Well, it took a lot longer than I expected, thanks to hosting a holiday and briefly losing all of my free time to Baldur’s gate 3, but I beat Super Mario RPG. It was exactly as I remembered it. Well, broadly speaking anyway. All the challenges were the same. All the secrets I could remember were in the same spots. The boss fights where more or less the same. I struggled with the same action commands I always struggle with and had an easier time with some of the ones that relied on mechanical operation from the less-than-perfect SNES controller. The story was the same, the world felt the same, and I got to enjoy my walk through it the same way I’ve enjoyed every replay of the Super Nintendo original. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is definitely one of those games that will always seem bigger and more beautiful in my memory from my childhood than it ever will from any of my replays. It was a big deal when it came out, taking Mario from the world of platformers to the world of RPGs while adding in a delightful cast of characters that never showed up again, and it was a big deal to me as one of the few games I got to play by myself. It felt different from everything else I’d ever tried before then and it was my introduction to RPGs as a whole (a style of game I couldn’t play much since most video game RPGs had scantily clad feminine character in them, something that would have gotten me banned from playing the game at least and probably grounded as well).

The general story of the game is fairly straight-foward. Peach is visiting Mario (on her own, unsupervised) and is kidnapped by Bowser. Mario, who was alone in his dingy little shack for some unknown reason, rushes out to rescue her. This rescue is interrupted immediately after he defeats Bowser when a massive sword plunges out of the sky and into Bowser’s keep, throwing everyone inside out into the world, seemingly at random. Mario hurries on his way to find Peach again, to return her to the Mushroom kingdom, and encounters not only a brand new character named Mallow being picked on, but a new threat to the world as well when he finds the kingdom temporarily conquered by a group calling themselves “Smithy’s Gang.” It turns out they had an unknown star, which Mario collects, and then he and Mallow set out to save the world from these new invaders, rescue Peach (who becomes a playable character shortly thereafter), and make some new friends (such as Bowser and another new face who is called “Geno” because their actual name is unpronounceable in mortal language). It’s your standard RPG fare, with the stakes being the endless invasion of the world around the Mushroom Kingdom and the inability for wishes to ever be granted again (which feels a little silly at times because it entirely removes the agency of the characters since this idea is presented using the example that Peach would never be able to be rescued if Bowser kidnapped her and Bowser would never get his castle back despite both those things happening while wishes were supposed to be ungrantable). Anyway, I’ve never really played this game for the story. I played it for the jokes, the humor, the music, and the general vibes of the game.

Playing it again, with new visuals, a couple new mechanics, updated music, and cutscenes was an interesting way to rexperience the game. It has been a while since my last replay, partly because my SNES broke and I’ve been putting off fixing it (since I never really have the time to do all the extra stuff I want to do with it, like 3D print a new case and turn it into a self-contained console with its own built-in screen), but partly because the battery in the cartridge died and all of my save data would disappear if I ever unplugged it from the console. I actually discovered that in my second-to-last playthrough, when I wanted to play something else for a little bit and then realized I’d have to play the whole thing all over again, and decided to just not play through the eighty percent of the game I’d already cleared. My last playthrough was actually what I was doing when my SNES got jostled by my roommate as he walked past, which jerked the power port loose so that I couldn’t actually get the dang thing to turn on anymore (and, you know, deleted my save file again). Still, this is a game I’ve played enough over the years that I can remember pretty much everything perfectly.

As a whole, the Switch version of the game felt easier. My leading theory is that I was much more powerful in this playthrough because I fought every enemy at least once as I played the game, a process I typically avoided while playing it on the SNES. Back then, I wasn’t listening to podcasts while I played video games, so doing grindy stuff like fighting the same enemies all over again felt incredibly boring, so I skipped as many as I could. That said, the new, two-tiered action command system definitely contributed to this feeling as well. Now, instead of needing to be precise to get the benefit of the action command at all, being precise meant I dealt additional damage to my target, dealt damage to all foes on the map (for basic attacks, at least), and could even reduce the damage I took to zero. Now, instead of being able to just reduce the damage by a couple points, a perfect action command nulified the damage done to my characters as long as the attack was against a single target. I think they ramped some of the damage up a bit to compensate for this ability to completely nullify damage dealt, but I also rarely had to use items in battle on the Switch version, so maybe I’m just imagining things. It also definitely helped that I could hold so many more items on the Switch version of the game and that they seemed to drop much more frequently. I never ran out of anything I needed and, between the higher drop rates and me not needing to use them as much, I almost never needed to buy anything. I think I spent more money buying the special treasures from the Treasure Toad in Mole Town than I spent on everything else in the game minus gear for my characters (which is the only way to get gear in this game, aside from a couple items, most for Mario, that show up as treasure in-game).

I still had a great time, even if it felt trivially easy at times. Sure, there were a couple fights that almost went poorly, but it was still a pretty smooth, uneventful playing experience. My only general complaint is that I don’t remember the game being quite so devoid of story as this felt, but I think part of that might be a result of a change in my expectations for the amount of story the game should have. I expect more from a game that looks as modern as Super Mario RPG than I would from an older game like Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. Still, it was a largely faithful adaption, even though more than a few names were changed. I mean, I get that “Frog Sage” is probably a more descriptively accurate name and is probably much more accessible to a wider range of people, but I’ll always think of him as “Frogfucius.” I mean, he was still the adoptive parent of Mallow, the little marshmallow-looking puffy boy who seems to be able to physically detach from his pants (which are also his only item of clothing) and all of his dialogue was largely the same, so it didn’t really change anything. It just threw me off a bit, during the early parts of the game. Most other name changes were small enough that they didn’t really faze me, though a great deal of that was because most of those changes were applied to enemies to keep the general joke-y nature of the game’s monster naming conventions in tact.

If you’re looking for a quick little RPG (though it is less little than it used to be, thanks to some post-game content added to the Switch version), I’d definitely recommend it. Even if you’re entirely new to the game, you can get a glimpse into the origins of a beloved series since this game is the base on which all of the Paper Mario games were built. I mean, the original Paper Mario game even has the same basic premise of wish fulfillment being at risk, seven stars needing to be collected, and Mario appearing in an RPG (which the series eventually abandoned, much to its detriment, though I will say that the game being an RPG of sorts didn’t help prevent Paper Mario: The Origami King from being incredibly boring to play). If you enjoy a decent RPG with fun music (they even have the option to turn on the original music from the SNES game), I’d definitely recommend giving Super Mario RPG a shot.