Super Mario RPG: Quirks and Annoyances

November 3rd, 2009

I think it’s fair to say that Super Mario RPG is a fairly good adaption of the Mario universe to the Squaresoft’s 16-bit RPG design, with a surprising number of minor innovations to boot. The fusion of adventure elements to the RPG formula is one such example of innovation, as is the pre-rendered visual style. There are some minor annoyances, quirks and flashes of brilliance sprinkled throughout the adventure, here are a couple of dot points that grabbed my attention:

Rareware Won in the End, Didn’t they?

Originally, still shots of Super Mario RPG had convinced me that the characters would appear malformed, charmless and slightly dark. This is true to some extent. The contrast of blacks is cranked up too high and the characters, in their 3D representations, do look a little uncanny. Overall though Squaresoft did a faithful job at ensuring that the visual design fits within the series’ overall style guide and avoids the aforementioned issues. Everything does appear slightly skewed and malformed by the perspective, but much is forgiven after watching the character sprites perform comedic reenactments in an over exaggerated, comedic fashion. Surprisingly they actually hold a lot of character.

There’s an sad irony to it though. When Miyamoto-san was designing Yoshi’s Island, he decidedly designed the game to look primitive and child-like in something of a response to the pressure NCL was dumping on him to mimic the 3D sprite design from Donkey Kong Country in the next Mario game. Super Mario RPG uses a very similar design to DKC, albeit presented from an isometric viewpoint. It’s kind of crushing in this way to see Mario’s last SNES game conform to this nature, undermining Miyamoto’s refusal of tech-driven visual design. Furthermore, Squaresoft would only go on to abandon Nintendo, make a game which popularizes even more flashy tech (Final Fantasy VII and full motion video) and therefore partly ensure the companies “loss” in the next generation of consoles. As with the 3D sprites themselves it’s a little uncanny.

Inconsistent Difficulty

The overall difficulty curve in Super Mario RPG is quite generous, particularly if you level early. As with the other games in the series, it can be interpreted as an RPG lite, I wouldn’t think so personally though. There are two or three points in the game where the difficult spikes without warning though. Early on in the adventure just after Mallow joins your team, the difficulty adjusts for the added party member, yet Mallow is very weak and only has limited FP (flower power; magic) to heal, so he keeps dying, leaving Mario to pick up the slack against double the number of enemies.

A couple of the boss battles too can be unfairly difficult or require an arcane set of tactics to finally down. Nearing the end of the game, the Czar Dragon and Axem Rangers are two such examples. Besides these occasional nuisances though the Super Mario RPG is hassle free. I’m hesitant to call it an RPG-lite or a beginner’s RPG, but it certainly takes the weight off the combat and grinding and instead places the focus on the dungeon exploration and sub-games built into some of the levels.

Distribution of Stars

Most games abide by the carrot and stick principle whereby they string players along by teasing them with rewards which are just outside their reach. Super Mario RPG tends to follow this approach too stringently and in turn often drags the player through long sequences of play only to take off with the reward, leaving you empty-handed.

Players enter dungeons with the expectation of receiving a reward at the end of it, otherwise why would they bother entering one in the first place? Put simply: players need carrots. If you break these expectations then the player will likely feel betrayed by the game design and play something else. The simple trick is this: Don’t break this rule or else you break the player’s confidence in your game.

super-mario-rpg-screenies

Occasionally Super Mario RPG will throw that rule out the window. As with every game in the Mario RPG series, Mario and company must collect 8 stars to resolve some sort of Mushroom-Kingdom-threatening crisis. One would thereby assume that after a hard slog in a dungeon the player would be given their star and sent on their way. However, at the end of at least 2 or 3 of SM RPG‘s numerous dungeon-like areas, just as Mario reaches for his sparkly reward some twerp swipes it from under his nose. The nefarious goon will swoop in, snatch the star, say a few words of pity before fleeing to the next area. Argh! Why would you do that to people? To further frustration, one of Mario’s stars is at one stage stolen from him, proving that players only enjoy exploiting the game and not being exploited themselves.

I don’t mind new content (SM RPG does drag on a little though), but I wish Squaresoft would’ve connected the narrative together in a way which didn’t seem to demean or trick the player, especially when the trick is a compulsory part of the play experience.

When you analyse the spread of content though, it’s easy to see how Squaresoft resorted to this approach. Super Mario RPG isn’t filled with 8 large dungeons with each one housing a star. Instead Super Mario RPG contains many small to medium sized dungeons (fitting in with the RPG lite theme somewhat), the proportions of dungeons to stars therefore doesn’t match very well. Some of the dungeons are used as transition points into the next area (many of the forests are used in this way), others are used in connection with the town villagers which’ll reward you with items to then advance to the next area. Taking the star away from the player is one such technique at justifying the distribution of areas, but when we consider the aforementioned principles (never betray the player) we see that this approach is highly problematic. In regards to the player then, they’re likely to feel bitter and view the technique as an artificial.

Narrative Bites

I found myself constantly surprised by the minor instances of interactivity that SM RPG provides with its NPCs, separate from the main narrative. For example, in one of the villages Mario helps a group of toads waiting to get married, after the event the toads prepare for a group wedding photo out the front of the chapel, in which case Mario is invited to join in on the photo. Every location has similar spurts of random interactivity with the NPCs, it’s a neat little way to work narrative more seamlessly into the game.

Jumping in the Isometric Perspective and a Lack of Clues in Landing a Critical Attack

Explains itself really. Super Mario RPG is presented in an isometric viewpoint therefore jumping is a little awkward as the tile infront of the player is diagonally position. Squaresoft were courteous enough to include a shadow under Mario which gives a clear indication of where he’ll land.

Super Mario RPG, as with the Paper Mario and Mario and Luigi series, allows the player to pull off critical hits if they time their attacks just right. Just by watching someone play though you wouldn’t tell as unlike the later games there are no visual clues to indicate when the player can/cannot land a critical hit. Furthermore, the party switches their weapons every couple of towns each of which have different attack animations and therefore different timing patterns in landing a critical attack.

Microtransactions: ‘Non-Interactive Sequences, the Author and the Player’ and ‘Super Mario RPG and Alternative Dimensions’

November 2nd, 2009

Microtransactions:A randomised assortment of ideas too big for Twitter and too short for their own posts, neatly compiled into their own reoccuring segment.

NB: I’ve been working hard to continue the stream of Metroid Prime 3 articles, but as I round out my final few weeks of Uni I’ve had to fall back on banked material. I hope you don’t mind, I’ll be back with the program as soon as I can. Thanks.

Super Mario RPG and Alternative Dimensions

Gosh, what a peculiar game. As I said on Twitter sometime outside of recently “Playing Super Mario RPG (VC) is like opening the door to an alternative dimension.”. A couple of people misinterpreted my tweet though, so allow me to quickly elaborate as the remark has a few meanings:

Super Mario RPG was originally never released in PAL regions. In Australia, the most amount of information we’d ever received on the title prior to release was in a special RPG issue of Nintendo Magazine System (our equivalent of Nintendo Power). This issue was famously dubbed the “RPG issue” because of a massive feature spread over several pages previewing the now famous JRPG avalanche which hit the Super Nintendo late in its lifetime. (I think they also reviewed a handful of RPGs which were placed at the start of the review section to keep in theme, but I can’t quite recall now.) The magazine, unsurprisingly, featured Super Mario RPG on the cover. Ironically tough, most of the spotlighted games featured in the magazine wouldn’t see a PAL release until years later, a good majority of those on the PSone, GBA and DS—and not on the SNES—including Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger.

As you can imagine the issue was something of a holy grail for RPG enthusiasts in Australia. Considering the popularity of the magazine and the rather dormant state of the internet, for many of us, this was likely our first real insight into these now iconic games. Unfortunately, for many of them, it ended up being a long tease. In the case of Paper Mario a tease that dragged on for 12 years, until it landed on the Wii’s Virtual Console service a year ago.

Therefore, as you can imagine: “Playing Super Mario RPG (VC) is like opening the door to an alternative dimension.”, stepping into the past and reclaiming what was once lost.

The second point of my tweet is simply to make the same remark players were making a decade ago, that is: the collaboration sure is an interesting one. The sad thing about this industry is that publisher’s rule the roost. Unlike in other media, it isn’t as easy for one developer to do their own interpretation of another developer’s property, even if the original developer permits. The whole process lies within the hands of the publishers who, in effect, legally internalize the creations of their developers.

Interpretations of other work therefore rarely happen, only in the rare instances where such interpretations and crossovers are managed internally or allowed by the owner of the intellectual property. Metroid: Other M is a great example, as is Capcom Vs SNK, SVC: Chaos and Namco X Capcom. Super Mario RPG is too a great example and was very much unprecedented for its time as it was one of the first interpretations of a franchise by someone other than the original creators (Wolfenstein 3D is another example, anyone have any more ideas?). For these reasons Super Mario RPG therefore felt unique, and playing it today still emits this alluring quality.

Non-Interactive Sequences, the Author and the Player

One of the core complaints leveled against Super Paper Mario and Metal Gear Solid 4 was the length of their non-interactive sequences. Super Paper Mario was too chatty and MGS4 can be considered as a game interwoven with a feature film. I know people have defended both games on the basis that the content in these sequences are actually quite good—and therefore doesn’t deserve the bad press—so I’d like to weigh in by agreeing with the assertion that so long as the content within these sequences actually serves a meaningful purpose, then they’re perfectly fine with me. (Meaningful purpose being a subjective term depending on the individual player). Of course, in saying this, MGS4 did have too much cyber babble and Super Paper Mario‘s dialogue did stretch the point at times. These are rather legitimate claims relative to other games on the market.

sunny-naomi-mgs4-cutscene

Games are a shared product between the designer and the player. The designer wants the player to experience certain things within their game, they want them to, to some degree, think in a certain way and act per se. The designer coerces the player’s actions by designing the nature of the world, but the designer isn’t the director, the player is. The player co-authors the experience. When the designer forces the player through a non-interactive sequence, the designer takes control from the player and pushes their own agenda. In this regard, I think that the designers and writers of MGS4 and Super Paper Mario became too invested in the messages they wanted to transmit during these sequences that they became overly directive of the experience and ultimately damaged the game(s).

I always go into a new game with the intent of being reasonable. Anything (side quests, narrative, sequences of gameplay, mechanics etc) that I feel as meaningless or damaging towards my experience, I won’t participate in. Although I read the majority of dialogue in Super Paper Mario, much of it I also skipped or skim-read simply because it dragged on and impeded on my experience. It’s the same reason why I’m disinterested in trophies for the Playstation 3, they just artificially lengthen the game. I personally don’t believe that the value proposition they’re offering me is worthy of committal—as we’ve discussed, this can feel like work. Not every player shares this view though, my work might be someone else’s challenge and so forth. It’s the subjective nature which makes designing games very tricky.

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