Well, it’s finally happened. This past Friday something happened that, for a very long time, many of us old timer Nintendo fans thought never would. A full and true remake for Super Mario RPG was released! After over twenty years of Nintendo almost compeletly ignoring its existence, not only can we enjoy the adventure once again, but we can do so with new mechanics, new cutscenes, updated boss fights and new, beautifully-crafted graphics and music!

I imagine that this is something of a dream come true for many fas out there, and it might even be cause for hope for the future of Mario RPGs in general. I haven’t yet had the pleasure of trying the remake, so this isn’t going to be breakdown of the game or anything. Rather, I wanna talk about why it’s been able to endure in gamers’ consciousness and what its success (hopefully) means for Nintendo and fans moving forward.

In hindsight, it’s kind of amazing that Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars wound up taking-off at all. It was released in 1996, the final year of the Super Nintendo and the year that Super Mario 64 took the world by storm on Nintendo’s then brand-new system.

By all rights, a goofy RPG spin-off should have wound up largely forgotten in all the hub-bub. It would have been so easy for it to happen too. Not only was the Nintendo 64 getting banger 3D title after banger 3D title, but so was the PlayStation! Sega was still hyping up its new systems and games too; there was absolutely no room for an “old” Super Nintendo game anywhere, especially since there wasn’t really any internet to speak of yet.

Yet, Super Mario RPG found its fanbase anyway. I like to think that it’s because it was just the right kind of unique. It had a look that was never duplicated thanks to the very unique place that 3D graphics were in at the time; it characterized Nintendo’s mainline characters in a way that arguably wouldn’t be duplicated until Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga in 2003, and it offered players a wholly different version of Mario’s world, one where the Mushroom Kingdom occupied only a small corner of the map and Bowser wasn’t even close to being the baddest guy around. In other words, it was wholly fascinating in a way that still endures almost 30 years later.

Compared to the mainline Mario fandom, and indeed many fandoms within gaming, Super Mario RPG’s base has always been comparatively small. It’s grown entirely by word-of-mouth recommendations; first from those relative few who played it back when it came out, and later by those who took that recommendation.

YouTube has helped greatly to spread the word too, butonly in recent years. Before that, people only learned about Super Mario RPG either through someone they actually new or through early internet message boards/guide sites (such as GameFAQs) where people were actually talking about it. Even now I would still consider the game to be a relative unknown, though now its more because of its age then anything else.

All that said though, Super Mario RPG has at last gotten enough of a following that Nintendo considers it worthwhile to bring it to all the younger gamers who own Switches (while also getting those nostalgia dollars from my like, of course). As I expressed in another post on the subject, I wonder if Super Mario RPG has the kind of magic capable of capturing the attention of younger gamers. Video games have changed greatly in the decades since it released, so it could very well just be a product of its time. Still though, the remake is looking absolutely beautiful, and it’s looking like Nintendo has done everything it can to make it playable for newcomers. So I’m actually quite hopeful that it’ll become the hit it always deserved to be this time.

If it (and the Paper Mario TTYD remake coming next year) do manage to take-off, then perhaps we’ll finally see Nintendo turn back from its trend of slowly but surely ironing-out all of the personality and RPG elements from its recent so-called RPGs. When they came out, Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario TTYD were real risks, both which eventually wound up paying off.

I would absolutely love to see Nintendo realize that these sorts of games aren’t risks anymore and that there are tons of us (perhaps soon to be many more) who are absolutely starving for more games that offer similar experiences. These remakes represent a chance to see even better titles from Nintendo in the future!

So, here’s to the renewed success of Super Mario RPG! I hope everyone who tries it is able to get as much or even more enjoyment out of it than I did as a kid, and I really hope Nintendo takes the hint and starts investing as much into the depth and writing of its RPGs it does their visual flair!

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How are you feeling about the release of Super Mario RPG? Is it the return of an old favorite for you, or will is it a chance to enjoy anew adventure? What do want to see from Nintendo when it comes to future releases?

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