While I am not the greatest fan of Chrono Trigger, I can at least appreciate it for trying to streamline the JRPG formula into a digestible and well presented format. It’s like a summer blockbuster: Not a lot to chew on, but you’ll leave the theater satisfied, and hey, you might wanna watch it again some time. It has interesting setpieces, great music, charming art design, it’s the exact kind of style-over-substance package that I can enjoy - and the parts of it that are actually idiosyncratic are genuinely interesting. I love the option to end the game prematurely at any point, for example, it’s a serious commitment to the whole idea of fighting a time traveling cosmic horror.
Now why am I comparing this game to critical darling Chrono Trigger? For Super Mario RPG it really does make sense: It’s a Squaresoft game, it’s meant for more casual players and it mainly tries to capture the audience through a “vibe”, an experience. To me, it seems like Super Mario RPG is trying to do the same kind of trick – pulling the wool over your eyes with its own sense of style and wackiness, trying to get you to hop on the ride and just have some fun with Mario’s shenanigans in this even-more-cartoonish-than-usual depiction of the Mushroom Kingdom.
But It just doesn’t work. I don’t care about Mario’s ride. Super Mario RPG fails at a very fundamental level to engage me and I almost feel bad for not “getting” it, because it’s trying so hard to be cute and charming, but it’s falling flat at every corner.
My biggest point of contention is that the core mechanics of the game just don’t really feel good. There is nothing to keep me even superficially engaged in the battle system, because every fight is laughably easy if you pay the slightest bit of attention, the attack animations are decent, but not outstanding, and worst of all, the action commands feel limp. The latter might seem like a small thing - you could almost call it a nitpick - but considering this is the action you do most often in combat, it only makes sense that it should be polished to a ridiculous degree, and it just isn’t. If you force me to do a timed button press for every single attack and to defend against every enemy attack during your 15-20 hour turn based RPG, you better make really damn sure that it feels incredible to do so. Give it some real crunch, make me feel that I succeeded, make me smile in anticipation before Mario attacks and make me hit that button with entusiasm, make a sound effect that evokes power, show me how the enemy reacts to my defensive action command, give it all some real visual flair. The action commands in this game feel like slapping 2 dry sponges together, I feel nothing when I pull them off. Where Paper Mario plays with sound effect crescendos and large visual indicators of success, Super Mario RPG does a little unsatisfactory jingle and puts some colored stars on the screen and calls it a day. This feeling isn’t helped by the fact that the timing for the special commands is weirdly obtuse and trial-and-error; some attacks have their timing window when the character is taking a swing, some have their window when the attack hits the enemy, and some have their timing window at an undiscernible point somewhere inbetween - and there is no actual indicator to tell when the button really needs to be pushed. You might say this type of timing trial and error is fun, but it’s not.
My second larger point of contention is that the general dungeon design is just forgettable. Most areas feel like a haphazardly slapped together collection of assets and rooms with enemies placed in random spots. Only a few rooms really give off the feeling that they have any deeper design thought put into them – platforming rooms, puzzle rooms or dungeon segments that pose any navigational challenge are rare. The dungeons are largely affairs of walking from point A to point B and fighting enemies inbetween (or not). None of the treasure chest placements are particularly exciting, either. If the dungeons were at least visually interesting or would transport an interesting theme, I could even forgive lackluster dungeon design, but a lot of the dungeons are just the most generic ideas you can think of for JRPGs. Forests. Roads. Sewers. A cave. A mountain. Riveting stuff. The worst part about it that there is so much use of recoloured assets between these excuses for dungeon ideas that there is no way they could ever shine. I am not saying that a Forest is an inherently bad dungeon setting if you pull it off with an interesting aesthetical style, but Super Mario RPG once again simply does not. The forests, roads, caves are neither mysterious, magical, nor do they even have interesting colour schemes, no, it’s just plain old forests, roads and caves. It tries to get away by painting over standard scenarios with it’s claymation art style and by injecting some Mario-Isms, but that’s too little to get away with ideas this generic. Even at its most creative, Mario RPG gets a “that’s kind of neat” out of me. A far cry from the medieval churches, futuristic factories, and ancient civilations from something like Chrono Trigger.
You might say that at least the visual style of the game is interesting and Super Mario RPGs character design really is one of its most distinctive traits, but also one of its most dissonant when it uses enemy designs that don’t fit the Mario mold. Why are there some designs that are trying to be spooky or unnerving (in children’s terms of course) when a lot of other enemies are just goofy looking cartoons? It feels a bit too directionless, there is also no coherent throughline for enemy types within a location. Some enemies are just funny little guys, and some are actual monsters you could describe as such. The character design doesn’t feel cohesive, it just feels like some were designed by Nintendo staff and others by Squaresoft staff.
The weirdest part is that by using these distinctly Non-Nintendo character designs in this setting, it feels like the game isn’t actually convinced that the Mario aesthetic is deserving of an RPG on its own. The principal antagonists are distinctly industrial entities, meant to represent weapons like knives, hammers and spears, whereas the known inhabitants of the mushroom kingdom are what you could call "core scrimblo". This feels weirdly out of place with the conceit that the game is entirely non-serious in its presentation of the story and the characters. There are basically no characters arcs or philosophies at play here, it’s just Mario fending off some invaders and it doesn’t really matter who those invaders are or why they are doing it. One of the first situations you are confronted with are Shy Guys on Pogo Sticks invading a town that you save by fighting a giant knife, and it doesn’t really get any more serious from there. The aesthetical contradictions could have been used to make a point, but the game doesn’t try to, and that makes it feel needlessly confused. At no point in the story is any real drive felt, it’s all silly and meant to be funny, so what is the point of the contrasting designs?
Since the story is so light-hearted, the jokes should at least land, but Mario RPG even fails at being funny most of the time – a lot the humor in the game is just the general idea of some concept or character trait being funny inherently, and these aren’t utilized for real set-ups and punchlines. An easy example: Bowser is a tough guy who is actually more worried about everything than he lets on, and he sometimes lets this slip. That’s the joke. There is no real execution at hand here, just wild gesturing in the direction of this contradictory behaviour. I am going cut the game some slack when I say that this is maybe the result of a subpar translation, because character reactions during story happenings also sometimes don’t really fit what is being said, but this still doesn't excuse the experience I had with that translation. Speaking of story, many of the humorous cutscenes feel like they are supposed to be somehow inherently funny because the main characters are pantomiming what happened to other characters. Now, character sprites in a SNES game are a rather limited resource, so what Mario and his friends are actually pantomiming at other people is often visually underwhelming, and it feels like I’m just supposed to laugh at the idea of pantomiming itself? The incidental jokes and cutscenes reflect a very superficial approach to humor where I feel I am supposed to laugh at the set up for a joke that is never followed up on.
If there is one thing I can say in favor of the game, it’s that I like the music. While it’s not my favorite SNES soundtrack, I can say that I had fun listening to the songs in the different locales and during battles. It hits just the right tone between tension and playfulness, and it’s generally catchy - I even like some of the songs in isolation, which is not something that happens often to me with SNES tracks, to be truthful.
I hate to be this negative about a game that is by all accounts a work of love, but as a whole package I would never recommend it. It’s a confused mess, failing to straddle the line between both the “Mario” and the “RPG” part and ends up satisfying the wish for neither. It tries to be experiential but doesn’t actually pull out all the stops to be remembered on the basis of its story or its locales and it leaves me with a very unsatisfactory feeling, like I wasted my time wishing for more. I feel like I will have forgotten most of the dungeons and characters in a month. I hoped that Mario’s first foray into the world of numbers would be more exciting, but I think I can at least look forward to the other games in the Mario RPG series being more up my alley.
Now why am I comparing this game to critical darling Chrono Trigger? For Super Mario RPG it really does make sense: It’s a Squaresoft game, it’s meant for more casual players and it mainly tries to capture the audience through a “vibe”, an experience. To me, it seems like Super Mario RPG is trying to do the same kind of trick – pulling the wool over your eyes with its own sense of style and wackiness, trying to get you to hop on the ride and just have some fun with Mario’s shenanigans in this even-more-cartoonish-than-usual depiction of the Mushroom Kingdom.
But It just doesn’t work. I don’t care about Mario’s ride. Super Mario RPG fails at a very fundamental level to engage me and I almost feel bad for not “getting” it, because it’s trying so hard to be cute and charming, but it’s falling flat at every corner.
My biggest point of contention is that the core mechanics of the game just don’t really feel good. There is nothing to keep me even superficially engaged in the battle system, because every fight is laughably easy if you pay the slightest bit of attention, the attack animations are decent, but not outstanding, and worst of all, the action commands feel limp. The latter might seem like a small thing - you could almost call it a nitpick - but considering this is the action you do most often in combat, it only makes sense that it should be polished to a ridiculous degree, and it just isn’t. If you force me to do a timed button press for every single attack and to defend against every enemy attack during your 15-20 hour turn based RPG, you better make really damn sure that it feels incredible to do so. Give it some real crunch, make me feel that I succeeded, make me smile in anticipation before Mario attacks and make me hit that button with entusiasm, make a sound effect that evokes power, show me how the enemy reacts to my defensive action command, give it all some real visual flair. The action commands in this game feel like slapping 2 dry sponges together, I feel nothing when I pull them off. Where Paper Mario plays with sound effect crescendos and large visual indicators of success, Super Mario RPG does a little unsatisfactory jingle and puts some colored stars on the screen and calls it a day. This feeling isn’t helped by the fact that the timing for the special commands is weirdly obtuse and trial-and-error; some attacks have their timing window when the character is taking a swing, some have their window when the attack hits the enemy, and some have their timing window at an undiscernible point somewhere inbetween - and there is no actual indicator to tell when the button really needs to be pushed. You might say this type of timing trial and error is fun, but it’s not.
My second larger point of contention is that the general dungeon design is just forgettable. Most areas feel like a haphazardly slapped together collection of assets and rooms with enemies placed in random spots. Only a few rooms really give off the feeling that they have any deeper design thought put into them – platforming rooms, puzzle rooms or dungeon segments that pose any navigational challenge are rare. The dungeons are largely affairs of walking from point A to point B and fighting enemies inbetween (or not). None of the treasure chest placements are particularly exciting, either. If the dungeons were at least visually interesting or would transport an interesting theme, I could even forgive lackluster dungeon design, but a lot of the dungeons are just the most generic ideas you can think of for JRPGs. Forests. Roads. Sewers. A cave. A mountain. Riveting stuff. The worst part about it that there is so much use of recoloured assets between these excuses for dungeon ideas that there is no way they could ever shine. I am not saying that a Forest is an inherently bad dungeon setting if you pull it off with an interesting aesthetical style, but Super Mario RPG once again simply does not. The forests, roads, caves are neither mysterious, magical, nor do they even have interesting colour schemes, no, it’s just plain old forests, roads and caves. It tries to get away by painting over standard scenarios with it’s claymation art style and by injecting some Mario-Isms, but that’s too little to get away with ideas this generic. Even at its most creative, Mario RPG gets a “that’s kind of neat” out of me. A far cry from the medieval churches, futuristic factories, and ancient civilations from something like Chrono Trigger.
You might say that at least the visual style of the game is interesting and Super Mario RPGs character design really is one of its most distinctive traits, but also one of its most dissonant when it uses enemy designs that don’t fit the Mario mold. Why are there some designs that are trying to be spooky or unnerving (in children’s terms of course) when a lot of other enemies are just goofy looking cartoons? It feels a bit too directionless, there is also no coherent throughline for enemy types within a location. Some enemies are just funny little guys, and some are actual monsters you could describe as such. The character design doesn’t feel cohesive, it just feels like some were designed by Nintendo staff and others by Squaresoft staff.
The weirdest part is that by using these distinctly Non-Nintendo character designs in this setting, it feels like the game isn’t actually convinced that the Mario aesthetic is deserving of an RPG on its own. The principal antagonists are distinctly industrial entities, meant to represent weapons like knives, hammers and spears, whereas the known inhabitants of the mushroom kingdom are what you could call "core scrimblo". This feels weirdly out of place with the conceit that the game is entirely non-serious in its presentation of the story and the characters. There are basically no characters arcs or philosophies at play here, it’s just Mario fending off some invaders and it doesn’t really matter who those invaders are or why they are doing it. One of the first situations you are confronted with are Shy Guys on Pogo Sticks invading a town that you save by fighting a giant knife, and it doesn’t really get any more serious from there. The aesthetical contradictions could have been used to make a point, but the game doesn’t try to, and that makes it feel needlessly confused. At no point in the story is any real drive felt, it’s all silly and meant to be funny, so what is the point of the contrasting designs?
Since the story is so light-hearted, the jokes should at least land, but Mario RPG even fails at being funny most of the time – a lot the humor in the game is just the general idea of some concept or character trait being funny inherently, and these aren’t utilized for real set-ups and punchlines. An easy example: Bowser is a tough guy who is actually more worried about everything than he lets on, and he sometimes lets this slip. That’s the joke. There is no real execution at hand here, just wild gesturing in the direction of this contradictory behaviour. I am going cut the game some slack when I say that this is maybe the result of a subpar translation, because character reactions during story happenings also sometimes don’t really fit what is being said, but this still doesn't excuse the experience I had with that translation. Speaking of story, many of the humorous cutscenes feel like they are supposed to be somehow inherently funny because the main characters are pantomiming what happened to other characters. Now, character sprites in a SNES game are a rather limited resource, so what Mario and his friends are actually pantomiming at other people is often visually underwhelming, and it feels like I’m just supposed to laugh at the idea of pantomiming itself? The incidental jokes and cutscenes reflect a very superficial approach to humor where I feel I am supposed to laugh at the set up for a joke that is never followed up on.
If there is one thing I can say in favor of the game, it’s that I like the music. While it’s not my favorite SNES soundtrack, I can say that I had fun listening to the songs in the different locales and during battles. It hits just the right tone between tension and playfulness, and it’s generally catchy - I even like some of the songs in isolation, which is not something that happens often to me with SNES tracks, to be truthful.
I hate to be this negative about a game that is by all accounts a work of love, but as a whole package I would never recommend it. It’s a confused mess, failing to straddle the line between both the “Mario” and the “RPG” part and ends up satisfying the wish for neither. It tries to be experiential but doesn’t actually pull out all the stops to be remembered on the basis of its story or its locales and it leaves me with a very unsatisfactory feeling, like I wasted my time wishing for more. I feel like I will have forgotten most of the dungeons and characters in a month. I hoped that Mario’s first foray into the world of numbers would be more exciting, but I think I can at least look forward to the other games in the Mario RPG series being more up my alley.
JetSetSet
5 months ago