A Super Nintendo Classic Is a Wish Come True! (Super Mario RPG in review)

     Hey friends! Are you familiar with the chant, "Geno for Smash Bros?" Chances are high if you follow the Smash Bros. series at all, but many people have had a hard time understanding the hype around this character as the game hasn't been very accessible for a while. That changed last year when we got a full remake of the original Super Mario RPG, fittingly titled Super Mario RPG. Finally, Geno, Mallow, and Booster among many other original characters have returned in this beautiful and very faithful remake of the original title, so I wanted to talk about it just a little bit today! It's time to equip your Lazy Shells, because we're heading to the Mushroom Kingdom in a very different context!

Same Old Story, But with a Big Twist!

    So, with this being a Super Mario game, the story begins as most of them do, with Bowser kidnapping Princess Peach, leaving Mario to rescue her. In the opening few minutes of the game, Mario has to charge into Bowser's castle and take down the king of the koopas. Right as he is about to be reunited with the princess, however, a giant sword plunges down from the sky and lands right in the middle of the fort, sending Mario, Bowser, and Peach all flying in different directions around the world. This is where the real adventure begins, Mario goes back to the castle to find the sword destroying the bridge to the castle, and unleashing all sorts of monsters on Mario's world, all based around different types of weapons, be it swords, knives, spears, bows, etc. The Smithy Gang, as they're known as, have broken through the Star Road, and it's up to Mario and some new friends (as well as some old ones) to find the seven Star Pieces and fix the Star Road, or no one's wishes will be granted again! Some pretty high stakes there, don't you think? It's a really cool way to weave in some Mario lore to the grander and more serious stakes of the story here, with the Star Road being a bonus world from Super Mario World. In fact, this plot point works so well, it's a lot of the plot of Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64, which was the next big Mario RPG after this one. In this game, however, you're not saving Star Spirits, and in fact, one of your party members is one!

New Adventure, New Friends!

    Mario encounters many colorful characters along the way in this game. It's really a shame, because there are so many creative things that only ever showed up in this game, and then afterwards were never really seen other than maybe having a cameo. Mallow, the first party member that Mario encounters in the game, thinks that he's a frog, even though it seems clear that it's not the case, as he has the appearance of a little cloud guy wearing pants, and it rains whenever he cries. He's raised by the Frog Sage (which in the original game was hilariously called Frogfuscious), who is one of the instigators of the quest, and the one who eventually tells Mallow to go with Mario to find his real family, as he's not actually a frog. The other original character that becomes a party member is Geno, who is essentially if Pinocchio came to life to fight. He is a toy possessed by a star spirit who comes down to help Mario out against the Smithy gang and to restore the power of wishes. I'm honestly not sure why everyone has been wanting Geno to be added to Super Smash Bros, but I'm completely on board. I think the main thing is just it would be nice to get more representation from Super Mario RPG as a whole, and I feel like Geno would be a better character for that kind of game than Mallow would be, who would be the obvious other pick. Smithy himself is a very strange villain, who doesn't show up at all in the game until you're actually about to fight him. It's a bold choice, as there are no side cutaways to him as the game is going on, showing the plans that he's putting in place, you're just going through his lair at the end of the game, and then suddenly, there he is! You fight him and you're done. He's also interesting because he actually creates all of the different bosses and enemies that you fight in the game, or at least the ones that look like weapons, and in his lair, it's a whole factory full of these bosses on conveyer belts. Smithy is a blacksmith, after all, making him a perfect villain for an RPG that goes against the norms of typical weapons for the likes of cymbals, a parasol, and a chain chomp instead.

    Of course, not all of the characters are new. Bowser, for one, is a show-stealer, and this game still gets a lot of credit for giving him his personality, as well as giving him the role of comic relief in most of the Mario RPG games even today. He's always so funny in the Paper Mario games, as well as the Mario and Luigi series, and while he is a bit more serious in the traditional Mario games, he still retains some of the silly charm that is established here really well. Princess Peach is as kind and caring as ever, but this may have been the first time that we saw that spark of fire in her, leading her to join the adventure to save the kingdom and the world that she cares so much about. We also have a little side adventure with the Yoshis on Yo'ster Isle, not Yoshi's Island, where one of the Yoshis who lives there wants to beat Boshi in a race. You even get to meet one of the greatest characters in all of Nintendo's history: Big Yoshi! He's a pretty big deal, mainly just because of how he looks. I'm a big fan of this big guy, and I was worried that they wouldn't have him in the remake, but they put him in!

The Music!

    It would be wrong of me to talk about how special this game is without bringing up the incredible soundtrack. Yoko Shimamura, arguably best known now for composing for the Kingdom Hearts series, also wrote the score for this classic game, and came back for the remake as well! You can tell how much love she put into these tracks, along with the orchestra that she assembled to rerecord and remix them. The most nostalgic track for me has to be what plays in the Forest Maze, I'm not sure if this is because of the flash cartoon from back in the day that added lyrics to that song in particular, but something about the song has really burned itself into my memory, and I was worried that these new orchestrations may not be able to hold up to the original brilliance on the SNES, but I was very wrong. The tracks are extended past the limits and simple melodies in the original game to sometimes add a good bit to them! Of course, there is a toggle for you to switch it back to the original music at any time, but I just want to applaud all of the care that went into this package from the musical side. It's pretty stunning.

The Graphics!

    Another incredible element of this remake is that they recaptured the art style right down to the way the Character sprites are handled, with all of them being much more short and stout than the classic models of these characters, especially different from the ones we see today most of the time. It works really well and it adds a nostalgic note to the fans who grew up with this game, or at least played it sometime before this remake, and it gives a nice new feeling to the new fans, while it never feels weird or anything. The remake does suffer from a few dropped frames here and there, but for the most part, it runs in 60 fps, which looks very nice. It's kind of surprising that this one runs in 60 and the remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door only runs in 30, but I'm sure it has something to do with the overall graphical fidelity, and ultimately it's for the best.

    Truly I feel like it's a miracle that this remake exists at all, and I'm so glad that Nintendo and Square Enix were able to sort out the rights to the point where it could be remade by ArtePiazza, since the original was made through a partnership between both companies. It seems so strange that so many great games are being remade around the same time, but that's just what happens towards the end of a console's life, looking back at Wii U's Twilight Princess HD. We also have Luigi's Mansion 2 HD to look forward to in the next month as well as the aforementioned Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door remake that just came out last week. I hope the general public has enjoyed this remake in the same way that I have. It has been a while since I played it for the first time, but I was surprised at how many secrets I still remembered from playing the original game on Wii Virtual Console. No matter how people think about it, though, Geno and Mallow live on in a new way, and it's just nice to have them back along with the humor and charm of the classic.

Thanks so much for reading this post, friends! It has been a busy few weeks, and honestly I didn't realize that I hadn't already written a review of this, so this has been a long time coming! I hope you enjoyed this remake as much as I did, especially since there has been buzz about a potential sequel since they did such a good job with the remake. That's really more wishful thinking than anything, but it would be nice to see more of these fun characters! Thanks again for all of your support, and I hope you'll all have a great week! Until next time, I'm Jonathan, a Self-Proclaimed Superstar and I'll talk to you again soon!