Hey, guess what? Mario sucks. No offense to the
little guy, but the franchise has sort of been milked dry to the point where I
just can't stand it anymore, with all the Lands, Worlds, Sunshines, Galaxies,
Karts, Parties, useless spin-offs, bad cartoons, a worse movie, and anything
you can slap the word "New" onto. But then there's Mario RPGs, the
insane-sounding gems that end up capturing our hearts. It's hard to say what it
is about Mario RPGs that makes them so special, at least for me. Maybe it's how
much they remind me of EarthBound, being RPGs but still having a sense of
humor. They don't ever do any of the dark stuff that EarthBound is known for,
but instead stay on the happy, funny side of things, which is still
pretty big for RPGs, as most of them stick to the other side and try to be dark
and grim all the time, which has really gotten boring as it makes even the most
unique story like The Witcher look like a Skyrim clone to me. But screw all the
actual analysis. Let's start judging games by their covers! My first impression
of the phrase "Mario RPG" was similar to my thoughts on The Rugrats'
successor, All Grown Up, which was something like "Doesn't that just
defeat the point? I mean, Mario is a platformer. Who thought this was a good
idea?" And boy was I wrong. The thing about most Mario games is that they
have trouble making an actual story except for the beginning with a "save
the princess" cutscene, and then a "Hooray, you win!" cutscene
at the end. But the RPGs are able to maintain an actual story throughout. The
gameplay is also pretty spot on and well balanced with the story. But enough
with openings that are longer than my entire review of Game Dev Tycoon. Today
I'm talking about Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. The game, like many Mario
RPGs, involves a whole ton of platforming, and it could be argued that it's
more than usual because technically there's more things that you need to do in
order to get from point A to point B, including: High Jumping by putting Luigi
on top of Mario; spinning across chasms by putting Mario on top of Luigi;
making Mario small by hitting him with a hammer; burying Luigi by hitting him
with a hammer; making the Bros. walk sideways by electrocuting Mario; running
faster by burning Luigi; and actually having to press A and B to make them both
jump onto a ledge. The good part about all this is that realizing which thing
you have to do to get through is much more rewarding mentally. And all the
field abilities have been loosely translated into special attacks in battle.
Oh, yeah, the battle system. Like other Mario RPGs before, this game
implemented a system of timing your button presses while performing attacks to
make the attack good. And this isn't even limited to the special attacks,
though the special attacks are notorious for the timing you have to manage on
the highest difficulty setting. With all three of your standard attacking
methods, you need to time button presses to your hits to get the most out of
your attack. Also, every attack that enemies try to hit you with can be dodged
with (well would you look at that) even more precise button timing. Some
attacks can even end up as counterattacks if they in any way involve physically
harming your opponent which happens a lot since most of the attacks you're
gonna deal with are the opponent just walking up to you and kicking you or
something making it not very hard to jump on their heads while they're standing
right in front of you. On the topic of the game's charm, it does a great job of
adding personality to some usually faceless characters and pays attention to
every part of the Mario franchise that it could find time to cover. And it adds
tons of new and fun ideas to the series' canon including the ENTIRE BEANBEAN
KINGDOM which has tons of its own lore and new locations. Too bad it never
shows up again. Seems like every Mario RPG series comes up with a brilliant
idea that just sort of goes away... Well, at least Fawful sticks around for the
rest of the series. Now, if you'll excuse me, I still have 3 games to finish
before Paper Jam comes out. All they need to do is squeeze Geno into that thing
somewhere and it's certifiably perfect
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