Gaming do-overs are big business now – remakes, remasters, and reimaginings are all the rage. They also come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. But for my money, Nintendo’s upcoming Super Mario RPG is of the best kind: hyper-faithful, perhaps to a fault.
As the old saying goes: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? And such is the case for Super Mario RPG remake. It’s easy to forget that this is the game that essentially launched a couple of different spin-off franchises. It’s not really clear if we’d have Paper Mario without this game; and certainly, the Mario & Luigi RPG series has a direct lineage to this game, even sharing a composer.
My point, anyway, is that Super Mario RPG is a classic. I’d actually go so far as to say it’s one of the very best games in the Super Nintendo’s library – one of the best consoles of all time. That perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s a marriage of a confident, industry-leading Nintendo and the RPG kings at Square, who at the time of Mario RPG’s original release were in between Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 7 – arguably the two most important RPG creations out of Japan.