Nintendo has been on an absolute tear ever since the Switch launched more than seven years ago. One big contributor to that success has been the Super Mario franchise which has a game selling in the millions in just about every genre.
Super Mario Odyssey is the best 3D platformer ever made and arguably one of the best games in any genre. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is still the gold standard of kart racing despite being almost a decade old. Super Mario Party is the de facto party game for us. Mario + Rabbids Sparks Of Hope scratches the strategy itch and the most recent Strikers and Golf games exist as options for sports fans. And there’s more still but the point is that you could purely play Super Mario games alone and still get in a healthy mix of wildly different genres.
Now as we end 2023, Super Mario RPG is here, a Legend of the Seven Stars remake, this game seeks to add the RPG genre to another facet of gaming that modern Mario can rule over but unfortunately we found this attempt sorely lacking.
Super Mario RPG is a turn-based title as Mario and friends go on another adventure to save the land. Players control a party of three which can juggle physical attacks, magic spells and items to defeat enemies in a series of mob and boss battles. The party gains experience and money as they go and towns offer rest and the ability to buy upgraded weapons, clothing and accessories.
All of this is very familiar to anyone who has ever played videogames with Super Mario RPG offering one small twist in the form of the Action Command. Hit A at precisely the right time when attacking to deal more damage, or when receiving damage to lessen it. Action Command is an extremely simple premise but it turns passive turn based combat into a wholly more active affair and even as you master the game’s other systems you still may find yourself missing some tricky timings on the Action Command, always leaving room for improvement.
The entire RPG structure of Super Mario RPG is its biggest downfall. Absolutely nothing here feels interesting or new. This is both a product of this being a remake and the fact that not enough has been done to update the systems or innovate on the original.
One key reason why RPGs are so fun is the sense of progression as you go. Progressing through levels, acquiring more powerful weapons and armour and mastering the game is arguably the entire allure of role-playing. On top of this the ability to customise your experience and build your characters how you want to match your sensibility gives you a massive sense of ownership that other genres usually don’t offer.
Super Mario RPG on the other hand is almost entirely linear both in terms of its characters and how they play. New items are strict upgrades on old ones offering almost no gameplay variety, the characters are all premade famous faces from the Super Mario franchise and you can almost entirely solve the formula of the game after just two or three hours of play.
One example of this lack of RPG intuition happened around the midpoint for us. In a dungeon there was a locked door representing an optional puzzle. It was not difficult at all but did require a few minutes of backtracking and optional fights to solve. The reward was an item that greatly increased speed and it just so happened to be the perfect inclusion for one of slow characters.
This was a great moment and exactly what an RPG should be… except for the fact that around 30 minutes later we reached the next town and found that this speed item was a common merchant offering, selling for so little money that we could have bought one for each and every character in our party.
This is a microcosm of the game’s problems and its inherent lack of satisfaction at every level. Nothing in Super Mario RPG’s gameplay is good enough to warrant special mention and it leaves the entire experience sorely lacking.
Now we can already hear people saying that our expectations are in the wrong place because Legend of the Seven Stars came out in 1996 and it is unreasonable to ask for so much innovation in a remake of a game that is almost 30 years old. Our argument to that is this: Super Mario RPG is a new game in 2023, asking new game money (with the Nintendo premium) and competing against new games that have successfully modernised and innovated over all these years. If Nintendo didn’t want to properly overhaul and reinvent the formula, why don’t we just go and play the original game instead? Alternatively why not go the remaster route and sell the game for less money?
It seems that the lion’s share of effort in Super Mario RPG is in the visuals and presentation. Super Mario RPG is a gorgeous game and it’s a simple joy to look at. This focus on polishing the presentation to a sheen pays off doubly in the cutscenes which employ genuinely funny body comedy that had us cracking a smile more often than not.
The world and its enemies are similarly well realised and venturing into a new area always had us excited for the visual element and not anything to do with gameplay.
Our one tiny complaint in this department is that some characters look better than others. Characters which appear more often in other games like the titular Mario or Peach or Bowser all seem to fit better into the world compared to others like Mallow and Geno. These characters, and several others, seem to have a style that doesn’t mesh with the modern 3D Mario look. We’re not sure if this is a product of converting these classic characters to a new game, but it does create a mismatch that betrays the overall beauty of this game.
On a more “take it or leave it” level is the music. The soundtrack is pleasant enough but it can be repetitive, especially for the type of player who likes to explore and do as much as possible in every area. You can swap between the modern music and the classic soundtrack at any time through a quick menu visit which is nice, but we’ll need some hardcore music experts to weigh in on what they prefer.
For our playthrough we stuck to the newer stuff.
The musically-inclined should also know that there’s quite a sense of rhythm running through the game. The Action Command system works better if you have a sense of rhythm and several minigames also rely on this for a challenge.
Before we wrap up here and leave a final score for Super Mario RPG we do want to mention that we never played the original and walked into this remake without the burden of nostalgia. This is very important given the age of the original and, again, this is a full priced new game that many will be experiencing as is for the first time. It will be interesting to see how the overall gaming landscape reacts to this one as older players and newcomers may clash over this, especially as the original is considered a classic.
Super Mario RPG has tonnes of charm, it looks great and it can be fun to mindlessly blast through, but it offers nothing particularly special and its RPG elements are too light to allow for any actual role-playing or player agency. The fact that this is a remake doesn’t really affect our end experience but we can definitely see a far superior, entirely new game being built on this foundation.
Right now, however, the game we have is difficult to recommend even with its stellar presentation that won it so many points with us.
FINAL SCORE: 6 OUT OF 10.
