Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga

I finished this game… a whole month ago? I just forgot to ever write a review for it. Which is ironic because I also originally forgot to finish this game. Played a long time ago. Don’t remember how long ago, but I’m sure I remember pirating it as a young teenager in the mid-2000s when this game was all the rage and everyone liked to rip sprites from it. I think I got stuck somewhere. But that won’t do… if I’m going to play all the video games, surely I should finish what I’ve started, right? Especially something that I keep saying is a game I really like - but how can I say that if I never played it all the way through? Some would argue that it’s perfectly valid to say a game is your favourite if you never finished it, or even if you haven’t played it at all, and I have no problem with using that definition if they want. I can’t vibe with that though.

Anyway. Guess I should actually talk about the game, and get over my favourite hurdle of “actually starting myself off writing a long thing”. Aside from its aforementioned cultural impact on the mid-2000s internet, Superstar Saga has all the makings of a great game. I really think the Mario universe translates well into an RPG, which at first seems really weird because the main games have no real story, but then that turns into the greatest benefit as characters are allowed to have personalities now (apart from Mario who is still a generic protagonist). Instead of having the boring old high fantasy medieval setting, which I just find personally unappealing regardless of whether it’s “overused” or if a “cliche” is even a real thing, you have the cartoon fantasy world of the Mushroom Kingdom. You have all your favourite enemies still, and you can still jump on their heads. So this time around, you just have Mario and also Luigi. No shenanigans involving all kinds of party members you have to keep track of, and also none of this “Mario is the only character” business.

This game is often categorized as your standard ye olde JRPG with turn based battles, but then… is it, really? I’ve personally taken to calling this an action RPG. It’s not like everything’s in real time, but the overworld does have an element of platforming to it (very minor, though), and if you aren’t good with timing and things (as sometimes I am but sometimes I’m fine), then there’s a few parts where you use your overworld abilities that can give you a hard time. Plus a few minigames which are… mandatory. Ech. That’s the first fault. I kinda dislike every single minigame this game has to offer, and many of them are required to be passed to progress in the game. I guess I managed, but they stress me out too much… anyway, there is that, and the battle system, where you can press a button at a certain time to dodge, or when hitting an enemy to do more damage. Actually, you sort of have to press the button, or otherwise you bounce off and do hardly any damage at all. So yeah, if you were expecting a game where you can take it easy on the button pressing, forget it. It’s not inherently bad, but you have to set that expectation sometimes. Oh yeah: Save points. That’s something else that should be mentioned. Of course most ways to play the game today involve some kind of savestate, but if you’re a purist or Real Hardware User, that’s something to take note of.

But there’s my hot take for today. I don’t actually think this battle system is very good. On paper, it should be a really great thing. It would mean that you have a unique way of dealing with each enemy, it avoids the battles being grindy going-through-the-menu-fests… in theory. In practice I find that there’s just too many enemies which are too fucking annoying for various reasons, or because you have no chance of being able to dodge them without pressing buttons randomly (there is supposed to be an indicator of how each enemy will attack and which one, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out), the hammer defense is just really annoying because you have to keep holding the button (but not too long!), there’s an amount of lag (seemingly from the game, not input lag) when jumping so even when you do react to something sometimes the plumbers don’t get out of the way in time and there’s fuck all you can do about it, I dunno. I just didn’t personally enjoy that part. You also have “Bros Attacks” which let the brothers combine their powers and you have to press buttons at the right time, which I guess is cool if you’re into that sort of thing, I just kept using the first one at the first level because I do not vibe with rhythm stuff I guess. You kinda need it if you want to beat the bosses in a reasonable amount of time, though.

But if you can get past that, either by personally managing to enjoy it, or just levelling up enough so you can just defeat enemies before they try any bullshit on you, then you have a lot of game to enjoy. There’s a lot of nicely drawn areas to explore that all feel naturally connected and not like they’re stapled together. The setting overall has a nice quirky charm to it, I guess you could say it’s a bit like Earthbound in that sense. There’s a decent amount of puzzles in the overworld although to be honest a lot of them are quite basic, and there’s various sidequests to do if you want to procrastinate beating the game but at the same time still want to play it. There’s some nice little wholesome moments like when Mario and Luigi reunite after being separated for just a bit they hug because they are brothers who love each other very much and care about each other

For the most part, I really like the dialogue. However that is my second hot take of the day: I don’t think the Luigi stuff has aged well at all. The whole “haha this character is a loser and sucks” joke only works at all if the character in question actually is a loser who sucks. This is just making fun of some guy who doesn’t deserve it. It’s 2021, we all like Luigi now, we actually appreciate that he has a personality and being scared of things isn’t like some kind of abhorrent trait that anyone deserves bullying over. Just be nice to the poor bastard! I didn’t laugh a single time at anyone forgetting who he is or whatever.

Kinda feel like the game drops off towards the end as well. The puzzles all just feel like you’ve solved them before and the game is being annoying by making you do them again, there’s overworld stuff where if you get touched by something you have to start all over again, the minor enemies become even worse to deal with than the bosses who are all just seemingly there to be annoying at that point… up until the final boss, where there are some attacks that you have no chance of avoiding realistically and if you die you have to beat the first phase of the boss again, so you have to keep trying and trying again until an attack is randomly selected that doesn’t kill you, and that’s just kinda the strategy for that boss. Oh also there isn’t really a post-game, after the credits you can only go back to where you saved before the final boss, so beware of that.

So yes, I did turn on rewind at that point. Leave me alone, I’m an adult and I don’t have the mental energy to be punished harshly for minor mistakes, don’t judge me. Speaking of emulation features, something else worth mentioning is that it’s one of the small handful of GBA games that can use the Game Boy Player for rumble, which mGBA can emulate (and why use any other GBA emulator?). However, I would actually not bother turning it on, in retrospect. Having played it all the way through with it on, I can say it does add immersion to the cutscenes I guess, but at the cost of a LOT of flickering in said cutscenes, and a lot of slowdowns in the ocean levels (oh yeah, fuck the ocean levels by the way). I’m told that this is basically how the GB Player works and not an emulation bug, so that’s something to know if you are going to click the “enable Game Boy Player features” button. The other point of doing that is if you explore the overworld, and you step over a hidden spot that you would otherwise need a guide to know about, you’ll get a rumble to let you know you can use Luigi to dig under there. Except you need to be tiny Mario to have that happen, which you aren’t going to want to be all the time. And you get a ! over his head anyway, even if rumble is off.

Yeah I guess I could say something about the bean sidequest and other hidden areas and higher level minigames required for it. But at the same time it’s entirely optional, so it’s just if you really want to waste your time doing it, then… yeah, I did too, though I found a way towards the end of the game where if you abuse rewind you can cheese a certain minigame that can give you every bean. The main point of it is to see all the E. Gadd cutscenes, but you also get a drink which permanently increases your stats, as well as me finding out that I didn’t invent the term “bean juice”. But I’m just not sure it’s really that much worth it. Maybe in 2003, GameFAQs was still just a thing that nerds like me knew about and “regular gamers” didn’t bother with? Maybe nobody wanted to download images of maps on their dialup modems? Yeah I got nothing, I was eschewing physical guides and looking up shit on the internet back in 2003, so I don’t know what the excuse was for having an annoying sidequest like that.

Oh! And you also get a graphically enhanced port of the original Mario Bros… anyone? Anyone up for non-Super Mario Bros? Yeah nah. It’s a bit garbage, I gotta say. Maybe I will be shot by Gen Xers for badmouthing an 80s arcade game (all of which they believe to be sacred), maybe this is my third hot take of the day, it’s just very slippery and frustrating and it doesn’t feel right that you can’t just jump on their heads (which is why Super Mario Bros was made in the first place). But like I guess if you did want to play Mario Bros, this (or the identical version also in the Super Mario Advance games) is probs the best way to do it.

So that probably wraps up all I have to say about it, or all I can think of. Would I still call this one of my favourite games? Ehh… I think I would still call it a good game overall, it just has SO many flaws looking back. Maybe I’m just bad at everything? I’m genuinely getting worried that I have begun to just suck at every single game in my old age, and my only hope going forward is to be a grandma who plays nothing but nonogram puzzles for all eternity.

It’s all good though, maybe the issues I personally had with it will be addressed in the sequelhahahahaha nah. Okay, to be fair I should revisit Partners in Time at some point, to see if I’m still as disappointed with it as I was at the time. And I haven’t played any of the other Mario & Luigi games after that, yes I know Bowser’s Inside Story is considered to be pretty cool. That’s okay, maybe AlphaDream will just release another game for modern platforms that I can then- ah, fuck.