enemy moves, timings, and patterns well enough. Rather than guard, Maro & Luigi can avoid damage by jumping, and remove projectiles or other obstructions with hammers, they can even attack the enemy during their turn by jumping on them or smashing them with your hammer during some of their attacks. Not only does this keep combat constantly engaging and forces you to always pay attention, but it rewards mastery and skill remarkably well which is a huge plus. It could inadvertently do the opposite as well though, where the game can come off as too easy and be incredibly unengaging because there's no stake or risk in fights if you never take damage. This is remedied a bit by the fact most enemies in Superstar Saga hit like trucks, especially later on, and attacks become harder to react to with odd timings, wind-ups, and difficult visual tells you need to pay attention to or else you're in a world of trouble. Not to mention the status effects in this game like tripping prevent you from dodging the next incoming attack, which can be devastating depending on the circumstance. It's... an odd system, but I think Superstar Saga does a great job at balancing it and gradually increasing the difficulty overtime to not make it feel inconsequential.

M&L has a big emphasis on timing with both counterattacks, but also regular attacking. This is very much like Mario RPG and Paper Mario where just before landing an attack, pressing the corresponding button will ensure your attack goes off correctly. Which, once again ensures the player is always focused and engaged with combat encounters so they can get through it quickly or optimally so they can progress the game. M&L takes it a step further with Bros. Attacks. While you're learning different traversal techniques outside of battles, those same techniques can be used in combat to perform very powerful attacks that require multiple different button inputs to pull off for a huge payoff of damage. Bros. Attacks require both Mario & Luigi, and each have different button combinations and timings you need to learn and master before utilizing them properly. The game does a fantastic job with the ability to make the Bros. Attacks easier to perform, but cost more BP (Bros. Points) to use, by slowing down the animation and showing the button prompts on screen. You can increase the difficulty of these moves which will decrease the amount of BP used, but the attack will move at normal speed and with/without button prompts depending on the difficulty you selected for it. I love this idea a lot since it feels like a tutorial while still giving the player's a reward with a higher cost, while mastery of the move only increases the rewards with a lower cost. There's an additional layer to all this as well, if you use a specific Bros. Attack enough times, the move will gain an "advanced" variation which is much harder to perform, but have additional benefits like stealing items, giving status elements, or simply doing more damage. No other M&L game does this, or really any other Mario RPG, so its exclusivity, while sad, is a huge boon this game has going for it. The amount of learning and mastery of these moves only to become harder and more rewarding is an incredible idea that never feels impossible to implement in your gameplay, but you also don't necessarily need to if you want to stick to the normal versions. To be frank, there's specific Bros. Attacks that are so over-tuned anyway, you'll probably end up using them the entire playthrough, which is unfortunate because it sort of defeats the point of all the variety and evolving moves, but it's still a very much welcomed addition.

Sound design and music are phenomenal here as well. There's a ton of upbeat tracks, a good amount of ambiance, good climactic music, everything you need is here. Nothing really stands out in a bad way except a few voice lines that sound a bit off, but other than that, nothing really stood out as bad or distracting.

Superstar saga impresses me as the first outing for this series. A lot of my criticisms are either fixed or at least addressed in later entries, the prospect of a new kingdom, characters, antagonists, and concepts for the Mario world are very much welcome and executed incredibly well while feeling very creative. BeanBean Kingdom feels like it really belongs with an extensive history that is fleshed out throughout the game while exploring it, while also slightly dipping its toes into Mushroom Kingdom immigration and general relations enough to satisfy me as well even if I did want a bit more of that. The combat is very innovative with a strong emphasis of mastery that rewards players constantly and feels very satisfying to master. Bros. Attacks having built-in tutorials for a higher resource cost so you can familiarize yourself with it to increase the difficulty while lowering the cost is great, it gets even better when those attacks get harder variations later with even more rewards to further encourage mastery is honestly something I want to see more of in RPG's 100%. I highly recommend this game since it's very creative and has a lot of unique concepts that you won't really find anywhere else. My largest criticism is really just some of the level design involving Bros. Moves to progress, and constantly having to switch positions to use certain ones can be annoying, but otherwise, everything here is very well done. I suppose my next review will be Mario Wonder in a week or two depending how long it takes, so please look forward to that as well. Thank you all for reading!

For this particular holiday season, me and a buncha Discord moots did a little "backlog secret santa" where each person was secretly assigned another to pick a game out of the other's backlog and make them play it. At the moment, I'm still unaware of who gave me Superstar Saga, but I'd like them to know I enjoyed it a pretty nice amount.

Before this little event, my only experience with any sort of Mario RPG was the third of this series, Bowser's Inside Story, and a forever unfinished run of Paper Mario: Sticker Star. I liked Bowser's Inside Story a shit ton, even going so far as to call it my favorite Mario game out of all of them, but for some reason I just never got around to trying any of the others. Glad I finally did with this one, though, since I definitely had fun with Superstar Saga, although it might've taken just a while to really start getting into it.
I think a problem I had with the game that didn't start fixing itself up until about three or four hours in, was the combat. With the amount of overworld encounters you face, you will be fighting lots of the same enemy over and over again, and the way the Mario & Luigi series does battles doesn't really help its case. Combat is extremely simple, time your A/B presses at the right time for extra damage, time your A/B presses at the right time on the enemy's turn to dodge. It's not until the Bros. Attacks when things start getting a little more varied, even if it is just a few more, flashier button timings for bigger numbers. It just makes all of the fights, including bosses unfortunately, rather forgettable.
The most charm Superstar Saga provides would be in the characters, in my opinion (and I've heard this is a pretty common thing among all of the older Mario RPGs.) There are a lot of great interactions, designs, even some quick cameos that were fun to see. It's always great seeing Peach get more speaking roles, the Bean Royalty (or whatever I'm supposed to call them) are all entertaining characters, there were some lines of dialogue that I had to do a quick double take on, I just don't have enough ways to say that this game's writing was shockingly entertaining, but I guess blame that on my lack of experience in these games.
I'll be honest and say I had the music off for a good majority of my playthrough. It's nice, and obviously I let it play for a little bit whenever I reached a new area, but it's not something I'd be willing to sit through for extended periods of time. Especially considering, again, the sheer amount of overworld encounters you'll be sitting through constantly cutting off the music with the same old battle theme every single time.

It was a lotta fun. It took a while to get there, but once I did, I had fun pretty consistently throughout, and I'm glad I had something to finally push me to try it out. Even if it was a little excruciating thinking about all the other games I wanted to play/replay lmao

Very nice 8/10. Looking forward to maybe also trying out some more of its sequels.

small tangent, people overhyped the hell out of that final boss. it's really not that bad, just dodge lol.

The best way to describe Superstar Saga is charming. It's not a particularly long or difficult game. It's not a particularly hard game. It's not a particularly complicated game, but it is charming. The Beanbean Kingdom is weird enough to be interesting, while not so weird that you ever really need to question anything. The gameplay is simple and both enemy attacks and bros. attacks are kind of simple when compared to the later M&L games, but timing your button presses to attack and dodge is fun enough to keep the combat enjoyable. The handful of minigames scattered throughout also help to break things up, even if a few of them like the minecart segment or the puzzle game on the S.S. Chuckola kind of suck.

A game I remember playing but never finishing as a kid - boy is it clear now why that was. Extremely charming and for most of the run time it's a fun Mario romp with a solid JRPG skeleton but when you hit a boss fight it reveals a streak of masochism. Boss fights are incredibly long and frustrating, with attack patterns lasting long past the "you have mastered this mechanic" range and into "dodge this attack with an incredibly small timing window 45 times in a row" territory. JRPG battles being a long slog is one thing, but the action component required for dodging attacks and attacking enemies is actually a physical drain - the final boss battle took me over an hour and left my hands and wrist in physical discomfort (note - you can definitely take breaks - you should in fact!). I don't know if I was chronically under leveled - it's definitely possible! But it was a real pain point in a game I otherwise had a pretty good time with.

The game is full of charm and nintendo polish - animations, puzzle mechanics, sound effects, and music are perfectly tuned and extremely satisfying. I can't say it was perfect or capital g Great, but it's definitely worth taking a look at to see what it's all about.

I don't really like turn based RPGs but this game is so good, i love it. The combat is really fun, and the music in this game goes CRAZY. I'm not a huge fan of the turn based combat format but the way this game does it is so much fun. The combat is simple, you attack on your attack turn and use attack pattern memorization to not get hit during the enemy turn and its so fun. I'm not a fan of how in other turn based games i have to sit and pray my enemy doesn't turbo fuck me and that theres nothing i can do about that, so i like how i can do something during the enemy turn like remembering the attack patterns and dodging or stopping enemy moves with what i learned through attack patterns instead of hoping i get lucky. This game has a lot of personality and charm to the Mario and Luigi sprites and i have so many memories of those sprites in old youtube sprite animation vids especially Mario bros Z.

É um jogo que eu sinceramente acho questionável o quão bom as pessoas falam, não me levem a mal, é um jogo bom, mas ele sofre de muitos erros que eu muito raramente vejo as pessoas comentando. As dungeons são um tanto quanto chatas, no começo elas até são divertidas e os puzzles são interessantes, mas com o passar do tempo fica cada vez menos divertido e os inimigos cada vez mais fortes, só que a força deles não segue o balanceamento do jogo, do nada eles ficam forte pra cacete. Os mini games sofrem do mesmo, no começo é legal mas com o passar do tempo fica uma merda, as vezes por um erro bobo tu tem que fazer toda merda de novo até passar, e Jesus os mini games da dungeon final são um inferno, não vejo alguém que realmente consegue se divertir com eles. No geral a última dungeon é bem chata, ela é uma junção dos mini games merdas com os inimigos chatos, e ainda por cima uns chefes insuportáveis. E por falar em chefe, MEU DEUS COMO O CACKLETTA É UM LIXO, ele é um boss absurdamente forte, com ataques extremamente punitivos e que tem curtas janelas de esquiva, não basta isso ele tem um HP imbecil de alto e sempre que tu morre nele volta da primeira fase, o desgraçado ainda pode usar alguns debuffs. De resto esse jogo também não tem nada muito exemplar, o combate é legalzinho, o humor é bem sem graça e olha que eu dou risada com quase qualquer merda e o worldmap é uma bosta, é um saco as vezes atravessar metade do mapa pq os fast travel dessa versão são quase inexistentes. No final é um bom jogo mas que não é nada além disso, só bom, a continuação, Partners in time melhora em muito bastante coisa. Tier B, 7/10

(Note: I'm just getting home from a long trip, so I'm writing this in the wee hours of the morning. Therefore, this isn't going to be an in depth review, and I apologize)

I think this is the perfect game to introduce people to RPG's.
For one, it's fairly easy (except for that final boss), if you get the Star B items and distribute stat points well. Even so, it's not a pushover. So it challenges just enough.

It has a surprisingly large overworld for a GBA game, but it isn't overwhelming. It's full of zaniness that bypasses and even at times parodies the RPG conventions. The story doesn't take itself extremely seriously, and you can tell from the onset. However, that's actually what makes the game stand out.

There are a large number of sidequests, and the graphics are charming, with great spritework that makes it feel like a DS game.
The battle system is really unique. Sure, it takes cues from its predecessors SMRPG and Paper Mario, but it adds its own twists. For example, in order to be able to dodge enemy attacks well, you have to read their cues. Some enemies will look left or right before attacking, some will have a red or green signal, which tells you which Bro the attack is going to.

It's a really interesting system. It adds kind of an active element to the turn-based RPG system. Instead of just waiting for your turn passively, it felt like you were really participating in the battles.

Recommending for just about anyone to try this one.

Road to Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door— Part 2

Y’know, maybe turn-based RPGs ain’t so bad. At the very least, they ain’t bad when Mario is involved.

Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga sacrifices some of the heart and atmosphere of Paper Mario when adapted to the GBA. The plot is a nonstop barrage of jokes, one-liners, and slapstick that rarely ever takes itself seriously. Thankfully, it all works due to how consistently silly and hilarious the entire adventure is, to the point that it comes off as an affectionate parody of traditional RPGs.

The characters are amazing. This game really solidified Mario and Luigi as characters: Luigi is the lovable coward who’s basically used as chew toy by everyone around him, and Mario is the supportive, more straight-faced (yet still goofy and cheerful) big bro who looks after him. The two have such an adorable dynamic with each other; they share numerous bro hugs throughout the game and whenever one of them falls during battle, the other will run over, put him on their shoulders, and keep fighting. Awwwww.

Aside from Luigi, the game’s main sources of comedy are the trio of Cackletta, Fawful, and Prince Peasley. Cackletta and especially Fawful are both excellent villains with over-the-top personalities that perfectly contrast each other; Cackletta, despite being more serious and powerful, is also pretty damn gullible, while Fawful, despite his ridiculous speech patterns and obvious psychosis, is MUCH smarter than he appears. Prince Peasley has a comparatively smaller role, but his rampant egotism is always funny and charming, thanks to the fact that he’s still friendly and helpful to the Mario Bros. in spite of his overconfidence.

I loved the overworld. The Beanbean Kingdom is structured almost exactly like a Zelda game, which is obviously high praise from me. You use whatever new abilities you’re given to navigate Mario and Luigi across new terrain, find dungeons, and solve puzzles, some of which have genuinely clever solutions. On the topic of dungeons and puzzles, the penultimate one, Joke’s End, is reminiscent of Zelda dungeons in all the right ways. It’s confusing, long, and oh-so-challenging. I love it. The music kinda grates on me, though…

I won’t talk about the combat too much, since I don’t know a lot about RPGs. All I’ll say is that it’s fun and fluid, but not as deep as Paper Mario’s.

Overall, Superstar Saga is an impefect, yet fast-paced and awesome start for a handheld RPG series.

One of the best games ever to introduce anyone to the greater world of RPGs. It's still Mario so the plot is baby-mode, but the combat is so engaging and varied and the writing is very good and holds up nearly 20 years later. The world is very well-condensed and it's very easy to navigate the world quickly, no time is wasted loading between the map transitions and you're constantly engaged. Badges and armor definitely can help you overpower the endgame and unfortunately you can't remove them when they're equipped, that's my #1 gripe with the game. You can opt not to equip anything past the mandatory item use if you want more of a challenge, though. The game is balanced better around no equipment than equipment, funnily enough however. Mush Badge OP. Great final boss, but getting there can be a gauntlet that the rest of the game doesn't really prep you for. Still a fire game and I'm glad the difficulty peaks at the end. EZ 5 star game.