Revisiting Super Mario RPG

 The very first RPG I ever played was Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars. Yes, that rather bulky title is usually shrunk down to "Mario RPG," but it was my first entrypoint into a genre that I am quite fond of - and in the last decade, branched out into the original tabletop version of the genre.

Made by Squaresoft at a time when Square was primarily making games for Nintendo (it would shift to Sony with Final Fantasy VII,) Mario RPG feels in a lot of ways like "baby's first Final Fantasy," which is fine because I was only 11 when I played it. Leveling and gaining skills is simple, and there are a lot of ways the game becomes fairly forgiving - like sometimes giving you back "freebies" when you use an item or letting you block attacks and reduce their damage significantly (though this requires careful timing).

The Switch remake for the game is mostly extremely faithful, upgrading the graphics (I believe the original's 3D models were effectively just pre-rendered sprites, while this of course can render things in-game). There are a couple new features - you build up a gauge as you string more and more timed hits (and blocks, etc.) together, which both creates a passive buff to everyone in the party (different characters getting different buffs) and filling up to 100% to allow you to unleash a big triple-attack that changes depending on who's in the party (because Mario always has to be one of your 3 active party members, there are six of these big group-attacks, which have a flashy pre-rendered animation when they go off.

However, what's delightful about this game is the way that, because it's so faithful a remake, you get some of that really weird 1990s video game aesthetic, both with bizarre creature designs that never made it into other Mario games (because this was Squaresoft doing Mario, rather than Nintendo doing Squaresoft) as well as some of the weirdness of the 45-degree isometric perspective - which does make platforming a pain, but hits me right in the nostalgia.

Of course, being 38 (pretty soon 39) and with a lot more RPGs under my belt, the challenge level is near the floor. Indeed, I think very much in that early video game era, there are some aspects that are trivial - like most combat - and then some aspects that are near-impossible (I never got the 30 jumps in a row challenge back in the day).

Nintendo's next foray into Mario-themed RPGs was Paper Mario on the N64, which became its own sub-series. I don't have anything against those games but I'm a little sad that this Nintendo/Square collaboration didn't spawn its own follow-ups.

Given how big a part of my life D&D has become, I have to give credit to this game for introducing me to the RPG genre (even if it would be 18 years between my playing this the first time and getting into D&D). So, yeah, it's been a fun trip down memory lane.