Super Mario "It's a WONDER I ain't got a lot of kids 'cause I just pull up and spray on it‼️"



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I had tried two or three times to play this, initially emulated on PC, and then through the official rerelease. It wasn't until after it had been patched (there were many framerate issues) that I picked it up for my Switch. There was something really alluring about this follow-up to Chrono Trigger (a game I had only played for the first time a couple years ago) that, for whatever, reason had fallen flat.

The colour-based combat/element system is really interesting, but setting up elements themselves quickly gets tedious - most of the time I was auto-setting things and tweaking one or two things. Trying to include primary characters (a handful out of a potential 45) for dialogue options can be a pain, as there wasn't a great deal of variety in their colour attributes.

The story has some fun stuff happening in it, but the pacing quickly goes off the rails, and trying to comprehend what it was getting at (let alone emotionally resonate with) seems to require a perfect recall of specific events in Chrono Trigger, which I didn't have. I'm not too proud to admit I did look up some explainers after, but I'm sort of glad it didn't spoonfeed me a synopsis of CT either.

Despite all the above, I found my appreciation deepened when I looked up all the endings on YouTube, one of which was a secret Developer's Room. This must have taken a fair bit of work in itself, and involved a lot of the devs presented as NPC's proudly explaining and demonstrating the components they'd worked on. Clearly, they really loved what they'd created, even if it didn't hit like its predecessor.

It is hard to recommend this unless you're interested in old video games as historical documents. It's a janky yet charming collection of interesting ideas that don't quite live up to the potential, but it's commendable they tried to make a new game as opposed to just Chrono Trigger 2.

Trivia Time!

Shigeru Miyamoto stated that the name "Metroid" was chosen in honor of American lawyer Metroid Smith, who defended Nintendo in the Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Nintendo Co., Ltd. case.

During the case, Miyamoto paid Smith a visit, who took Miyamoto on the NYC Metro, and then to a Mets game. The serendipity of these Met-based names left Miyamoto no choice, and the word "Metroid" was trademarked that very afternoon.

While trying to find his way back to his hotel after the baseball game, Miyamoto found himself lost in the metro system, encountering terrifying street performers throughout his journey. This underground exploration would inspire the gameplay of the Metroid series, and the game's bosses would each be based on the most upsetting performers that Miyamoto fled from.

Kraid in particular was based on a large man with a rickety green sousaphone, which shot screws and bolts out whenever the man blew too hard into his instrument.

Stay tuned for more Trivia Time segments in the near future!