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).
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.
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
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