Super Mario RPG’s Switch remake remains charmingly off-brand

Nearly three a long time after it was first launched on Super Nintendo — and regardless of a good-looking remake for Switch, with fully redone visuals and rerecorded music — there’s nonetheless one thing unusually, however not unpleasantly, off about Super Mario RPG.

Mario appears all squat and cross-eyed; actually, the entire Mushroom Kingdom and all its denizens have a type of squashed, funhouse-mirror look, as if folding them into an isometric perspective has flattened all of them out. Early within the sport, Bowser’s citadel will get run by way of by a large, skyscraper-sized speaking sword; when did you ever see a sword in a Mario sport? Not lengthy after, a Toad makes a joke about forgetting his bazooka at residence. His what? Mario’s home is a wobbly, clapboard shack. Mario has a home. It’s every kind of unsuitable.

This journey, first launched in 1996 as Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, was a collaboration between Nintendo and Square (now Square Enix) when each have been of their mid-’90s pomp. Nintendo was winding down the SNES after an unbeatable run of in-house classics, from Super Mario World to Yoshi’s Island, whereas Square was months away from unleashing Final Fantasy 7 on the world. It was a gathering of close to equals, and whereas the characters have been Nintendo’s, the turf — turn-based role-playing video games — was very a lot Square’s. The developer had the boldness to make its personal tastes and persona felt in Mario RPG, in a lot the identical method it later would with the Disney-crossover Kingdom Hearts video games, and in a method few exterior builders working with Mario ever would once more (with the current exception of Ubisoft’s zany-but-cunning Mario + Rabbids video games).

Image: Nintendo

So Mario RPG options many components that really feel like international our bodies, even throughout the hallucinatory, anything-goes world of the Mushroom Kingdom. Square was allowed to create its personal characters for the sport — together with Mallow, Mario’s first companion on his quest, who claims to be a frog however appears like a cross between a cloud and a cauliflower with stripy pants and a purple quiff. There’s a stunning rating by the legendary Yoko Shimomura (Kingdom Hearts, Street Fighter 2) that has a lush, nostalgic high quality that’s subtly however profoundly completely different from authentic Mario composer Koji Kondo’s folksy melodic playfulness.

It all provides as much as a curio: a sport that has lengthy felt prefer it belongs in a parallel dimension. Released simply months earlier than the Nintendo 64’s debut, authentic SNES copies of Super Mario RPG command excessive costs on the used market, and it has had solely fundamental and sparing reissues from Nintendo since (it didn’t come to Europe in any respect till the Wii Virtual Console model in 2008). But it was additionally influential, laying the foundations for Nintendo’s later (and extra tonally managed) Mario RPG sequence, Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi. It has the identical streamlined RPG techniques as these video games, the rhythmic inputs that add immediacy to the turn-based fight, and the same, mildly meta humorousness.

Image: Nintendo

For no matter motive — maybe a starvation for any and all Mario content material within the wake of the Super Mario Bros. Movie phenomenon, maybe a newfound willingness to take dangers with its mascot — Nintendo is now lastly prepared to provide Super Mario RPG its due and combine it correctly with the Mario catalog, by way of this full Switch remake. It’s unusual to come across this sport (for the primary time, in my case) in 2023 on Switch, and it’s nice that Nintendo, Square Enix, and whoever developed the remake (which remains unclear, however I’ve requested Nintendo for clarification) have so fastidiously saved its wayward spirit alive.

The full 3D graphical overhaul retains the unique’s weird rendered look, properly refusing to homogenize or standardize the designs, and retaining its off-kilter character even because it smooths out the animations. Shimomura has fully reorchestrated her rating, however you possibly can swap to the chiptune originals, if you happen to like. There are some trendy creature comforts, like a frequent autosave, however most of Mario RPG’s archaic, 27-year-old design quirks stay intact. That mentioned, on early proof, Square’s professional simplification of conventional RPG mechanics appears bulletproof — and the sport performs very swiftly, contemplating its age.

As sensible as the brand new model is, taking part in Super Mario RPG looks like a portal to a different time — or one other timeline, maybe. A timeline the place Mario lives in a shack. I’m nonetheless not over it.

Super Mario RPG will likely be launched on Nov. 17.