Had to abandon this at the last area when I realised I just wasn't having fun anymore. There's so much here that I love. The music is amazing, the models are really cute and charming, the level and creature design is very creative and fun. But I feel like this remake is, in a weird way, too faithful. There are a lot of dated design decisions in the game that I think would have felt fine if played on the original hardware, but when positioned against the modern improvements they stick out really badly. And there is just a strange sense of things being missing in the game. Like the lack of text writing noises or beepspeech during dialogue - and no character talking sounds at all in cutscenes which makes them feel unfinished.

The characters in general are just kind of... Okay? Bowser is probably the highlight. Peach's character is basically non existent. The party rarely feels like an actual party, and the villain is just a big sword I knew nothing about.

I feel like in a world where the M+L series and Paper Mario series exists it's hard for me to like this game outside of just recognising it's value for what it was the first to do. But there are plenty of better Mario themed RPGs these days to pick from so it's hard for this to compete. I hope the remake is really good for those who loved the original though.