Super Mario RPG(2023) Review

I always heard about how "good" Super Mario RPG was, I was almost considering emulating the original game years back but lost interest in doing it, at the same time over the years I always heard how "good" the combat in Mario RPGs tend to be and how Mario RPG along with Chrono Trigger tend to be some of the best RPGs the SNES has to offer. On top of all this, I stopped playing RPGs a while ago back in 2019 and I only occasionally dabbled in the genre like with Cyberpunk 2077 and Dragon Ball Kakarot. I wanted Mario RPG to be the first one to slowly get me back into the genre especially with this remake and after all this rambling, what do I think? The game is pretty good and I'm surprised I got to the end at all but I wouldn't consider it to be great.

I decided to play on Breezy Mode for this playthrough since I'm not really familar with turn based RPGs or how Mario RPG combat worked, and it's a good enough mode for a newbie, it gets more challenging towards the end but it never felt impossible or that I needed to grind at any point, the weird thing about the game on this mode is that the first boss and the early game were the hardest parts of the game, once I got past the first boss everything slowly got easier.

The battle system in the game is surprisingly engaging for a guy who never really plays RPGs and especially turn based games. You essentially have to time button presses for attacks and defensive and because of this battle give you much more agency than the games of this genre usually would and it made more engaging for me as a result. Not all attacks enemies throw are blockable so I had to watch out.

All though one issue, I did have is that fodder enemies were a bit too easy with the occasional enemies about 25% of the time where they take a considerable amount of damage before dying.

The bosses are more interesting, playing on Breezy probably detracted from the challenge but I did like how bosses did make the player switch between characters and make me use items. I used a lot of maply syrups, Peach was the primary healer and Mallow's Thought Peak ability came in extremely handy for weaknesses, I never thought I would need to use any of this on Breezy but the game slowly taught me into using them and I didn't need to look up a guide and I commend it for that.

Outside of the battles there are occasional mini games, these do an okay job at breaking up the pace but nothing too special, they at least are never mandatory so makes them tolerable by default. The level design for dungeons are mostly "fine" if nothing special, they get the job done with the occasional obtuse moment here and there but there at least wasn't so many that I had to look one up every few seconds.

However one major negative is the jumping sections, I get that Mario is a platforming series but these parts felt forced. One the jump physics never feel precise and it's easy for me to miss jumps and the platforms can be easy to miss on top of easy to fall off since I will be pushing the analog stick to make it to the platform than accidentally fall off. There isn't too many sections like this but the ending section with the 6 doors requires you to do at least one of these platforming sections or do the trivia sections but I find the trivia sections even worse so I stuck with platforming and it makes these sections even more insufferable since it's either do bad platforming to progress or awful trivia puzzles to progress, doing either felt like I had to pick my poison. This was by far the worst part of the game, luckily I only had to do 4 out of 6 doors, if I had to do all 6, I would've quit the game.

A big issue I have with the game is the story, I know expecting a well written story out of a Mario game is basically going to get me mocked, and while the story in Mario RPG isn't "terrible" it felt like it could've been more. What carries the game is the character interactions, they are endearing enough on a surface and Mallow is an okay character decent development but that's kind of the thing, the story is just midly interesting enough on a surface level. What could've elevated the story is probably Smity actually doing things to make me dislike him whether it'd be doing henious acts or the worf effect. He's just typical final boss that barely does anything. The story in general lacks any kind of clear stakes, no one dies and I guess you could say it adds to the saturday morning cartoon nature but outside of the gameplay, the story was just "there". It's not good enough to be remarkable or bad enough to make hate seeing the cutscenes happen. It just felt like it could've been more than being an "okay game story".

The ending is also pretty weak and it's basically just collecting 7 stars and that's it. I felt like the story could've been a bit more interesting.

Overall, Super Mario RPG was a solid game for a genre I don't even actively engage in. I might play and try to finish more RPG because of this but who knows.