Nintendo Switch among the platforms
During the SNES’s golden age, the original Super Mario RPG was an absolute classic—just not in Europe. Although there was a digital version of the Square-developed role-playing game available on the now-defunct Wii Virtual Console service in 2008, the Switch remake offers many players their first opportunity to play one of the best games from Nintendo’s heyday of 16-bit gaming. The game was never physically released in PAL territories.
Super Mario RPG begins on well-known ground with Bowser capturing Peach and Mario attempting to rescue her, while being perhaps the first Mario game with a deeper plot than “run to the right, stomp turtles, rescue princess”. The Smithy Gang, sentient weaponry from an other universe, soon complicates matters with their entrance. Their goal is to destroy the Star Road and take away the world’s ability to grant wishes. Together with his newfound friends Geno (who isn’t Pinocchio at all) and Mallow (a cloud raised by a frog—don’t ask), Mario sets out to free the Mushroom Kingdom from the most recent menace.
That was the case with the SNES and it remains the case with the Switch: while the Super Mario RPG has a longer tale than the plumber’s platformers, it is still not a very complex one. A slick CGI cutscene now and then adds a little pizazz to the otherwise straightforward “go here, solve problem, beat boss, repeat” narrative arc. Along the journey, the majority of the attention and development is given to those new characters, leaving Mario, Peach, and Bowser virtually unchanged as archetypal ciphers. You won’t be left scratching your brain over the hidden meaning of it all, but it all works and is full of beautiful, wonderful, and frequently very humorous moments.
A happy journey full of amusingly strange, poignant, and incredibly clever moments.
What’s truly amazing, though, is how little the Super Mario RPG from 2023 differs from the original—and not just in terms of plot. Although the visual enhancement is striking, the entire area and world design faithfully replicates the SNES version, including the placement of unseen hidden chests. With a few minor changes to bring it into compliance with Nintendo’s more defined 21st century Mario legend, the translation is almost exact as well. Princess Toadstool, as she was known in the original, is now Princess Peach.
There are almost too many completely new elements, giving the impression that Nintendo is being cautious. Rematches between boss fights and the scrapbook feature, which serves as a kind of replayability, are among the features that are appreciated. After all, who hasn’t come back to an RPG after a few weeks away and discovered they had no idea what they were doing? But some feel like the consequence of wanting to offer something new while also being cautious not to change things too much; these include a bestiary of slain monsters and an Easy Mode that makes the already easy game even easier.
The biggest area of change has been in combat, though nothing particularly ground-breaking. All the classic features of a Square game from 1996 are still there here, including turn-based combat, avoidable or inflicted status ailments, and ability-enhancing gear to outfit your group. The majority of the changes are minor. For example, although the earlier version added well-timed action commands to boost enemy damage, new version expands them so that all opponents receive splash damage from a perfectly timed attack button tap. In a similar vein, strategic guard placement can completely negate enemy damage, although enemies now warn when an attack is completely unavoidable. A more significant change, Triple Attacks, permits the employment of strong group attacks once a gauge is filled by all those precisely timed action orders, but this is still a straightforward, nearly beginner-friendly JRPG, so genre fans won’t find anything new here.
Even still, it’s nearly hard to avoid falling in love with Super Mario RPG, whether you play it now or not. Despite its simplicity—a few rhythm-matching mini-games that never seem to actually match rhythms will probably be the biggest challenge most players face—it’s a happy adventure full of witty, heartwarming, and hilariously bizarre moments that will captivate both new and seasoned Mario fans.
In the end, Super Mario RPG on Switch feels more like a faithful replica than a remake—rather, it’s more of an experiment in game preservation. For better (the ability to switch between the fantastic original score by composer Yoko Shimomura and a freshly orchestrated version) and worse (an overall experience that still seems like a game that was released almost 30 years ago), this version is absolutely loyal to the original. Though it is nonetheless deserving of its illustrious and important reputation, the game is a love letter to a bygone period by design. It is not a Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario, or Mario & Luigi.