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

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

Nintendo’s Iron Curtain

I’m going to pose a hypothetical question to you that I know you won’t be able to answer, because I’m a voice on the internet and you’re reading at home. What’s so special about, say, Super Mario Maker that it couldn’t be played on the PC?

Likewise, why haven’t we gotten a keyboard-and-mouse port of Metroid Prime? Or a Steam release of Ocarina of Time? Well, the obvious answer is because Nintendo only develops these first-party titles for its own consoles. Duh. But then my next question is gonna blow your mind.

Why not?

Seriously, why not? Think about it. What about these classic Nintendo titles is so special or unique that they can’t be pulled off with a “standard” controller (that is, the same layout that PlayStation and XBox have been using for the last three console generations), or even a keyboard and mouse setup? That’s a trick question, because emulators have been pulling it off pretty well for years now. Except for Skyward Sword, I guess, but I’m really only asking for ports of good games.

I grew up with Nintendo games. My parents, being Asian and all, had (and still have, really) a big problem with me playing video games. I had to save up for a Game Boy Advance by myself, since a console was BEYOND expensive. Relative to now, it’d be like buying… Well, I guess it’d be like buying a console.

As such, all my first video games were Nintendo titles. Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga, Pokémon Ruby. I grew up with Nintendo and had, and still have, a distinct emotional investment in the stuff they put out.

But I’m also a poor college student now, and I have to manage my own money. I have to pay attention to how much I spend on video games and a console is completely out of the question, because I can’t make videos on it too. And that makes me really upset, because I’ve played every Mario and Luigi game except for Dream Team and I REALLY WANT TO PLAY IT!

I started PC gaming because I already had a PC, and shelling out hundreds of dollars for a 3DS just to play Fire Emblem Awakening and Kingdom Hearts 3D, each of which I would again have to shell out $40 for, was not an option. But as I sit here, in my ivory PC Master Race throne, I look over at Apsire playing the remakes of Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, and I silently weep.

And in between my tears, I wonder why I can’t play those games. Because the 3DS controls look awfully similar to my PC USB controller.

How many people are in my same scenario, I wonder? People who converted because you can get a library of three games for less than $20 on a machine you already own during a Steam sale, but to stay loyal to Nintendo, you have to invest at least $400 for the same. And, to that extent, I wonder how many of us would return to Nintendo if they decided to release some of their older titles – or, hell, even release the new ones – for other platforms. I would buy the shit out of Wind Waker for Steam.

Am I crazy, or have hardware innovations kind of stopped being a thing as of late? In the second half of the Wii’s lifetime they pretty much gave up on motion controls and started making high-def SNES games. Oculus might be a thing coming up, but for now it still seems kind of niche to me. It’s almost like the whole motion-controls boom with the Wii was just a fad that was unsustainable, as was the mandatory shinier graphics of the last 2 console generations, and the best method of game design is ultimately that: Good design.

But I digress. Back to Nintendo. To date, the most interesting usage I’ve seen of the Wii U gamepad is the Bowser party in Mario Party 10. A lot of games use it as a glorified menu screen, or a straight-up duplicate display of the main screen. I’ve come up with three games that would really utilize it on my own, are you guys really that creatively bankrupt??

I gave up on Nintendo because I’m poor, and I’ve regretted every minute of it. I’m sure I can’t be the only one who feels this way. We don’t make our platform choice decisions based on whether a controller is better than a mouse and WASD, we make them based on external factors outside of our control. And money is one of those things. If Nintendo’s pay gate was limited to how much the games actually cost, I’d gladly come running back. Sure, it’s less money than they want from me, but they want more money than I have. It’s the choice between selling me just a game and no console, or selling me nothing at all.

But if they don’t want my peasant money that’s fine too. I’ll just go cry over here in the warm, highly profitable arms of Valve.

~NCB