A post playthrough Super Mario RPG assessment

The 90s was the golden era of 16-bit console RPGs. You had your Final Fantasy titles, your Secret of Mana, your Lufia games, and, for those unafraid of emulators, Tales of Phantasia.

But, a little late to the scene, riding on the shoulders of giants, came Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.

This was the game that got me interested in the RPG genre to begin with. From there I moved onto those Final Fantasy games and Lufia titles, and the masterpiece that is Tales of Phantasia.

But I first played this game (several times through) almost twenty years ago, now. As such, you'd be right to wonder whether the game holds up or not.

After spending a weekend working through it with friends, I can write confidently that it does. For the most part.

Graphically, the sprites based on 3D-models still look clean and neat (with the exception of monsters like Belome).

Aurally, the music and sound effects have all the charm they do in the other Mario games.

Story-wise, the game is still compelling since several characters and elements of the Mario world are explored for the first and (alas) last time.

And, as far as the gameplay is concerned, Super Mario RPG offers a fine blend of JRPG standards (turn based combat and side-questing for secret areas and items) and Mario-inspired mini-games and platforming.

Though, the game's platforming is much more difficult than I remember. Mostly because the game's isometric viewpoint doesn't lend itself to easily judging distances and depths. Were it possible, warming up with some Sonic 3D Blast probably would've helped.

But Super Mario RPG really shines in its minigames' integration with the main game. Most of these games are played through at least once because of some relevance to the story. Placing them within the structure of the game as a whole keeps you from needing to do any serious backtracking to retry them. The minigames' accessibility also makes the game's world feel much tighter than those that are spread out over expansive world maps.

The cost for that tight world design is high, though. There's little exploration involved in Super Mario RPG. Just as when I played the game as a kid, in this recent playthrough there were a few instances where the crook of a wall or the texture of a rock suggested that something lay just beyond it, if only you had some of Link's bombs or Samus' roll ability.

However, beating an RPG crafted by the masters of the console RPG golden era, SquareSoft (known now as Square Enix) in a weekend (approximately 20 hours) is otherwise unthinkable. Were there an expansive overworld in Super Mario RPG, rather than a node system, much more time would be spent in travel. Not to mention, time spent fighting monsters during that travel.

But that's Super Mario RPG's greatest strength.

Even though when you know what you're doing it's a fairly short RPG, it's an RPG of small, manageable numbers.

At level 22, equipped with the Lazy Shell and the Quartz Charm, Mario doles out 500 damage per turn against the game's final boss. No more than fifteen turns of that damage alone ends him.

Your characters' HP isn't likely to climb much higher than 200.

The game pools together your party's MP into a number that maxes out at 99.

For whatever bizarre reason, you can only ever carry a maximum of 999 coins. If you do so, you'll never be left with less than 300 coins after upgrading all five of your party members weapons and armour.

These relatively low numbers make the game supremely manageable and conceivable. These qualities make the game a welcome reprieve from other more expansive RPGs (like Dragon Quest IX, or the downright intimidating Xenoblade Chronicles), while also offering a ready amount of challenge in its hidden content. Not to mention the infamous achievement of winning the Super Suit for executing 100 consecutive Super Jumps on a single enemy.

So, though the challenge may be set outside of the main game, and the experience as a whole is short in comparison to other RPGs, Super Mario RPG's rich blend of its name's two key elements locks it firmly in place as a great classic of the 16 bit era of RPGs.

The Links between pasts and worlds

Going back to A Link to the Past after playing a bit of A Link Between Worlds is odd. Most Zelda games are just the same thing over and over again. You're assigned some sort of quest (usually ending with "save the princess"), you go through dungeons, face bosses, and build an inventory that helps you to better navigate the world and the lair of the final boss. But when "the overworld is the same" gets thrown into that mix it's a completely different experience of same-ness.

Because of their shared overworld (in the first part of the game, anyway), A Link to the Past and A Link Between Worlds are a unique pair among the Zelda franchise. With the latter game taking place hundreds of years after the former it's neat to see what's changed and what's remained the same. For the most part, the changes are minimal, but there are a few. The missing chunk of land between Syrup's shop and the Zora's Domain, for example.

One of the weirdest things, though, is the fact that in A Link to the Past's Dark World, Link's house is a bomb shop and in A Link Between Worlds, Link's house becomes Ravio's shop. It's odd because Ravio's garb and strange animal companion look like they might have come from the Dark World. Though, the item renter looks nothing like the trunk-nosed imp that sells bombs in the 16-bit classic.

Reasons to prefer a genre

I need to work on my twitch reflexes. And my spatial awareness. These are the things that playing a few missions of Star Fox 64 have shown me.

Much like the SNES original (a game I beat for the first time only a few years ago), I always struggled with Star Fox 64. Yet, I also really love space combat simulation games like it. As a kid I must have clocked in at least a hundred hours on a Terminal Velocity demo, I played Star Wars X-Wing every chance I got, and I loved Descent. Before I discovered the RPG, the space (or even just aerial) combat simulator was, without question my favourite genre. Not that I was ever any good at it. It was just that I, like every young boy, liked blowing up big robotic things that had evil intentions.

I still do, as last night's blast from the past made pretty clear. At the same time, though, space shooters never really struck me as capable of the emotional impact a good RPG can have.

Ultimately, as someone who already loved writing fiction, the RPG's greater potential for more gripping stories than your standard space combat simulator (at least in the 90s) is what lead to my now insatiable drive to try as many RPGs as I can. Plus, working with a series of menus proved easier than movements in a three dimensional plane and holding steady while aiming.

Ending a quest's lengthy hiatus

I never really played too many Dragon Quest games before taking up Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies nearly three years ago. Somehow, despite my appetite for 16-bit JRPGs I just never hunted down roms of the lauded series in my childhood, when time was mine and most of it was spent on the genre.

Maybe it's the come down from finishing Phantasy Star IV, but today's return session to Dragon Quest IX brought me right back into it. I'm sure having stopped right in the middle of the first big quest (the hunt for the black knight in Brigadoom) also made it easy for me to feel like I never left the game in the first place.

The game plays like so many JRPGs from the SNES era. Battles are turn-based, menus are deep, and the dungeons aren't so much expansive as they are tight. Brigadoom isn't a huge place, but it's got enough stairs and hidden rooms to keep you backtracking and wandering to find the right path. Plus, being able to see treasure chests and pots in adjacent, but seemingly inaccessible rooms is an invitation to deviate from the straight path to dungeon's end.

So far Dragon Quest IX's offered a fine mix of nostalgia and innovations on the formulae I remember from the 16-bit era's Final Fantasy series, Tales of Phantasia, the Lufia games, and even outliers like Secret of the Stars.

A History that Never Was

Hyrule Historia is a must for anyone who calls themselves a Zelda fan. It's true that it gives a bit too much space to Skyward Sword, but the coverage of the other games is greatly appreciated. Though, I wonder if maybe it's been so well received because instruction manuals no longer have as much trivia/concept art as they did in the days of the NES, and SNES.

However, none of those manuals ever had a comic in the back of them.

Compared to the full-bodied manga done by the two-lady team of Akira Hinakawa, that found at the back of the Historia's quite short, but the art is just as sweeping as any of the full-volume counterparts. And the story reads like something that could be a cutscene from Skyward Sword or another game in itself. Which makes fine sense, since the Zelda games keep getting deeper and deeper into that world's past. Hopefully the Wii U game bucks this trend, as we've gone back far enough, for now.

"The Gods," Spiritual, and Actual Successors

Did I miss something?

Aren't the deities of Hyrule God*esses*?

Then why is everything in The Wind Waker "of the gods"?

Maybe it's just staying true to the original Japanese. I'm not sure when in the life of the Legend of Zelda story and world the goddesses Din, Nayru, and Farore were invented (maybe the Hyrule Historia can tell me), but it must've been after A Link to the Past, since that game's Japanese title literally translates as "The Power of the Gods." Could the use of "gods" in The Wind Waker just be another nod to the SNES classic?

Even when I first played The Wind Waker its structure reminded me greatly of A Link to the Past. You've got a mysterious wizard rounding up young maidens, three things to collect before you make a world changing discovery (and get the Master Sword), then you go through further dungeons, gather a great power, and finally face off against a version of Ganon. Shy of being the sequel to A Link to the Past, The Wind Waker is definitely its spiritual successor.

This fact makes me wonder all the more about how Eiji Aonuma and the Zelda team are going to make a direct successor to A Link to the Past. My suggestion: Bring back the magic bar and all the magic that was taken out of A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time due to the SNES' and Nintendo 64's limitations. And, to those worried about spells like Ether or Bombos being over powered game-breakers, Link to the Past 2's use of depth could really even things out.

Hope for the Future

In Radiant Historia pressing the "Y" button swings your sword. This is a small feature that doesn't do much at first. It's how you can trigger pre-emptive battles on the field, and, judging from their reaction to it, can be used to cut down vines after some sort of upgrade. But this feature hints at what will hopefully be a bigger part of the game as it goes forward: Actual environment interaction a la Golden Sun.

So far, all I've picked up is the ability to set bombs on barrels, but this alone has opened up a few extra paths. Most of these paths don't go anywhere yet, but my hope is that with your knowledge of explosives and sword-swinging abilities the game will gain some puzzle elements.

There's nothing wrong with a straight RPG, but adding puzzles to it makes it so much more than a series of fetch quests or grind sessions. Real brain teasers are one of the main things that made the Lufia games on the SNES so memorable, after all.

Radiant Historia already brings time travel to the RPG mix, and puzzle-solving (which could also fit in nicely with the game's timeline(s) system) would surely sweeten its blend.

She Sells Seashells by the Sea Sword

Twenty is all it takes. Maybe there's something there, and maybe there isn't. But if the idea is that the number's supposed to reflect an age, I don't think you'd get a dialogue box that tells you to put your name on it right away.

Yes, I'm talking about the sword upgrade you get from the Seashell Mansion in Link's Awakening.

Considering how blocky and rounded your first sword looks, the upgrade looks like it should be from another game. Maybe there's another connection between Link's Awakening and A Link to the Past here - perhaps the better sword's design is based on one of the Master Sword upgrades from that SNES classic.

The animation for getting it is the stuff of speed metal, as well. See for yourself:

Away Game Special: Anodyne

Getting away from console gaming is fine with me, though Anodyne definitely owes a lot to the NES/SNES era of action adventure games. Because it's a computer-based game, it also smacks quite a bit of RPGMaker 2000 to me. I think it's mostly the game's graphical style, since squat sprites and square environments are that application's bread and butter.

Anyway, though I've only nibbled at the demo so far, Anodyne is a smooth experience that is just slightly off of straightforward. No hands are held, since the game's good at what old school action adventure games were - giving you a finite number of options to go forward and making it possible for you to try them until you find success. And really, that's what's missing from a lot of modern adventure games, the puzzle aspect that doesn't have to be a brainteaser, but can just be bump in the road that's too high to go over, too wide to go around, but completely combustible since you have bombs, or already burrowed through if you look hard enough.

So, though I'm in no way affiliated with the makers of the game, If you haven't already, check out Anodyne here.