Mario And Luigi RPG Retrospective — Part 8: Return to “Normal”

Once clearing the three-part-tree’s fetch quest, which is a fairly simple puzzle-gauntlet, we face down the final boss of the area; a sentient soda monster.

oh shiiiiiiiit

Oh snap that’s the plot device we came here for

Ah shit

Ah fuck

This boss has some esoteric damage properties that I’m not going to go into in-depth right now; suffice to say, it’s easier to hurt if you use your new team-up attacks. Hope you’ve been practicing those on the random enemies in this level. If I was designing this, I would have made THIS one the spiky boss that couldn’t be jumped on, if I was insistent on testing the player’s mastery of hammer-oriented bro’s moves.

Beating the boss transitions into a section where former Chateau owner Bubbles breaks open the floor underneath us and separates the Mario brothers, leading to a Luigi-only section. And this is an objectively bad piece of game design.

On one hand, I kind of get it. This game fleshes out Luigi’s character like no other game — even more than Luigi’s Mansion, if you ask me. It posits his cowardice and struggle to live up to Mario not only as a part of his character, but as an interactive piece of his struggle; and very little else of Mario canon exemplifies this better than these Luigi-only parts of Superstar Saga.

On the other hand, these sections run headlong into the game’s basic mechanical foundations in an absurdly frustrating way.

Until now, the brothers have never been separated for an extensive amount of time, and, as we’ve discussed previously, the A button has controlled the primary character and the B button has controlled the secondary. In battle, A is the Mario button and B is the Luigi button.

However, when Luigi is solo, the button that controls the character on the field (A) is the wrong button to control him in combat (B).

And yes, I am a grown-ass man as of this writing who can handle this small amount of cognitive dissonance. But revisiting this section, even over 10 years later, brought back memories of missing action commands and dodges that should have been easy, because I’d pressed the wrong button. The fact of the matter is that this is a smack in the face to the muscle memory that the player has been building for what my save tells me has been nearly 3 hours.

This solo-Luigi stuff is completely unprecedented. As much as I hate to admit it, as much as I love this game, this Luigi-only section is a horrible trolley-problem of game design, where converging disaster factors come together to an inevitable, tragic conclusion.

At least it’s short.

When the plot reconvenes, we do a small QTE that is at least consistent with internal mechanics;

And by curing the queen, manage to cure the whole town. That’s an idyllic authoritarian community for you.

There’s a bit of a lore dump here that breaks down the stakes of the villain’s plot here, in case you haven’t caught on;

Ok, so the basics of Cackletta’s plot have been laid out. She stole Princess Peach’s voice, and then she stole the Beanstar, so the game plan is to activate the latter with the former and, by doing so, achieve… whatever you need. Plotwise, this is fine. It doesn’t matter what Cackletta wants; she’s clearly a Bad Dude and has the means to accomplish her goals, so barring a major plot twist, it’s the Good Guys’ goal to stop her. This is fine, as far as RPG plot structure goes.

I have to wonder, though, why the god of the Mario universe keeps making all the omnipotent artifacts in the shape of stars? Clearly the bad people have caught onto the trend. Maybe that’s why the Mario Odyssey plot coupons are “moons?”

In any case, a quick reunion with the bishonen-parody-prince highlights our next destination.

But this is also our chance to explore the reinvigorated town, so let’s take a brief respite from the plot to do this. SPOILER ALERT: If you don’t fuck around in the town now, you’ll have to wait a frustratingly long time to do so again.

The town gives you two collection quests to encourage you to screw around here for maybe a little bit longer than a pair of heroes given mandate should;

This pair of fetch quests totals 15 nonsense items to locate within the castle town limits; neither quest rewards you with anything particularly consequential (to my knowledge; I didn’t do either of them this playthrough, since I’ve completed each multiple times in the past), but they do give you an excuse to familiarize yourself with the town’s geography and get to know all the residents. It’s a deceptively organic way of forcing the player to engage with civvies and get them attached to such.

One last thing to discuss about the town; the coffee shop.

This coffee shop is how you get permanent stat-boosters in this game. It’s a needlessly complex system. How it works is:

You need a certain amount of these beans before you can make a coffee that will give you a stat boost.

The problem is that at least two of these bean types are flat-limited in the amount that exist in the world. Each bean can only be accumulated in one way; Green via battles with compatible enemies, yellow via minigames, red via those digging spots we discussed in entry 7, and brown via straight-up INVISIBLE BLOCKS.

If you haven’t caught on yet, the obvious implications of this are that there are a set number of red and brown beans that exist in the game’s world. You can earn more via a very, very specific minigame that only opens up in the late-game.. but only one at a time.

Furthermore, you can get a special equippable item for mixing each of these coffees once; the following screenshot is not mine, because the playthrough I’ve been doing for this retrospective has been pretty haphazard.

Frankly (HA), I think this is all needlessly complicated. The Bowser’s Inside Story approach to beans was far superior. But I guess we’ll get to that whenever we get to that.

I’m tired. I wrote this very last-minute. Hope this gives you some insights into my thoughts on this game, assuming you care about this game.

Ah jeezus

Christ

I need some sleep.

~Hans

Mario And Luigi RPG Retrospective — Part 7: It’s Not Wine

Banana woman directs us to go to the southwest corner of the map to the Chucklehuck Woods, where we can find a secret soda formula that can cure the queen of her All-Might transformation. Everything about these woods screams “wine.” The entrance is a dark manor house referred to as a “chateau,” there are tons of wooden casks, and the red-and-green pair that we meet here are Frenchmen. Despite this, the game adamantly refers to the beverage produced here as “Chuckola Cola.” I’m curious to know if this is the same in the Japanese version, given that while the Japanese are weird in their own way they are a little less prudish about booze.

That being said, it’s pretty cute how they justify carbonation by saying you tell the fruit jokes while it’s brewing. There’s a minor bit of lore with these little tourism info-plaques that draw one’s attention:

In the next two rooms we encounter a strange situation with an awfully familiar individual;

The green man’s name is Popple, a self-stylized “shadow thief.” He’s got a sort of 40’s gangster way of talking, and he’s recruited an amnesiac Bowser to be his sidekick in order to get the same plot device we’re after. This kicks off with a boss fight against the pair that introduces “reaction attacks,” where a character may get mad and immediately attack if you target the wrong target.

It’s a bit of a risk/reward. Popple has far less HP, so taking him out means less attacks per-round, but every time you make progress on that front you get hammers thrown at you. Your call as a player.

Once Bowser has been trounced, Popple flees the scene like a coward. The aforementioned red-and-green Frenchmen that he has bound and trussed then teach us bros hammer moves and set us free upon the woods to find our goal. The new moves are “mini-Mario,” where Mario is hammered into a tiny size, and “Luigi dunk,” which slams Luigi feet-first into the depths of the earth.

You’re actually free to just leave without getting these moves, but eventually you’ll smack into an obstacle you can’t figure out.

The core concepts here — entering small spaces and going underground — are useful enough that these moves will make a comeback in further installments. Like the high-jump and spin-jump, these open up the world Metroidvania-style for further exploration.

They also have the interesting effect of separating the Mario bros from their lined-up formation. When a character is moving solo, the B button will jump the other brother, but the only way to move him is to press start and switch.

The puzzles in the woods don’t require separating the pair outside of single screens, and they won’t let you leave without both.

They are mostly an exercise in splitting up and reuniting before heading to the next room. This will, however, make a comeback much later. Furthermore, the game has stopped funneling you forward through a predetermined path. There’s an area map now that shows the whole level, and leaves it up to you to navigate to the right rooms where the important stuff is.

I seriously love this gradual trickling of complexity. The game never stops teaching you its own rules.

Like HooHoo Mountain before, Chucklehuck Woods introduces a few gimmicks that can be interacted with using your new abilities. This barrel is important:

That green facemask on the wall will blast you with fire if you step on the switch, so Luigi needs to enter the barrel from below and stand on it to reflect the fireball. Mario can also jump on top of the barrel to reach high switches.

Like Mario swallowing too much water, the barrel is an interactible that changes the context of other actions. I believe it is also the source of a major glitch utilized by speedrunners, but we’re not here to talk about that.

Deep in the woods there’s this big Deku tree that tasks us with getting some additional plot keys before we can go further into the woods.

He does this strange thing where his sprite divides into three pieces that all move separately. I kinda like it. It’s a weird way to indicate how alien he is that effectively bypasses the limitations of the technology. It’s a real shame he got changed in the 3DS version.

This is a bit of a nested quest where we have to explore the corners of this area, fight some enemies, and do some random challenges. There’s a moment worth noting where we meet the Deku tree’s granddaughter, and she teaches about these marks on the ground, in case you haven’t thought to try digging on them. I suppose the intended interaction with these things isn’t immediately clear, but it’s a bit obnoxious because it’s one of the few explanations you can’t skip.

Out of all these games, I like the third’s iteration on beans the most. But we’ll talk about that next time, along with the end of this area.

~Hans

Mario And Luigi RPG Retrospective – Part 6: Do Your Job

After learning hammers, the next sort of half-area is the functional equivalent of Hyrule Field. We’ve left the tutorial for good, and are kind of free to go wherever we want. Except not really, because everywhere besides progression is locked off by organic mobility gates and/or absurdly high level enemies.

I’ve got some mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I like that it gives me the illusion of freedom, to make me feel like I’m going to the next area of my own free will. On the other hand, if the game is going to be level-based it may as well own it and just make me go exactly where I need to go. This is lowkey what subsequent entries in the series — most obviously Partners In Time — will do.

Exacerbating this mild bout of frustration is the fact that you’re only given a general direction of where to go. Like with most things in this game, the information is there for you, but only if you look for it. But the progression here is mandatory. You have a binary choice here; keep moving on with the game, or… don’t.

However this is ultimately very inconsequential, so I’m willing to leave this question without a definitive answer on whether I think it’s good or bad. It’s whatever.

Incidentally, this interim area also has an enemy that can be countered with the hammer or by jumping on its head, depending on the attack it uses. So the game introduces that idea here.

When we do make it to the town (the entrance to which is demarcated pretty clearly as “important”), we find out it’s been wrecked. There’s a few civvies that will provide context for this if we care to talk to them:

The only way to move forward is to enter the castle, so we go in and get roped into having to fix the plumbing. This game is kind of famous for being the only game where the Mario Bros actually do plumbing, and it’s pretty simplistic, but effective. It introduces and executes upon all its gimmicks internally, while mixing in combat encounters that dial up the difficulty a little bit but not too much. It even manages to flex continuity with how a port of the Mario Bros arcade game is bundled in on this cartridge. A solid area overall.

At the end of this area, we encounter this banana woman who gave us the task to begin with, and find out that our villain Cackletta has used the same disguise again to fool us into getting her hands on the plot device.

This is pretty contrived, but I think it serves its function well. The player now knows the villain’s motive. Having us play along with the plan’s fruition also keeps us away from that thing where the villain’s evil plot is more or less complete, and they’re just waiting for the protagonist to get there to have a final showdown.

The Beanstar, incidentally, grants wishes, and is therefore an article of tremendous power. We’ve gotten all the basics in place now, so we can move on to the boss fight: A cursed monarch.

There’s a unique mechanic to this boss, where before every attack she’ll take a few steps forward. If she’s gotten close enough to you, she’ll do this super fast and hard-to-dodge punching attack. It’s a little frustrating because it’s difficult to figure out what, exactly, is going on, and she does enough damage that you might get killed before you can work it out. I think this is one of the worse boss fights in the game for this reason; the game hasn’t really prepared the player to deal with contextual attacks like this.

On top of that, this boss is also one of those puzzle bosses. You need to attack her swole arms to make them deflate, like All Might, so the crown will fall off and you can use special attacks on the body (with the crown on, the body is considered a spiky enemy, and will damage you for jumping on it). So the player is spending all their time focusing on the arms and may never think to whack the body to keep her away from you physically.

And to top it all off, you can’t really grind before this fight; there’s a fixed amount of enemies in the sewer stage and the only exit is straight into this boss fight. You just have to throw yourself at the problem until you finally figure it out. It’s a pretty low point for the game.

As far as the plot is concerned, though, I like how Superstar Saga flexes fantasy and RPG tropes to keep the plot functional while also making fun where it needs to. After beating the shit out of the cursed queen, the Mario brothers are tasked with finding a cure for her plight, in the next level that we’ll talk about next week.

~Hans

Mario And Luigi RPG Retrospective — Part 5: Mountain Climbers

Last time, the green tutorial man fired the cannon that Bowser was stuck in and used him as a projectile to blast away the ICE agent that we defeated, effectively removing him from the picture. As soon as we enter the next area, we are accosted the police and assumed to have committed a crime. Fuckin’ typical.

When we get the misunderstanding cleared up, thankfully without violence, the cops tell us that the the prince mentioned in this screenshot is missing. So the Mushroom Kingdom is not the only one sans throne heir. The culprit is described as such…

I wonder who it could be. I guess this means we’re on the right track, huh? Not that we could have gone off it. Chasing Fawful leads to him dropping a roadblock that we can’t pass yet. Even the path to progression is blocked by an extremely classic RPG “broken bridge” scenario that we have to find the plot to move past.

The plot that is these two blacksmith brothers — coincidentally, red-and-green — can’t get their hands on the specific kind of ore from the mountain peak they need to make hammers. If you talk to some of the civilians, you’ll find out that some guy named Blablanadon — a pilot? A bird? The local cactus-folk imply he’s the one who takes people up the mountain, so I assume he can fly. Anyway, if you do your own investigation you’ll probably realize that his absence is why these guys can’t get their ore, which only comes from the top of the mountain.

The setup here is a little forced. The game kind of assumes that the player knows a hammer is the key to passing the roadblock we’ve been given. I think that this is kind of excusable gameplay-wise because we’re just forcing open gates to move forward, but it’s kind of nonsensical from a plot perspective. That being said, nobody ever said the plot was why we were playing this game. I’m sure that if the game took the time to make sure all this stuff was made clear I would be complaining about how much exposition is being shoved down my throat.

When we do get inevitably climb the mountain, it’s easy to see why all the cacti think the mountain is so hard to climb; none of them can spin jump or high jump. The level requires not only the bros. moves, but also introduces a few field objects that change the context of those moves.

Water fountains and tornadoes will make reappearances in the series, but I think this is the only time they’re introduced so unceremoniously. It works well here because you have so few options. This first water fountain, for example, is introduced in a very minimalist, player-first way.

First off, only Mario can be over-hydrated. You can step Luigi into the waterspout, but only Mario creates a gameplay reaction.

You’ll notice here that when Mario is fat, the A icon is crossed out. You can’t change it and pressing the A button will only produce a negative sound effect. If you read the sign, you can infer that the high jump, which jumps Luigi onto Mario’s head, will spew the water. If you didn’t read the sign it’s OK, because you can’t actually leave this area.

The ledge here can’t be scaled without the high jump, meaning you’re trapped in here until you figure out what the solution to the puzzle is. As an added bonus, trying to high jump out of here while Mario is all bloated will probably teach you exactly the solution to the problem. And in case all that wasn’t obvious enough, the sign does a bit of reverse psychology on you if you do choose to read it.

Superstar Saga loves to do this. Often the text hints in the game will tell you not to do something you’re supposed to do, so if you’re a child playing this game you’ll feel a little naughty for doing it.

None of this is to say that this part would be difficult, even for children. But there’s beauty in how the game gives the player the reins in finding solutions to the obstacles it presents. Not once is the player forced to sit through an expositional sidekick sitting them down in a non-interactive scene to walk them through how to play the game. In fact, Superstar Saga‘s “reverse psychology optional tutorials” kind of do the exact opposite; they optionally allow the player to seek an indirect hint that tells them to not do the thing.

If this game had been made in a post-Sequelitis world, I would absolutely think this was done as a satire of excessively obtrusive tutorials.

The area is divided up into two sections, each with a boss. The first an introduction to attacks that target both brothers; he has a sweeping laser attack that goes under all four of your feet and requires you to jump one after the other in one “dodge phase.” He also introduces the puzzle elements of some boss fights; he makes these rock columns that he’ll hide in, and you have to destroy them so he’ll become targetable.

This isn’t my screenshot; I forgot to take one while fighting him.

The second boss proceeds to play on these elements, as well as the features of the Rex enemy found in the next area (quite literally; the first field enemy in the next screen has a Rex inside it). Rex can be stomped on to make him short, like in Super Mario World. This makes his attacks easier to dodge.

The toupee-wearing Donald Trump dragon that serves as the level’s climax boss combines the Rex concept with the puzzle elements of the first boss. Initially, his height makes his attacks hard to dodge, like Rex.

Once stomped short, he will, like Donald Trump, eventually vomit up some crap from the depths of his throat.

Then, he will use that crap as his platform from which to spew his attacks.

You have to destroy the platform, or he’ll keep spitting stuff at you from this point-blank range at this hard-to-dodge height. Once the platform is destroyed, he grows tall again and the cycle repeats. This boss combines and remixes all these things that the level has taught the player over the course of the climb and I love it.

As for the plot, it turns out that Blablanadon guy we were looking for is a pterosaur. Didn’t see that coming, honestly. He was up here incubating an egg he found at the mountain summit, although I’m not sure how he knew this thing was an egg and not a rock with a face like the rest of ’em.

The Donald Trump dragon hatched out of this egg and turned out to be the polymorphed missing prince of the kingdom that those cops were looking for. After being turned back to normal, he does this kind of funny but also annoying thing where he flips his hair and bishie sparkle fills the screen.

I suspect this is intentional. The way this character is written is very boastful and everyone’s always talking about how badass he is, but we will spend a respectable portion of the rest of the game saving his ass. He’s like the Miles Gloriosus archetype.

Anyway, the prince directs us to visit his mom the queen, in the direction we were heading anyway, and gives us a plot key. Dino guy gives us a lift down the mountain and we get our hammers and the basic tutorial plus open-space to practice with the new toy.

It’s worth nothing here that the blacksmiths specifically say that the hammer is only usable by the lead character right now. You can try to use the hammer as the person in back, and the icons allow for it — but you won’t get any meaningful results.

The game doesn’t care, however, if you discover this early:

Surprise! If you’re thinking experimentally before you pass this flaming rock, which is the gameplay gate for proving you know how to use the hammers, you’ll learn that different actions can lead to different results in different circumstances.

I like that the game doesn’t deny you this little discovery. It won’t come in handy for a while, but you can learn about this as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Indeed, the fact that this rock is on fire and needs to be put out before you can hammer it is evidence that suggests you’re supposed to be able to discover this now.

Beyond this screen, the only way to proceed is to do the first level of a minecart minigame — once again, not mandatory after the first time — and, afterwards, a quick tutorial on using hammers in battle, followed by a single screen where that knowledge becomes mandatory to proceed.

As is Mario RPG tradition, you can’t jump on spiky enemies, so you have to use the hammer instead. Superstar Saga also has hammer counters; when spiky enemies approach, you use the hammer to beat them back instead of jumping on them.

That being said, I think this is the only game in which you can fail a hammer counter. If you hold the button too long in anticipation, Mario or Luigi will drop the hammer behind them.

It took an obnoxiously long time to get this screenshot.

It’s to be expected for a huge mallet like this whose hammerhead appears to be the size of Mario’s entire torso. Bowser’s Inside Story has a few enemies that flip this concept on its head, and we’ll talk about them when we get there, but for the most part hammer counters are super easy in the following games.

Anyway, I’ve been typing for a while now, so we’ll talk about the next area next week, same time same place.

~Hans

Mario And Luigi RPG Retrospective — Part 4: AlphaDREAMers

Stardust Fields is a purple area littered with shards of shooting stars and a theme that begins with an extremely military-sounding drum cadence. It’s the first “real” area in the game that sets you loose to run around and explore on your own terms, but only after you’ve gone through the customs and immigration minigame.

Superstar Saga has a number of minigames. You have to clear all of them at least once to finish the game, but after that they’re all just a way to farm certain item. Also, technically the controls never change, even in minigame. The A button controls Mario and the B button controls Luigi, even if the action each is performing changes. It’s concise and intuitive (although the people running the minigames are perfectly willing to explain things to you if you want).

Bowser is stuck in a cannon here and the border patrol comes down to make our lives difficult.

Much like ICE, he is a tricky bastard who exploits technicalities and loopholes to make your life miserable and take your money. In the process of collecting his SUPPLEMENTAL toll fee (after he takes all your money first), we learn our first set of team-up moves, the spin-jump and high-jump.

The way the game leads you here is a nice bit of design. There are these high ledges in a few places that you can’t pass because you can’t jump high enough.

Eventually you’ll fall down here, which forces you to go to the next screen with the important stuff.

You can try moving on to the screen after the one where you learn the important moves, but you can’t go any further than that without them. The game naturally gates you in with terrain, instead of seizing control and forcibly walking you to the key to progression.

The high-jump ability makes these high ledges navigable. Suddenly you can get up there and the area opens up.

The high-jump and spin-jump abilities are taught by these two red and green dudes who look like they have mustaches, but the 3DS HD remake indicates that these are in fact giant toothy grins, which is far more disturbing.

As for the moves themselves, they function as the “pair” action for jumping. Later bros moves will always be performed by the guy in the back of the formation doing one of his normal actions.

Perhaps the coolest thing about these moves is that they also serve as your special attacks in combat.

I seriously cannot fathom why they didn’t keep this in the later games. Then again, field moves are way less interesting in the later games — but we’ll talk about that a bit later.

Each special attack has its own set of input commands, in classic Mario RPG style, but they all maintain the basic principle that A is the Mario button and B is the Luigi button. This is just such efficient design. Every idea built upon this concept is easy for the player to digest because it all comes from the same foundation: A = Mario, B = Luigi.

When you finally do fight the ICE guy, because of course a diplomatic solution is untenable, the boss here introduces “do nothing to dodge” attacks.

This spikey ball is flying over Luigi’s head. If I jump, I’ll take the hit.

He makes them really obvious but I think introducing this idea here is a bad move. This concept doesn’t return for quite a while.

Regardless, while this area is a bit more hand-holdey than the last, it does a really great job introducing the stuff it needs to. I could probably defend it by saying that these games are for kids and this stuff is just a little more complex than the super-basics. The next area, Hoo Hoo Mountain (yeah, every level has silly names in this game), is an assault course in high-jumps and spin-jumps.

We’ll talk about the mountain, and do a bit of story stuff, next time.

~Hans

Mario and Luigi RPG Retrospective — Part 3: How to Mario

Superstar Saga‘s start menu immediately presents the player with the iconic suitcase, and starting the normal adventure brings up the save file screen designed like a passport. I’ve always loved this little touch of the save system. To date, I think it’s the most clever way to integrate this gameplay conceit into the game world, without drawing excess attention to it like Undertale does intentionally.

The opening cutscene shows us a sinister banana arriving in Princess Peach’s throne room to present a treasure chest full of tear gas, before revealing itself to be some sort of evil witch. There’s a lot that happens in this scene but it’s tight, effective, and introduces the basic idea that some shit has gone down, and that’s all we need to know right now. Soon, we move into the Mario RPG tradition where a Toad shows up at Mario’s house to fetch him for a quest of some sort.

Here we actually take control of the Toad for a moment to explore Mario’s house.

Note that no popup appears to tell us to use the D-pad to move. We’re just here. Toad cannot do anything besides walk around. It’s a small playground to explore and figure out the basic controls, that also happens to be filled with little environmental storytelling. This is a pretty nice lofted apartment, honestly. To get a place like this in Atlanta you’d need to pay upwards of $1000 a month, but two brothers in a reliable trade could probably afford to split the rent.

And then Toad sees Mario naked before we rush off to the castle, dragging our brother behind us. A collision with Bowser, who is already here, leads to the time-honored tradition of a Bowser tutorial fight. Besides the fact that the music absolutely slaps, the game is also noteworthy here for giving me the option of doing the tutorial. In fact, the way Toad talks about this, it’s almost like he assumes that this Mario has been on break after recently finishing some other Mario RPG adventure.

I’d like to make a comparison to Paper Mario here; In TTYD you guard attacks, reducing their damage. You can also do a super-guard to cancel damage. But the damage reduction doesn’t negate damage, unlike the dodging in Superstar Saga, which means that if you’re outnumbered (which you usually are) and you can’t kill the enemies fast enough you’re going to get whittled down unless you master the super-guard.

TTYD gives you two options, one of which is objectively worse. Like the crossbow versus the knives or gun in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, the presence of a gameplay tool that’s better in all circumstances than the other makes said other tool superfluous. The TTYD player is better off just learning the timing to do super-guards and not bothering with regular guards; like fencing with foil or epee versus fencing with sabre, learning one will just throw off your muscle memory for the other, and why bother with the one that’s objectively worse?

Oh, except some attacks can’t be super-guarded. Good luck figuring out what they are and learning the timing on guarding from their ambiguous animation, assuming you can even figure out it’s an attack you need to regular guard against before you get killed.

In Superstar Saga you dodge or you die. There’s no half-assing it. But Superstar Saga is also always fair. The hitboxes and hurtboxes are clearly indicated, and every attack in the game has a way to dodge it. Superstar Saga never puts you into a situation that it hasn’t properly prepared you to deal with first and never presents a situation where the player’s countermeasure options are unclear.

Even more egregiously, in TTYD you don’t get a substantive defensive stat to help mitigate the damage you take unless you invest a full level up in badge points — hope you won’t need that extra HP or FP for another dozen or so battles that will only get harder. Superstar Saga has a far better handle on both the RPG elements and good-feeling combat than TTYD, even if TTYD has some extremely creative (and often clumsily implemented) ideas.

Anyway, the next chunk of dialogue explains the initial conflict:

Bowser is weirdly short and gross in this game. But he’s set up here as a temporary ally, as far as defeating the larger scope villain. It’s time to go through immigration and customs.

The game presents you again with a piece of “unstructured space” to goof off in and become acclimated to the controls. Move around, get the hang of jumping up ledges, and talk to the civilians. You can get some minor rewards for doing so. Never at any point does a Toad stop you to explain how to jump with the A button. There is a little command icon in the corner, but that’s part of the interface and never goes away (unless it’s important).

This civilian tells me to go talk to the tutorial man if I want to, but doesn’t drag me over to that guy near the fountain to ask about Action Icons.

The next screen presents us a Save Album, which you will be tempted to hit if you’ve hit the blocks in the previous room and gotten delightful rewards from them, and a brief scene with Toadsworth where he gives Mario a suitcase; the in-game justification for the equipment and items menu. All of this is great. It’s thematically consistent with the idea that we’re going abroad to explore a different country. The scene also shows that Luigi is planning to stay home from this adventure.

The next scene makes it abundantly clear that that’s not going to work out.

Onboard Bowser’s private jet the next idea is introduced: controlling both Mario and Luigi. Each of the two is mapped to a different button, and the next area is dedicated to explaining the basics of moving them, jumping each of them separately, and switching leaders. This last one is the most important and also the only one that is required to move on; you have to get a passport photo taken of each Mario brother. All of this is helpfully illustrated by matching red and green koopas in WWI aviation gear. The red and green theme will reoccur a LOT.

This “each button controls a guy” thing is an overwhelmingly consistent core concept for the game.

If you’ve never played the game and are reading this retrospective blind, it may seem like the game has thrown a lot at you, and you might be startled to find out that as of my return playthrough to capture these screenshots I’m only 10 minutes in (and I dawdled a LOT in the plaza. It was fun to be back in this world and I wanted to jump around jump around jump around now).

But the fact of the matter is that it HAS thrown a lot at you. It’s just done so in a nonrestrictive and open format that presents the player as the one with agency. It also helps that all the information is presented in a diegetically consistent and oftentimes humorous way.

This game absolutely nails tutorials, and continues to do so through the combat section of this area, where it teaches you two-character combat, counterattacking, and that classic Mario RPG “attack an enemy in the field for a head-start in battle” thing, concluded with a tutorial boss where Bowser teaches you about enemy attack indication. A complete combat foundation in another 10 minutes or less.

And don’t think I didn’t notice that every single combat tutorial lets you skip it if you want.

Incidentally, this tutorial boss is absolutely brilliant. After you destroy his jetpack, which is what Bowser explained the attacks for, there’s a brief second phase where nobody tells you anything and it’s up to you to see if you’ve properly absorbed everything the game has taught you so far.

Tutorials are important, but the best tutorials are the ones you don’t really notice. The initial tutorials in Superstar Saga seem obtrusive when I draw attention to them like this, but they’re top tier among GBA games of this time period and, I would argue, top tier, period.

The combat tutorial boss also advances the plot; his name is Fawful and he’s a mild internet phenomenon for his weird way of talking. He will (spoilers) go on to appear in both the DS games, one as the primary antagonist, and he’s working for big bad Cackletta here. After we beat him he crashes the Koopa Cruiser and we go down in a location that a mysterious first-person voice refers to as Stardust Fields, which we’ll talk about next week.

~Hans

More Ideas for the Percy Jackson Series

Published this piece for FSR last week:

While writing it my sister and I tossed around some ideas that never made it into the piece, because they’re a little too in-depth. Let’s discuss now.

Further Dream Casting

Jeremy Irons as Chiron: I think Irons has the perfect amount of posh Britishness to be Chiron as described in Lightning Thief. I also think Chiron got a bit weirder as the series went on and Riordan tried a little too hard to make him stand out from the “wise teacher archetype.” Chiron is fine as the wise teacher archetype, plus his immortality and ability to talk about all the heroes he knew in person is plenty of uniqueness without needing a weird character quirk like all the other tertiary characters. Giving Chiron depth in the series can be accomplished without pushing him into the sidelines.

Robert Sheehan as Luke: He’s maybe too old, but I think Sheehan has that cool senpai vibe about him that could work for Luke. Unfortunately I’m not that familiar with teenage actors of the day. That being said, I think more important is properly translating Good Luke into Evil Luke, and I believe Sheehan’s got it in him. He can certainly pull off both looks; compare/contrast his pretty boy getup in Mortal Engines with his Umbrella Academy vibes.

Cooper Andrews as Poseidon: A Shazam! alum like Jack Dylan Grazer, I really loved Andrews’ performance as a dad. I’d like to see this idea with a bit more nuance, what with the effects the godly element has upon both parents and children in this universe. And maybe it’s my appreciation for Aquaman affecting my perception but I like a Polynesian actor playing a sea god.

Paul Giamatti as Dionysus: I think this one needs no further explanation.

Ethnicity Swapping for a Contemporary Setting

In my piece, I recommended rewinding the temporal setting of the series to the 2000’s. I think it solves a number of potential inconsistencies with some of the rules of the world and how American society has changed in the last 16 years.

If the series is determined to be set in the current iteration of modern day, however, I think some tweaking will be needed. Notably, as my sister has pointed out, Manhattan is not a place for poor people to live. There’s no chance a family as poor as Percy’s could afford a place there.

So we got to chatting and she noted that it could potentially be very interesting to make Percy a Dominican kid from the Bronx. The MCU Spider-Man did something a bit like this, moving Tom Holland Peter into Queens. This maintains some of the broad strokes of Percy as a New Yorker, but updates the setting and brings diversity into play in a way that I can only assume Riordan, who, unlike J.K. Rowling, has expressed open and enthusiastic support for representation, would be wholly onboard for.

The lingering issue with this idea is that his mom would name him Percy. And since that’s technically short for Perseus, I’m willing to forgive it.

That’s it for this! Man I wanted to be the person who adapted this, all the way back in like 2017. Maybe they’ll still pick me? I can be the representative for the books on-set.

~Hans

Mario and Luigi RPG Retrospective — Part 2: A History of Mario RPGs

Context is important. We’ll probably be doing some compare/contrast in the upcoming weeks and I think it’s useful to at least establish where I stand on these other titles outside the Mario & Luigi franchise. I want everyone to know that I haven’t played most of these and what I know about the few that I’ve touched.

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (1996)

Ye gods Bowser is ugly here. Although I suppose it’s effective.

Released the year after I was born. I’ve never played this. I’m aware there’s an obsession with Geno from this game but I don’t know anything about it, besides this Awkward Zombie comic:

Paper Mario (2000)

Another one that I don’t know anything about. Actually, I know one thing about it; it introduced the “paper” idea and “enemy types as party members,” which in turn introduces the horrifying implications of Mario enemy sentience. The best of the Mario RPGs make jokes about this concept in a self-aware way. I’d love to see a dark and gritty moral-choice oriented take on this, but because Mario is the Mickey Mouse of video games, the closest I can get is the Brawl In The Family song about it.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (2004)

This is the big one that everyone loves. I’ve played a bit and watched speedruns and some videos of the story, and I know what happens. I can understand why people like it. The dialogue crackles, the characters are charming, it’s a good time.

I do think that the unconditional praise this game gets, however, is somewhat unwarranted. Nostalgia and the sunk cost fallacy probably have something to do with it, but there are some iffy decisions going on here. The top two things for me that never fail to make me rage out are 1). How steeply enemies scale compared to the player and 2). All the god damn WALKING. For environments that have fairly little to interact with outside combat (which punishes the player for leveling excessively but doesn’t give sufficient benefits to each individual level to prevent them for wanting to grind in the first place) this game has a strange obsession with making the player plod across the world over and over and over and over. The last quest where you have to do this is kind of self-aware about it, but that doesn’t excuse making me walk to all those places in the first place.

Super Paper Mario (2007)

Like TTYD, my opinion on this differs from most people. I think the broad strokes of this game are an interesting take on mixing RPG and platformer elements. The switch-to-3D element is a bit half-baked and eventually turns obnoxious (the version in Fez (2012) is a lot more interesting), but I like the platforming and how the obsolete “score” mechanic of platformers is repurposed as EXP. The art style is kind of fun too, in its own way. I don’t think these good mechanics alone carry the game its full length, but there are redeemable ideas here.

Sticker Star (2012), Color Splash (2016), The Origami King (2020)

These all reviewed badly and I’ve never had the desire to touch any of them until this moment, when I realize that my enjoyment of certain mechanics in Super could mean I might think there are similar redeemable ideas in these three games. I might have to check some of these out now. We’ll see. I definitely won’t be drawing any comparisons in this series, though, because I definitely won’t get to these games until AFTER I finish the retrospective of games I’ve already played.

Next week we’ll boot up Superstar Saga again for the first time in probably around 10 years to see if it holds up.

~Hans

Multiple Endings and the Grind of New Game+

The first recorded instance of the term “New Game+” was in 1995’s Chrono Trigger, where the option carried over almost all of the player’s progression, leaving them horrendously overpowered. More contemporary iterations on the concept have altered and tweaked the idea, with more notable versions, like the Legend of Zelda series’s “Hero Mode” and Borderlands “True/Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode” scaling up difficulty on a second playthrough. But today I want to talk about the original New Game+, the one that trivialized the gameplay in order for the player to freely explore alternate endings on their own terms.

A lot of modern RPGs have multiple endings, encouraging repeat playthroughs. At its core, this is a fine idea. But there’s a disconnect that arises when the game then demands that the player repeat the early game, which is totally linear and often contains lots of story exposition you already know. Some New Game+ modes increase difficulty to keep this early section fresh, but this just means you have to spend even longer on this part of the game that offers no choices that affect the ending — which is why we came to do a fresh playthrough in the first place.

Rarely do modern RPGs scale at a linear level to the player, the way SNES classics like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI did; most require the player to pause their story progression in pursuit of extra experience points to stay on top of the level curve. This is no more true than in New Game+ modes that increase difficulty; the distance between levels becomes bigger and you have to grind even longer just to stay on top of the main story quest.

This, in turn, encourages players to play it safe and try to optimize success, even if doing so is boring. This is especially true if the story elements interplay with the gameplay by providing combat and exploration bonuses, like extra companions in Fallout 4 or paragade points in Mass Effect. If I’m going to need to complete this character’s sidequests in order to get the levels I need to beat the Dark Lord, blowing him off to get the special ending could lock me out of getting any ending at all because I won’t be able to kill the final boss.

I never asked for more of THIS.

For games with multiple endings, scaling up difficulty on New Game+ is, in effect, defeating the purpose. Part of the beauty of the Chrono Trigger New Game+ was precisely that you could breeze your way through the linear early game. Fighting a higher-level Yakra isn’t what any of us came here for. Carrying through progression was a method to facilitate bypassing the stuff that wasn’t important to getting an alternate ending. It wasn’t SUPPOSED to be fun to fight Yakra super over-leveled, even if it may have been for you. Yakra was just a bump in the road to getting the Epoch and being able to really explore the alternate ending options.

The most obvious explanation for this is that studio publishers demand “more gameplay” in order to fulfill what they perceive as some mandatory game-hours quota, but we’ve know for years that quantity and quality aren’t mapped to a correlative curve. Perhaps the strangest thing about all this is that the shining example of making this multiple endings thing work has been around for 25 years and yet designers continue to think that this particular thing, that it trivialized the boring early game, is what it did WRONG?

Look, if I wanted to do the early game again in early game conditions, fighting wolves and slimes on equal terms, I would just start a new game. Nobody has ever stopped me from doing that. That’s why it’s called New Game Plus. There’s a Plus. Something extra you’re getting, a head start on the initial grind so you can jump right back to the fun part where you’re free to explore.

That being said, I don’t mind scaling up difficulty on repeat playthroughs of games with linear, fixed endings. In fact, I believe the inverse is true with these kinds of games. Adding depth to fixed endings through mechanical difficulty is pretty much the only place to go. But I think adding alternate endings accessible ONLY through this method is a mistake, unless the alternate ending in question becomes the only ending through dint of being on a repeat playthrough to begin with.

I think this all boils down to one basic principle: Find the focus of your game and keep your efforts centered there. You can supplement your rich story with engaging and deep combat mechanics — if you have the budget, absolutely do both! But players who want to see all the story endings shouldn’t be forced to engage with the combat mechanics or minigames in order to get what they’re here for if those mechanics don’t affect the story in any meaningful way.

As for Witcher 3, with its freely adjustable difficulty options… See me after class.

~Hans

Mario and Luigi RPG Retrospective — Part 1: In Memoriam of AlphaDream

Paper Mario: The Origami King was recently released.. to less than stellar reception. Since abruptly bailing on my Kingdom Hearts retrospective, in part because I got stuck in the middle of Chain of Memories and lost my will to continue, I’ve been thinking about doing a retrospective on a series that I really loved as a kid.

The Japanese official artwork maintained this clean aesthetic throughout the series lifetime that didn’t come to the US until Bowser’s Inside Story.

The Mario & Luigi RPG series holds a very particular special place in my heart. Superstar Saga was my first video game, ever. Seriously. I fell in love with the charming spritework and base concept at the little demo stations they had at WalMart back in the early 2000’s. I picked up the second and third installments on release day, but fell off the train when the series went 3DS, as I had switched over to PC gaming by that point in my life.

Last October, Mario & Luigi developer AlphaDream went belly-up. This is depressing for a number of reasons, but since I’m not privy to the financial details outside of what sources have reported, I will say this: After the initial success of the franchise, AlphaDream became a farm for those games. They didn’t make anything else original except a single Japan-only mobile game after Bowser’s Inside Story in 2009. Before that mobile game, their previous two releases were just remakes.

I would have liked to see some original ideas come out of AlphaDream in its twilight years. I want to know what the people who made the tightly focused and precise injection of dopamine called Superstar Saga WANTED to make, even though they were a farm for a single one of Nintendo’s myriad IPs.

I think a parallel can be drawn here to Game Freak, the developer of the Pokémon games; Pokémon was successful on such an enormous international scale that Nintendo allowed them one (1) original IP game in 2005, the obscure 2005 Game Boy Advance title Drill Dozer.

Pierce the heavens

This strange little title absolutely NAILED game feel and had more original ideas packed into it than the entire Call of Duty franchise, and yet it would be another 7 years before Game Freak was allowed to do something that wasn’t Pokémon again. That’s kind of sad.

As for the Mario & Luigi franchise, I do think this is a very Pirates of the Caribbean sort of situation. The first game is lightning in a bottle (coincidentally; we’ll get to that later in the retrospective) that the other titles couldn’t quite figure out how to recapture. We’ll get to analyzing some of these in detail as we go through the series, but the one that stands out in my mind is how the later entries sit you down with an annoying tutorial character to explain basic gameplay in detail.

We’ll talk next week a bit about the history of Mario RPGs before diving headfirst into my nostalgia.

~Hans