SMRPG has an interesting place in my life. I got it when I was 12, and it sort of kickstarted my "online life". I started posting on the SMRPG GameFAQs message board, which was sort of my introduction to the internet. I made a lot of online friends there, some of whom I would stay up for hours and hours chatting with on AIM. One of those, I stayed friends with for about 15 years, until he disappeared one day.
Sometimes we would hang out on AIM and see who could answer questions from newbies the fastest. ("Which Final Fantasy is Culex from?" being a favorite.) Other times we would just talk about life. I remember talking with my best friend from those days (the one who disappeared) on the night the US invaded Iraq.
Nostalgia goggles and all, but I miss those days of the Internet.
I know most people will say they transitioned from Digg to Reddit in the 2000s, but I feel like GameFAQs was the spiritual precursor to Reddit because there was a board for every game and even more general boards for most interests.
It had to be one of the most popular Web 1.0 sites around
Thank you! I hope he's doing okay, wherever he is. He did this a few times, where he would disappear, then come back later with a new username, saying that he had to get away for awhile for emotional reasons. This time he never came back again, though. I have regrets, and feel like I wasn't a good friend to him near the end. I just hope he's happy.
I had absolutely no idea. I always saw him referred to as a final fantasy boss. I guess in mario rpg he's from that universe, but he's not actually from the universe. Crazy.
Culex uses the Final Fantasy 4 boss battle music, so some people mistakenly think he is from the game but it's just the music. I've played through FF4 over 10 times and he definitely is not in it ;)
SMRPG is great. It's absolutely "baby's first JRPG" (but with actual stats, not the low stats of Paper Mario) and it wears that badge with pride. I don't think there's a JRPG more accessible than this one if you're not familiar with the genre - the UI of the original is very much geared around "make it understandable to people who've only ever played the Mario platformers" and it just... works. From what I've seen, that's an element the remake has mostly left intact, which is good to see.
I can't find myself saying that Geno and Mallow "don't fit the Mario canon" - we've seen characters in the RPGs who have full arcs or "emissary" style personalities (Paper Mario 64 and Super Paper Mario jump to mind immediately) and the baddies almost certainly are just as fitting as the random cadre of bosses you get in the platformers.
I don't think it aged that badly either. There's a sort of oddball humor to the game because it was originally translated by Ted Woolsey who didn't have a series bible for the Mario games. (Especially since a lot of the games humor in some places was derived from Japanese anime and stand-up comedy, so he had to invent certain things from whole cloth since the references are otherwise incomprehensible to a non-90s Japanese audience).
That said the game is definitely from a time before corporate brand management forced these characters to be stripped down to just their most basic personality traits. I'd say that's a good thing though.
It's just a really good game overall and it's easy to see how Paper Mario ended up evolving on these concepts and what's the good old "Square weirdness" that's only present here. Makes you wonder where things could've gone, had Square not moved FF7 development from the N64 to the PlayStation.
" I don't think there's a JRPG more accessible than this one"
I'd argue there's one more, though I may be biased as it's what got me into RPGs - Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. It's a relatively unknown title as it was an attempt by the Final Fantasy franchise to get beginners into RPGs. It's like Super Mario RPG in a lot of ways, including seeing monsters on the overworld. However, it's much more like table-top RPGs, without mechanics such as timed hits and with more standard RPG monsters and spells. Personally I love the art style they went with in the game, it's the peak of pixel art IMO.
Yeah, my friend and I got MQ when it first came out and beat it in a single day. IIRC, the resurrection item was cheaply available, instant-death to undead enemies, and healed living characters up to full health.
There were some fun box-moving/jumping puzzles though.
It's generally a fun game and fairly streamlined, but there are some trash fights (mainly in the fire region) where it's really easy to get stun-locked to death. Or get a game-over from having both party members get petrified by the monsters in between your turns.
With SMRPG, you can at least still block while asleep/mushroomed/scarecrowed.
Mystic quest peak moment: a fight with Naga/medusa with low HP. The medusa sprite would change from the regular giant femme fatale image, to an old lady, distraught about losing her hairpiece.
Odd game for sure
Speaking of Peak pixel Art :
Paladins quest. Thats Mystic quest on crack
Maybe it’s just nostalgia but neither paper Mario nor Mario & Luigi come a light year away from SMRPG for me. They feel just like bland superficial attempts at a formula when the formula is actually the least important part of SMRPG. The apparent weirdness that the reviewer mentioned is for me exactly why I love it: the characters just are what they are; you don’t have to understand, their unexplainable weirdness makes them (and the game) so unique.
Game design from the 80s and 90s has an aspect that will never come back again: players could be expected to spend actual time with a game, play it without rushing, explore and find things out on their own. The world has changed and I will not say what is right or wrong, but this expectation and design will never come back.
Paper Mario was initially fine IMO. It laserfocused into a very different niche; because it made stat logic simple math puzzles, the developers were able to build out the interactive element to SMRPGs fights into something that feels appropriate, yet not too obtrusive (something which the franchise would end up losing by the time Sticker Star came rolling around). A lot of attacks in SMRPG just have one button you press to make them stronger; by contrast Paper Mario would introduce things like stick flicking, holding moves or inserting certain button combinations to make them stronger.
Tonally I'd say 64, TTYD and Super manage to stick close enough to being "quirky, yet funny" with all of them having some emotional beats that they don't undercut. Sticker Star, Color Splash and Origami King all veer into self-parody levels when it comes to the writing and it just... sucks really. It's hard to take the entire thing seriously when everything you interact with makes a joke about how everything is made of paper every other sentence.
Mario & Luigi for the most part isn't really based on SMRPG. Most of it's DNA comes from a game called Tomato Adventure instead. That said, it did end up borrowing the more superficial RPG elements. Superstar Saga and Partners in Time probably fare the best in terms of mixing more RPG-like elements, while the games after would rapidly swing between "way too easy" and "absurdly difficult" when it came to the interactive component.
I'd say that last bit about game design only really started to fade away in... around the early-to-mid-2010s really. It was falling out of favor before that with Xbox and Playstation's approach to game design but the whole "everything is online now" means that games are trying to fight with their players against the inevitable deluge of other games out there.
Cool, thanks for the analysis, you obviously have played much more Paper Mario and M&L than I have. :)
Yes, it's inevitable, I understand and that's why I said that I don't want to step into right vs. wrong territory. It is what it is, but personally I find it exhilarating to step into a world like the ones from King's Field or Shadow Tower (early From Software games) and realize I have absolutely no frigging clue of what's going on around me, and then slowly learning how to handle the crushing difficulty until I master it. By coincidence the commenter below mentioned From Software which was exactly what I was thinking of when I commented. Early Souls games are also good examples, but even they have become basically arcade-fighting games by now.
I don't know, maybe. I'd certainly agree that at least the King's Field and Shadow Tower games are like that, perfect examples of how you can start a game in a complete state of WTF and slowly get better and better until in the end you feel like Superman. And Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 and 2 might fit that too, but from then on (DS3, Bloodborne, Sekiro) it became more of a question of combat challenge than actual discovery/exploration itself.
I'm currently doing a sweep of the From catalogue in release order, and I have to say, wow I love their early approach to game design with King's Field and Shadow Tower. (Armored Core is fun but not really my cup of tea)
I wouldn't consider that to be the "Square weirdness" from the Square of the 90s... For today, maybe.
What I mean moreso by that is that FF games up until 9 more or less had this shared tone of "stories with gravity interspliced with extremely goofy moments and oneliners".
SMRPG fits that tightrope almost as well as the more well known games it shares a platform with (Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6); there's multiple gags but the game also still treats this idea of "Bowser just got upstaged by this army of metal guys" with a completely straight face. The stuff surrounding the core story of the Seven Stars isn't undercut by anything but it's still followed up by the running gags of Mario doing impressions of the various NPCs he's met because he's a silent protagonist and they wanted to animate an explanation.
Later Mario RPGs would largely ditch that gravity in favor of just going all-in on the goofiness as the RPGs went on (Mario & Luigi got a really bad case of that). Square on the other hand bled creatives during the merger with Enix until Nomura was the only one left and he got super up in his own ass about storytelling... which led to Kingdom Hearts becoming what it is.
I dunno. I was a big fan of Secret of Mana which has a really disappointing multiplayer. Three people really can control three characters at once but if you want to cast a spell or change weapons you open up a menu that stops the action for everyone else. Sometimes I think about hacking the game so the menus appear out-of-line so the multiplayer really is fun.
A multiplayer RPG was almost unheard of though until MMOs became a thing. Local multiplayer RPG was always quite rare. Interesting that Secret of Mana even attempted it.
Uh... except MUDs - which absolutely dominated the early era of gaming and still exist as a small but extremely dedicated player base to this day. Text will always be an extremely compelling medium for RPGs since you're only limited in your expression by your imagination - there is no graphical hindrance to what actions occur.
True, and I enjoyed a space based one that I used to play quite a bit back then, but I guess I would consider MUDs to be MMOs as well. They still ultimately required an internet connection and console games didn't really become popular for net based play until PS2.
Mario RPG might possibly be my favorite video game of all time. I grew up pretty poor and really wanted an N64 for Christmas. We couldn’t afford it at the time so I found an alternative - I remember being sad about it, but I found a used copy of Mario RPG for something like $30, this was at the end of 1996. When I sat down with it it’s like something clicked. I didn’t get the N64 for another year but it didn’t matter. I still remember everything about this weird and wonderful game. I haven’t gotten the remake yet, maybe partially because I don’t want to ruin those memories…
It's right up there for me as well. I remember getting it for the SNES and not understanding it. I was quite young. I knew Mario, but I had no concept of an RPG. I didn't touch it for years then picked it back up and loved it.
I only played it through emulation (on ZSNES, in Windows 98!) but I was very young, and I'm a non-native English speaker so the gameplay felt even more obscure to me. It's crazy how now, that I have a better understanding of English, some things I got stuck for a long time when I was a kid were actually quite simple.
The most fun to me, it's that still retains the magic, the OST is still great (and the option to use the classic one is quite a gift), it feels mysterious and magical. They did an amazing job.
What I mean is that the SNES cartridge for Super Mario RPG had a SA1 enhancement chip which is a processor that's faster than the one shipped with the original console, the Ricoh 5A22.
So unlike most games today which are mostly a ROM device, SNES games were actual computers on a cartridge.
Oh I see.. I thought you were saying that the switch cartridge had an embedded controller that was faster than the SNES processor (and probably the SA1 chip too)
But I think they were saying the chip in the cartridge this time is faster than the chip in the cartridge last time (which was still faster than the SNES's processor)
For what it's worth, the remake is faithful and careful. The menu even allows you to restore the original music (though I think the updates are awesome).
As someone who's also playing through the game for the first time now, I can both see the ways in which it holds up, and the ways it doesn't. Personally I don't think the characters feel out of place in the Mario universe, since the RPGs in general tend to take a very different approach to their cast and universe than the platformers do. The Smithy Gang feel as Mario like as the Shroobs, X-Nauts, Super Paper Mario cast in general, Legion of Stationary, etc. They're not traditional Mario esque species, but they work very well for the story they're needed in.
Where it feels a bit archaic is in the gameplay side of things, simply because its successors have built on its ideas so much. The action commands and being able to block enemy attacks in battle were a novel concept back then and still work well, but the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi series have taken those ideas so much further than it can feel a tad quaint by comparison. When your successors let you block/counter everything and have attacks that sometimes play out like entire mini games, having moves that require pressing a single button with seemingly arbitrary timing can feel a tad basic.
And the overworld exploration feels a bit similar sometimes, just because of how future games go full on Zelda style exploration dungeon with your abilities and how you can navigate the world with them, while this one mostly plays out more like a traditional RPG overworld map.
But it's definitely very approachable for a new player, and someone who hadn't played this in the 90s is going to get a very enjoyable experience trying the remake for the first time in the 2020s.
As someone who adores Paper Mario, I'm actually really enjoying the simplicity of all actions being timed A presses. I've found that combats have a snappiness and flow to them due to it, and there's enough variety in the changing timing of different weapons that it stays fresh.
Yeah, I just can't get over the Paper Mario games and I am also a great fan of Mario and Luigi: Dream Team which takes advantage of the stylus on the 3-DS to deliver some of the most interesting boss fights I've ever seen. (some of those are somewhere between a boss fight and a minigame)
After Final Fantasy III/VI, Chrono Trigger, Secrets of Mana, Illusions of Gaia, Super Mario RPG, etc..
The golden age of RPG's was the release of the playstation. The combination of mechanics that had been refined into the richer world of cd quality audio, voice dialog, visual improvements to 3D worlds and CGI sequences.
Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX, Chrono Cross, Breath of Fire, Arc the Lad, Tales of Destiny, Grandia, Lunar, Star Ocean, Breath of Fire, Xenogears, etc...
I grew up in this era so really try to keep my bias in check but that really did feel like the golden age of JRPGs and many other games at the time. Arguably certainly action games and shooters peaked later but late 90s Square was something else...
Yes, after the N64 and playstation (and Windows 3.1), the only thing that really revolutionized gaming was (working) online play.
Of course, graphics improve with each year, but hitting those first 3D consoles (and PC games) was amazing in a way that nothing else that follows has been. Hearing actual orchestral music or live acting in a game was fantastic.
Everyone remembers Mario 64 or the expansive open world Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In the same way, Final Fantasy 7 or 9 represent the best FF games to many people. Mario Kart is still the universal poster child for group games.
I'm glad things have continued to improve, but those first few consoles had growth of an industry so much more impactful than anything from the last 15 years (again, apart from good online play).
Agreed was a little unsure about shooters at first but the same period covers Half Life/CS. Though it took consoles to catch up with that multiplayer experience for shooters. Was goldeneye as good as PC shooters like CS or Quake?
That all said, after a 3-4 year break from games, I did get quite a lot of wonder from Destiny 2 and Monster Hunter World as it took quite a happy period of readjustment before I could see the invisible walls and game objects again. So maybe some of it is an age/experience thing...
But the core gameplay loop of D2 with its weird chore mechanics are a far cry from the fun and adventure some games like OG Chrono Trigger had...
> Was goldeneye as good as PC shooters like CS or Quake?
I remember it being bigger than Quake. Everyone I knew had played it, but not everyone had played quake. Probably do to the great/easy 4-person multiplayer.
It received critical acclaim and sold over eight million copies, making it the third-bestselling Nintendo 64 game.
> Or it did in 1996, anyway. As great as they are, one quality that mid-’90s Square games do not share with Nintendo’s work of the same era is timelessness.
They're timeless in my heart. I guess I kind of see the point: Super Mario World is easier to show to a modern audience than FF6... But they are iconic and durable and still fun to play.
What was so fun about Super Mario RPG for me was the sheer amount of Easter eggs. From Geno's Whirl's 9999 damage (only to normal enemies, not bosses, EXCEPT for Exor), to fighting Culex, to all the steps you need to do to unlock the lazy shell, and hundreds of others I forgot or never knew about, it felt like a truly endless adventure.
Yes! The whole world feels special and lovingly crafted. I spent so much time tracking down the frog coins as a kid (my horror when I discovered one can only be gotten at the beginning of the game). The journey to get the belt in monstro-town? God, it was so engaging as a kid.
My favorite little bit of hidden functionality was that you can become an indentured inn-keeper in Marrymore. It had this weird mechanic that you could request to stay another night right from your room. The game designers could have been lazy and just prevented you from staying another night if you didn't have the funds, but instead they built this entire game mode where if you go into debt, you can't leave the hotel until you pay it back by working as an inn-keeper. I remember getting stuck there for a ridiculous amount of time because of how many nights I stayed at the hotel thinking I was getting away with something.
it's funny people are talking about secrets. Yoshi P of FFXIV and FFXVI has lamented the poor ROI on secret content. Eg Yuffie and Vincent will not be optional hidden party members in the VII remake.
I understand the thought process because there is some serious work doing CGI and VA (x2+ for EN/JP+) and all but there really was some magic in discovering all the hidden stuff and games as recent as Elden Ring and BotW show that there is still a big appetite for exploration and discovery.
Wonder what that would look like for modern Square games...
One feature I loved was that player characters that weren't in the current main party would still gain XP from battles, even if they weren't involved. It allowed me not to have to choose early on who would be the party member and avoid my terrible case of analysis paralysis.
In case you haven't played it: they actually improved on this in the remake. You can swap fighters during the battle like Pokemon, so you can make use of all five characters (which helps a lot on some of the post-game fights).
I was both excited and forlorn about this release. AlphaDream, the team behind the Mario & Luigi series, went bankrupt a few years ago. And Paper Mario has jettisoned itself further from the JRPG genre with each release.
So this could very well be the last official Mario RPG, a remake of the very first.
There is at least going to be a Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door remake coming out sometime in 2024. I'm hoping it's a sign of more traditional Mario RPGs to come, but who knows. The TTYD remake is something that most of the fanbase thought would never happen, so I guess anything is possible.
I've never been a big fan of Paper Mario, I personally loved the isometric approach Mario RPG took, it really fit the Mario motif better and felt more like a platformer RPG.
The fact that it was developed by square was such a great decision. Square dominated the RPG space for 90s consoles for good reasons and they just crushed it. The addition of timing mechanics to attacks was such a great idea to keep young kids (the target demo) engaged in a genre that they've likely never played before.
The fact that we've had probably nearing 10 Mario RPGs since then says a lot about this game.
i take issue with calling it a relic. i dont know why every game needs to be the same. like sure, there are modern rpgs and this is not a straight copy of divinity original sin (most modern tbrpg i have played) but its battles are not worse, just different, with less tactical options like positioning and a strong emphasis on timing. the rest of the games structure is pretty similar although i am sure mario rpg is strictly linear whereas DOS has some choice. turn based rpg's dont change very much it seems.
it reminded me a lot of the original pokemon games. which i did also enjoy back in the day.
Not even considered, in Japan, Paper Mario is iirc called Mario Story and we have early development screenshots calling it Super Mario RPG2, denoting it as a successor to the SNES game.
It's very explicitly the successor of this game (also seen in how it kinda mimics some of the basic plot beats), it just got renamed during development.
SMRPG also marks the initiation of the comedic writing style that would later become characteristic of games like Paper Mario and later Mario RPG titles.
The Paper Mario series and the Mario and Luigi series feel nothing like Super Mario RPG. They remove too many RPG elements and feel much more linear. They aren't packed with secrets, mythos, and a vivid primary and supporting cast. There's much less mystery and intrigue, very little to go back and unlock, and scant customization.
Dealing with the disappointment of the new installments was one of the many things that ultimately weaned me off of regularly playing video games. I realized things didn't strictly get better, and that we often get sold things with just with a different coat of paint.
The subtext to this article is that Nintendo has never released SMRPG for the Switch's virtual console, but they are selling a remake for $69.99. No thanks, give me the relic ROM.
Reading about this game in the late 90s when the N64 was out, it had this insane allure and lore to it that other Nintendo games lacked outside of Zelda and maybe Pokemon. This game got me into emulation and retro gaming at a very young age and I'll always think back on it fondly.
I've heard good things about the remake and still find this to be one of the most accessible games in the RPG genre that I've ever played.
I loved SMRPG and I have tried to play Earthbound probably 50+ times in my 39 years of existence and I have never, ever found it fun or interesting. I don't think I've ever gotten past that opening where the village/city/whatever is under attack by aliens and you're running around trying to find people or something.
You're not alone, I also got stuck in that opening sequence as a child - thankfully the game was just a rental. Honestly at that stage in my life I didn't understand what was going on in the battle sequences since they were so text heavy. RPGs were too foreign of a concept at the time. Couple years later went on to enjoy the crap out of FF6, Chrono Trigger, and SMRPG, so I really should revisit Earthbound.
It's not surprising that you would find a game boring if you've only played the first 10 minutes of it 50+ times, but you might enjoy it more if you stick some of those 10 minute sessions together and try getting past the tutorial.
In their defense, I also tried it semi-recently and literally couldn’t get past the tutorial. I got to a point where I didn’t know what to do next, walked around for 20 minutes, then gave up. I could’ve searched the internet but I generally make it a policy not to do that with games.
I’m probably just stupid, but games back then had this tendency to make everything into a maze, where the “challenge” was in figuring out what the hell to do next. SMRPG suffers from this too, there’s a few points near monstro town that if you don’t know exactly where they’re trying to get you to go, it’s really confusing. Childhood me couldn’t figure it out and I never made it past there (I have since revisited and completed the game.)
If you guys get the chance please give earthbound a real try, get past the first town or two. I was also in the same boat, not making it past the opening several times as a kid and young adult.
I gave it another try when it came out on the switch SNES app last year and the game is absolutely magnificent. I wish i had actually played it as a kid. I don’t even want to spoil it, but there is so much creativity and love that went into some of those areas. The final battle is one of my favorite moments I’ve ever experienced in a game. This is a great candidate for a new remake (or better yet sequel) but I don’t think it’s going to happen.
I was just thinking of this the other day. I would love to see a semi-remake/port of Earthbound in which they updated the art style to mimic the clay figures that were used in the (amazing) player's guide that was included with each copy of the game.
I somehow feel guilty for never even remembering the original game. My first console game was Mario Bros on the NES. And I was big into RPGs back in the late 90s (eg. FFVII). How am I just hearing of this now, and this remake?!
TBF it came out really late in the SNES' lifetime, May 1996 in North America. I'm sure more eyes were on the upcoming Mario 64 and Nintendo 64 release than an RPG on a soon to be replaced console.
I tried playing through multiple times throughout my childhood and could never finish it. Finished Final Fantasy III/VI. Beat Chrono Trigger multiple times. SMRPG never did it for me.
Funny, I actually also started it many times, always liked it quite a bit, but never played to completion. I think I was just not drawn to it in the same way I was to, say, Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VI (or Super Metroid, which is not an RPG but is contemporary...) all of which I've replayed to oblivion, even on my mobile, even to this day.
Yeah I feel the exact same! I grew up in the 3D era of gaming (my first home console was an N64) but I find SNES games very easy to go back to. I purchased a SNES Classic and I don't use it often, but I love the feeling of playing on a TV with a real (replica) SNES controller.
So why doesn't Super Mario RPG feel as good? Not sure. Could be the isometric faux-3D graphics haven't aged well (and make platforming a chore), so the remake would solve that to some degree. I think it's something deeper though. It's fun, but everything is so... trifling? It's fun but it feels like a snack.
Several inaccurate details just in the first couple of paragraphs: conflating remakes with preservation, citing a localization change as an "original" subtitle, and crediting Nintendo for third-party productions. I realize video game press is not known for its rigor but the more I read Polygon the less I can take it seriously.
The Japanese release was for the Super Famicom. It is reasonable and correct in this context to use "original" to refer to the English localization, especially since the game was released almost simultaneously in both markets.
I was watching a play through of this on youtube, there were so many comments about Geno and how happy everyone was to see him again. I had no idea he was so beloved!
This is one of my favorite JRPGs. I played it as a kid and it was right up there with the greats for me. If you liked Chrono Trigger, etc, play this.
With that said, I am so sick of remakes. When I first heard a 2023 Super Mario RPG was coming out I was so excited that we'd get an actual 2023 SMRPG. Not a remake. Everything is a remake nowadays. I have zero, absolutely zero desire to replay a game I beat when I was 12.
It's like the FF7 remake.. my god. I put like 80 hours into that game, probably an entire school year. Play it AGAIN? Are you kidding me. For the exact same story?
These JRPGs aren't exactly fun to replay. There's usually no fast travel, no ng+, nothing. It's the exact same game over and over. How many times do you think I want to get the Masamune?
Fwiw, FF7 Remake is something different, to both acclaim and great upset. It occurs after the original timeline but in the original timeline—Aeris and Sephiroth both know what happened in the OG timeline and S is trying to remake it better according to his aims. Also there’s a bit of a Kingdom Hearts-ification to some of the main story beats, which is my main complaint.
Many people are so upset because they didnt get what youre saying would be so bad, an actual remake or remaster.
Sometimes we would hang out on AIM and see who could answer questions from newbies the fastest. ("Which Final Fantasy is Culex from?" being a favorite.) Other times we would just talk about life. I remember talking with my best friend from those days (the one who disappeared) on the night the US invaded Iraq.
Nostalgia goggles and all, but I miss those days of the Internet.