The score might be a bit inflated, since Mario RPG is a game that I played a lot as a kid, and I am not immune to nostalgia. That being said, this remake is very faithful aesthetically to the original, and most mechanical changes, though overbalancing the combat in favor of the player, are in service to the overall experience goals I interpret Mario RPG as setting out to fulfill on the SNES. I’d recommend it to anybody who wanted to play Super Mario RPG but never got the chance, It’s a great remake. Not really that surprising, since it was developed by ArtePiazza, the same studio that made well-received remakes of Dragon Quest 4, 5, 6, and 7 that (from what I know) are widely considered to be the definitive versions of their respective games.

For more complete thoughts, I haven’t fully completed the original in years, but given the reputation Mario RPGs and remakes had last decade for sanitizing their aesthetics to be more in-line with what you’d expect from main series Mario games, Mario RPG largely preserving its artstyle in the remake is great to see. It’s great to see a trend starting in Odyssey/Wonder finally leak back into the RPGs which were largely known for being places that Mario was allowed to experiment with character designs in the first place, even if it is only a remake. The only negative thing that stuck out to me was them main series-fying Dry Bones, which sticks out like a sore thumb.

Mario RPG’s story is still pretty cute and fun to this day. Though it’s not anything to thematically write home about, you can tell all Mario RPGs got their happy-go-lucky vibe starting with this one, with quite a few moments that genuinely made me chuckle. I enjoyed the way the party members were written, with Bowser’s need to maintain a powerful, boastful image you can see nobody else in the game buy being funny to watch and Peach throwing herself in the action whenever she’s not kidnapped being a refreshing take on her character. Mallow might be the only character to have an arc, since he spends the game hoping to find his parents, and the moment that plotline gets resolved is honestly really sweet and a bit touching. Don’t have much to say on Geno, he’s just cool. Mario also helps to tie the party together, him being something of a celebrity in the Mushroom Kingdom is fun wish fulfillment for the player but he’s given a good amount of personality despite being unable to say a word. Aside from his excellent miming skills, he has entertaining reactions to situations (i.e. falling over when something unfortunate happens) and he makes for an effective soundboard for party members during their rare emotional moments. The remake doesn’t change too much between the start of the game and credits except for some sick boss introductions and a few cutscenes that forgo the isometric perspective for a more dynamic camera, giving those moments more gravitas. Overall, fun story that set the tone for a lot of Mario RPGs and I feel comfortable recommending it to any fans of other Mario RPGs.

The gameplay is a more interesting to discuss. I say Mario RPG is great for people who dislike turn-based RPGs, and I mean that both affectionately and derogatorily. The game has more content to latch onto outside of turn-based combat than other Square Enix RPGs of the time, such as navigating levels with platforming and its variety of minigames. However, the actual combat is fairly basic. Basic attacks are strong enough to the point where having two powerful attackers fire them off and having one character (often Peach with her overly strong healing abilities) serve as a battery to keep them alive. Combat feels good to play due to action commands making you feel more involved compared to other turn-based games, but its simplicity makes it so that you’re not making very interesting decisions compared to other turn-based RPGs of its ilk. Subsequently, this makes it great for people who dislike turn-based combat but not great for people who crave more depth out of those systems.

The remake makes it slightly easier to explore the game’s depths with the addition of in-battle party member switching. Every party member aside from Mario can be swapped out for another before an action is taken, allowing you to switch out a party member who might not be optimal for a situation. Though this balances the game in the player’s favor, it actually considerable improves the game as it makes Mallow and Bowser worth using. Mallow can be swapped out after using Thought Peak to identify health/weaknesses if he isn’t too helpful, Bowser can be used to throw out powerful physical attacks for extra damage when no other party member is useful, and Peach can be benched when her healing isn’t necessary.

The other big addition to the game is the Action Gauge, which adds more decisions to switching party members in and out. Successfully performing offensive and defensive action commands fills the gauge up, and chaining successful commands together gives your party buffs depending on what characters are in your party. Filling up the gauge completely also allows the party to use one member’s turn to perform a Triple Move, which performs a unique attack defending on your party. These moves can range from straightforward attacks for massive damage to defensive moves like shielding the party from one attack or healing everyone. This helps add a bit more depth to switching in, as you might want to rearrange your party to pull off a specific Triple Move at the right moment or get buffs that best suit your situation.

One question I grappled with briefly was whether these additions overbalance the game in favor of the player. I came to the conclusion that while this is true, switching party members and managing the Action Gauge encourage you to play the game in a more engaging way, and balance didn’t appear to be a concern in Super Mario RPG anyway. Even in the original game, strong equipment is easy to come by, it’s easy to amass money to stay stocked with powerful items, and you can receive random buffs when knocking out enemies that flip the odds in your favor. Extra mechanics like these do a great job at letting players easily mine more depth out of the game while staying true to Mario RPG’s experience goals.

Overall, Mario RPG is a fun, casual turn-based RPG that has you navigate a fun, colorful world launching you from setpiece to setpiece, and is a great game for people who aren’t sure if they enjoy turn-based combat but want to try a simple game in that vein and enjoy Mario games. Give it a shot if it sounds cool!

Risk of Rain 2 is interesting in large part because it doesn’t seem to evolve the formula of Risk of Rain significantly, but rather keep the spirit of its series intact while switching genres between games. While the first game was a side-scroller, the second game is in full 3D, often being labeled as a third person shooter. Fortunately, it largely succeeds at this goal and manages to stand out in its own right. If you enjoy either one of these games and can tolerate the genre shift you’ll most likely enjoy the other.

Risk of Rain Returns worked in large part because you were constantly forced to weigh the short term vs the long term. Navigating levels, choosing to take fights, popping teleporter events, and gunning for certain chests are all decisions that have weight because the game always asks you to pick power vs efficiency under the smoking gun of difficulty increasing over time, and often that choice can be extremely gray. Though the way items interact with your player character doesn’t lend itself to interesting decision-making on its own, it’s the way you’re asked to navigate through these challenges that makes the game compelling. Fortunately, 2 is able to retain this focus despite the shift in genres, save for one element that I’ll discuss later.

One of the best things Risk of Rain 2 brings to the table is levels with more identifiable landmarks. Given how the first game was 2D, it could sometimes be difficult to tell exactly where you are in relation to the rest of the level, which is an issue solved by the transition to 3D. Orienting yourself around levels is super easy to do now, and I rarely get lost playing this game compared to Returns where I actively needed to work to orient myself. Players can also now influence which area they go to via the Bazaar of Time, which is appreciated since there’s more area-specific gimmicks this time around. Abandoned Aqueduct has a button minigame to give you access to a chamber, Siren’s Call has a unique miniboss fought by breaking eggs, and Rallypoint Delta has a super expensive bot to repair that only appears in that level.

Players are also granted slightly more control over their loadout. Multishops are more common, allowing players to reliably gauge whether an investment is worthwhile ahead of time. Additionally, 3D printers/scrappers makes so that players can sacrifice random items in their arsenal to guarantee an item they really want, or prepare scrap ahead of time that is sacrificed first to eliminate that element of chance. This does expose a problem the game has with item balancing though, as I often find myself only using printers with the best items in the game (lens maker glasses, harvester scythes) instead of situationally considering duping based on what survivor I have. I only feel like I make that choice with Focus Crystals, an item uniquely good with brawler survivors and situational for all other survivors.

The Bazaar Between Time also lets the player easily purchase lunar items that are powerful but have significant drawbacks. They’re the kind of item that I wish was more common in Risk of Rain, having powerful buffs that are balanced by some negative effect, (the easiest to explain being the Shaped Glass doubling damage but halving your health) and as such are situationally useful on some survivors while being terrible on others.

My biggest complaint with the game that I alluded to earlier is the teleporter event. In RoR Returns, activating a teleporter summons a boss and begins a 90-second countdown. Once the boss is defeated and the countdown reaches 0, the player can move onto the next stage. What made this event so interesting is that it also spawns tons of enemies, and your movement around the stage is not restricted. Enemies stop spawning when the timer reaches 0, allowing you to approach the boss more easily and creating its own set of interesting decisions to make. This turns every boss encounter into a question of time vs efficiency, as you can camp out the boss and deal with mobs until the timer runs out, but that will increase the difficulty in the long term due to you taking a while.

Risk of Rain 2 makes a couple of critical changes to the teleporter event: you can only “charge” the teleporter (RoR 2’s equivalent of the timer) by standing within a set radius of the teleporter, and while the teleporter event is still active (i.e. the boss is still alive and/or the teleporter is still charging) the player is prohibited from interacting with anything outside of the teleporter radius. These two changes combined reduce the flexibility of the teleporter event significantly. In Risk of Rain Returns, you could pop it earlier and run from the boss to explore the level as the cost of higher enemy spawns, and if you kill the boss before the timer hits 0, you can explore in the meantime to see if you can grab anything before going through the teleporter. In 2, if you don’t struggle with a boss there’s often minutes of wasted time spent waiting for the teleporter to fully charge so you can finally play the game again. Though this could make searching for chests after the event more committal, I don’t think it’s worth all the dead space created in the event you shred the boss. At the same time, I recognize having some limiter on the player’s movement is necessary, as it is far easier to dodge attacks in an enclosed 3D space than an enclosed 2D space. I would propose solving this issue by making chests openable during teleporter events and making the teleporter charge much more slowly instead of not at all if you step outside the radius. Because difficulty increases over time, fighting permanently outside of the teleporter event would be a poor idea. This would make running away from a teleporter event to maybe loot chests or deal with mobs sub-optimal and inefficient, but not outright impossible, which could improve the dynamic of teleporter events significantly.

Overall, Risk of Rain 2 improves some things from Returns’ formula but the flow of the game being interrupted by teleporter events makes me go back and forth on which one I prefer more. Overall though, Risk of Rain 2 made the jump to 3D pretty well all things considered, if you played the first game and liked it or find this game interesting from my review and enjoy third person shooters I’d recommend giving it a go.