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.
Timeless Combat System
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.
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.