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).