Odds are good you’ve seen Mario stomp a goomba or kick a koopa shell before, but you might not have seen him punch a giant lady with a parrot for hair right in the shins while she sips a cocktail and rides a floating banana. Super Mario RPG is easily one of the quirkiest adventures the mustachioed plumber has ever been on, rightly becoming a standout when Final Fantasy developer Square first released it nearly three decades ago. Its 2023 remake is an incredibly faithful recreation of that already awesome RPG, with a fresh coat of paint and some small but smart combat updates. Those changes can’t completely shake off 27 years of dust, but they do provide a fantastic way for fans like me to revisit this classic while also letting new folk better enjoy just how wild it is firsthand.
Bucking the usual setup, this entertaining story kicks off with Mario rushing to Bowser’s keep and immediately rescuing a kidnapped Princess Peach – but before they can return home happily ever after, a giant sword with a face crashes through the castle roof and sends all three of them flying. From there, Mario has to fight lots of living weapons up to no good and collect seven Star Pieces in order to save the Mushroom Kingdom. It’s not a long tale, taking me just about 12 hours to finish (though I’ve done so on SNES before), but the writing is so consistently funny and often off-the-wall that this essentially-unchanged script still had me frequently laughing out loud.
Super Mario RPG’s turn-based combat is extremely straightforward, pitting your party of five against all sorts of weird and creative enemies – from your standard Mario monsters like goombas to the skeletal corpse of a mastodon that has literally zero explanation. It fuses timing-based button prompts into your otherwise recognizable mix of basic attacks and resource-limited spells, satisfyingly giving you an extra boost for a well-timed A-press on offense and reducing damage (or even negating it entirely) on defense.
This system still rocks, and it’s easy to see why it influenced so many games that came after it – be that Mario’s own RPG outings in the Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario games, or more recent successors like the South Park RPGs or this year’s Sea of Stars. That said, it’s worth mentioning that while it’s always very fun, combat is also borderline comically fast a lot of the time, sending you into super-easy fights just as quickly as you’re likely to finish them, with the really interesting encounters reserved for a fairly wide array of inventive bosses. That includes a strange sort of dog monster that creates clones of your party members, as well as a living bow who cleverly disables buttons on your controller to prevent specific types of moves, shaking battles up nicely even if they still don’t usually pose much of a threat.
Combat is also definitely the place this remake has been altered most substantially, largely for the better. Button timings now give an even bigger bonus for a super-precise press, even adding a splash damage effect to your basic attacks that made me more thoughtful about how I distributed damage in standard encounters than I ever was in the original. Chaining together well-timed presses also fills up a gauge to use on powerful new Triple Moves, each of which comes with an awesome 3D cutscene. These updates don’t necessarily make the combat feel as modern or as deep as many of the games inspired by the original, but they do help breathe plenty of fresh life into a system that certainly benefits from it.
One part of that system that is still a ton of fun is its varied selection of weapons. Rather than only being a statistical increase, the weapons each of your party members use are tailored specifically to them, and their animations – and, as a result, attack timings – change whenever you find a new one. Mario could be kicking a koopa shell or smashing baddies with a hammer, while the totally lovable “tadpole” Mallow can go from swinging a stick to crashing together cymbals. Bowser (who rounds out your party alongside the mysterious Geno and Princess Peach herself) has probably the best weapon option: a glove that lets him pick up and hurl Mario as a projectile like Colossus tossing Wolverine.
I loved that each time I switched weapons I had to retrain my muscle memory, which is made easier here by a smart new prompt that guides your timing only until you nail it a few times (and then comes back if you start to slip). The rub of this extremely amusing weapon system, however, is that you don’t have much control over it. This is a very linear game, and each new weapon you find will almost always just be statistically better than the last, with no comparable alternatives to choose from. That’s true of your defensive items too, leaving the RPG part of Super Mario RPG a little bit thin as you don’t really customize your characters much past a single accessory slot for things like small stat boosts or status resistances.
Instead, the lifeblood of this campaign is its variety – it’s easy to enjoy some fairly simple combat and progression when you’re never in the same setting long enough to ever come near getting bored. You’ll jump from classic Mario sewers to a ghost-filled sunken pirate ship, from a minigame where you’re barrelling down a waterfall collecting coins to one where you’re running up a hill trying to save Princess Peach, from fighting a crazed bomb person to a living wedding cake. This world could so easily have crumbled into a hodgepodge of disparate ideas, especially when you occasionally remember that this is somehow still a Mario game, but instead they come together to make a strangely coherent and delightfully unique whole.
All of the things I mentioned and more have been lovingly recreated with true 3D graphics faithful to the original’s pre-rendered 3D art style, and the new look is… I dunno, it’s fine. I don’t mean to undersell what this remake has done, it really does look quite nice, especially in its brand-new and often super-cool cutscenes – but I can’t help but feel like some amount of the original’s personality has been lost in the translation here. Models and environments are updated almost one-to-one, leaving them looking shiny and new, but removing some of the charm the pre-rendered look naturally had. When I look at other Switch remakes, like Link’s Awakening or Live A Live, I end up wishing this one had found a bit of its own flavor inspired by that SNES look rather than just making the closest approximation it could manage.
One area that has been masterfully modernized, however, is the soundtrack. Super Mario RPG’s music has been burned into my brain since childhood, and while the rose-tinted glasses that come with that adoration initially had me thinking the updated versions were just okay, all it took was swapping between new and old (which you can conveniently do at will in the menu) for me to appreciate just how great these new tracks are. They are perfectly reverent while adding impressive layers of instrumentation and nuance to every song, capturing their spirits and all the little accents that make them so catchy while bringing something new to the table in the exact way I wished the graphics had.
And speaking of new, this isn’t just the adventure oldies like me might remember. The base campaign has remained relatively untouched in terms of content, but an entirely new post-game lets you explore for secrets you may have missed after the credits roll, while also including some impressive extra challenges to push your limits. Avoiding any specific spoilers, that includes extremely clever twists on some fights that require a deeper use of the combat system and its various mechanics in a way I appreciated. I sort of wish these encounters hadn’t been saved exclusively for an endgame grind, but I like that the added difficulty is there for those left hungry by the main story.
There’s also a comprehensive Monster List to fill out, with checkmarks and funny little quotes for every enemy you manage to successfully time Mallow’s Thought Peek ability on, giving me a completionist goal to chase even as combat got overly easy. However, this list exposes perhaps the most surprising issue with Super Mario RPG’s remake: about a third of the way through the campaign, the menus started suffering from serious framerate drops that made everything from shops to equipment juggling to that exhaustive Monster List a chore to navigate. I didn’t run into any technical issues besides this (apart from some similar lag in one specific map area), but it was bad enough that I actively disliked managing my party, checking my items, or revisiting all of those silly quotes I had collected, which is a bit of a bummer.
