This trio has had a wildly disparate impact on the genre. Final Fantasy VI is unmistakably the direct ancestor of Final Fantasy VII, which is an epoch marker for the entire genre: jRPGs made after FFVII are either an imitation of it or a reaction to it, and I can’t say with certainty that any game made since has displaced it in that regard. Chrono Trigger is regarded as the best jRPG of its era, if not all time, but had one kinda-sorta-direct sequel, a third entry in the series that never came out and had its script cannibalized for a Final Fantasy spinoff mobile gacha game, but otherwise was largely ignored by developers until the indie game boom of the 2010s. Mario RPG meanwhile spawned two distinct series of successors a few years later: Intelligent System’s Paper Mario, and Alpha Dream’s Mario & Luigi.
Here’s the strange thing. Mario & Luigi is the successor to one of the definitive games of its generation, has cameos from that game and adopted a lot of its tone, mechanics, and presentation. Its Japanese title is literally Mario & Luigi RPG. And while it’s unmistakably an RPG… I also don’t think it particularly wants to be one. You spend a great deal more playtime navigating the platforming puzzles in dungeons than fighting enemies, and while towns and NPCs and the like exists interacting with them is only rarely the solution to progress- usually it’s more “go get quest, then do puzzles to get to where you need to be”. Except the puzzles are about swapping out platforming actions.
So it’s a fascinating case where a game is unmistakably a jRPG, while doing the bare minimum to achieve that universal recognition… which makes it a good example for what actually makes a jRPG to start with, doesn’t it?
Before that let’s establish the basics. Alpha Dream was founded by a pack of former Squaresoft folk, noteably for our purposes SMRPG’s director Chihiro Fujioka. He filled the same role for most of their pre-M&L work, a pack of Japanese-only RPGs and the handheld Hamtaro games, most of which share a similar trend of blending jRPG-style turn based mechanics and stat-based character growth with real-time elements. I’d single out Tomato Adventure, a world of living tomatoes where the key element of combat was playing minigames as part of your attack. It’s both very obvious why Nintendo tapped them to make (some of) their Mario RPGs and also why M&L is the way it is.
Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga features the brothers on an adventure in the Beanbean Kingdom, chasing down the witch Cackletta who has stolen Peach’s voice. They crash land at the boarder after Cackletta’s minion Fawful manages to shoot down Bowser’s airship, and end up walking their way back and forth across the kingdom obtaining powerups, tracking down a local wish-granting relic, having laugh-themed misadventures (locations in Beanbean include Chuckle Woods, WooHoo Hooniversity, TeeHee Valley and Joke’s End), and otherwise playing out the RPG Hero shtick. But let’s break that down.
- There’s three towns in the game, complete with NPCs, which is about right for a ~17 hour game. You breeze through each of them in about 5 minutes each and said NPCs are rarely where quests come from. Indeed there’s basically only one sidequest obtained this way, the rest are actually tucked in out of the way corners with their own dedicated givers.
- Most of your time is spent navigating the hub area, where as you progress through the game you branch off from the surroundings of Beanbean Castle into various dungeons and similar locations. It’s a reasonable structure for a non-linear RPG, except M&L isn’t one of those; you can see where locations you aren’t supposed to go yet are, you just don’t have the ability to get there. The jRPG method to handling this would usually just be making enemies in those later areas too strong to reasonably beat, encouraging the player to go in the recommended order, while setting flags to make sure nothing happens if you brute force it (or not, if you actually wanted to be non-linear). What M&L does is give the brothers different ways to combine their Jump, Hammer, and Hand talents, given them a diverse (overlarge, honestly) set of platforming skills to open up more and more map.
- Battles play out on a separate field in a turn-based way. The quirk shared by all Mario RPGs, tapping buttons in rhythm with your attacks has a large presence in M&L as well. Indeed timed hits are at their most elaborate in M&L, with the bulk of your damage coming from Bros. Attacks which tend to have between 3 and 10 presses for a complete attack, which really pushes it from a way of spicing up combat to being more important than other elements of the game. There’s one or two attacks with bonus effects, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Timed blocks meanwhile are completely different in M&L, because every enemy attack in the game is blocked, or rather dodged, differently. Some can be punished with added good timing, others cannot, but most importantly is that the game assumes very strongly that you are dodging almost all attacks; enemy damage is relatively high and adds up very quickly with only the two PCs.
- Leveling mechanics are superficially similar to SMRPG, with the player selecting one stat to apply a bonus to at each level up from a roulette. The game tracks this in some form (probably based on how far the stat is above some baseline), meaning at each level some stats will be easier to get higher bonuses than others. Because of the weight given to timed hits, however, defensive stats matter considerably less than Attack and Speed. Equipment similarly has bonus effects attached that are generally more important than their raw stat boosts.
Ultimately M&L contains all the elements commonly associated with its genre (experience points, gaining levels, exploring worlds, obtaining quests, plot-driven game structure) but makes a concerted effort to minimize them in favor of its own quirks. And the best way to get at what those are is talking about… not the core mechanics that make up game genres, but the core values. That is, what mentality or approach is meant to be rewarded in a given genre.
In an RPG that’s knowledge, which can alternately be read as pattern recognition. Gameplay obstacles in the genre, at their best, are mighty things that can be made easier by the player’s knowledge and applying the skills they have well. A boss will have a weakness you can learn about, or will rely on certain abilities the player can anticipate and block. The actual execution of the player’s strategy is given less weight than devising it in the first place. Secondarily, the player can prevail through determination, alternately read as exploration. Bluntly, the player can embark on additional quests, or explore hidden corners for new treasures, or even straight up level grind to close the gap in strength between them and the foe, whether in sheer numbers or in additional equipment and skills.
Fundamentally, and this is more of a personal stance, the key attribute that makes something an RPG is having the option to grind your way out of problems. It’s a sort of safety valve in case the player is inexperienced or missed some vital clue or ability. And these things exist in M&L, but it’s inefficient. Enemy damage is quite high, so you have to grind an awful lot of levels to make up for being weak at dodging. Enemies are pretty durable against your basic attacks, so failure to master Bros Attacks make added strength gained in grinding a lot less meaningful. There are sidequests, but not very many, so searching nooks and crannies won’t really give you that much in the way of added strength (although do that anyway, if nothing else than to find beans to make coffee. Best part of the game.)
Meanwhile, platformers emphasize reflex, with a safety valve of memorization. Once you’ve gotten basic proficiency with the controls and handling of a given platformer, a blind playthrough will live or die based on quick reactions to level elements as you see them. And of course if you don’t get it right the first time, just doing it until you can do it from memory will get you through eventually. M&L’s emphasis on dodging enemy attacks works similarly: if you have good reflexes you’ll never get hit, and if not just do it repeatedly until you just have the rhythm memorized.
And that’s the game really. M&L undeniably lets you play it as an RPG, but it wants you to play it as a platformer. It takes a lot of level grinding to make up a deficiency in platforming reflexes, but basic proficiency in dodging well and reliably performing the Bros Attacks will easily make up sub-par equipment or underleveling. Conversely, knowing which attacks cause stat busts isn’t terribly meaningful, because there’s just the one so you know to always open every fight with it until it sticks. Enemies technically have weaknesses, but they don’t add any huge amount of damage: you’ll get more out of Bros Attacks anyways. The trappings, connecting to SMRPG with basic mechanics and cameos and humorous tone, the comforting steady gain of EXP and levels, watching numbers climb ever higher, those all cue the player to expect an RPG. But the experience of playing it is distinctly closer to a platformer.
Which actually is the biggest weakness of the game.
The thing is? A lot of these platforming elements never quite come together. The field controls are somewhat sloppy, and cycling through all of the various platforming skills on the field is cumbersome (the 3DS remake helps some, but only some). While having a more Zelda-like progression where you do an area, get a new ability, and that lets you go back to the hub and access a new area is fine from a structural standpoint, using the abilities just feels like a time waster. In battle, all the counter attack shenanigans means enemy turns take quite a while, stretching out battles you can end in one attack needlessly long just due to animation time. The game wants to emphasize these elements, but what draws you in is those surface RPG bits. The best part of M&L is it’s quirky humor, the extensive supporting cast, the unique handling of the core Mario cast. Hell, this is only the second game to use Luigi’s modern characterization; Luigi’s Mansion came out just over 2 years before Superstar Saga, with no real appearances of the second fiddle except Super Smash Bros. Melee in between. Seeing it interact with such a large cast is one of the real highlights, nevermind the recurring cameo from the signature new character from Luigi’s Mansion.
Ultimately I wonder if M&L is a rosetta stone. It’s often held as the best of its series, and a strong contender for the best Mario RPG, but actually playing it the jank stands out way more than the strengths once you get more than an hour or two in. And while in the broader culture I completely believe most people just play a couple hours of a game, wander off, then remember its quality forever based on that time, this sort of game usually bucks that trend to at least some degree. But I think there was always a subset of jRPG fans who actually didn’t like the genre, so a jRPG that actually is trying really hard to be a puzzle-platformer? Well that’s a whole other kettle of fish. You have to dodge, so the final boss is super hard! I can run around and see all the places I’ll go later, even if I can’t get there now! I’d personally pitch those as immaterial, the game is still linear and the bosses might be hard but they aren’t interesting. But if you weren’t engaged by jRPG mechanics… well those coverups will make the game stand out won’t they?
Still, for all that it’s far from a bad game. There’s stuff to like, and it’s no surprise there’s a dedicated fanbase for the series. But for myself… well, I got more distracted using it as a platform to talk about genre definitions didn’t I. I mean, until the final dungeon I barely noticed this was a Yoko Shimomura soundtrack, and I worship her the way ancient peoples worshiped the sun, and for much the same reasons. And there’s a lot to say about the series as it developed, but seeing as I’ve only played half of those that’d a bit beyond the scope of this particular article. It should be noted though that one of the recurring problems there was overstaying its welcome, and that’s absolutely not an issue with Superstar Saga; it’s almost exactly as long as it should be. And I guess I should probably take that cue at this point too.
Rating- 7/10
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