Tag: mario

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Game Ramblings #55 – Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser’s Minions

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: 3DS
  • Originally Released on: GBA

TL;DR

  • Faithful remake with the right mix of visual polish without losing the soul of the original
  • Battle system still holds up, particularly against the newer entries that went more experimental
  • Bowser’s Minions portion of the game well made, but feels more suited towards mobile

I suppose the TL;DR really should have read – If you enjoyed the original, you’ll enjoy the remake – because that’s really all there is to it.  The fact that this game is enjoyable is not a mystery.  In its GBA form it was well received for funny dialogue, a great battle system, and a visual style that brought the world to life.  All of that moves itself to the 3DS perfectly well, with some enhancements to the visuals and audio that make this feel a lot more modern.  In addition, the new Minions mode does add a particularly nice tie in to what happened to the typical enemy cast of the game while the Mario Bros were out adventuring, even if the mode feels more suited to a mobile device.  All in all, this is a solid remake that folks holding onto their 3DS will find worth playing.

For anyone that hasn’t played these games before, like any JRPG the battle system is really the core of what made the gameplay so special, and it’s standard turn based with a twist.  Like Super Mario RPG on the SNES, button inputs at the right time can provide both offensive and defensive capabilties, in this case tied to A and B for Mario and Luigi respectively.  The combat in place here was probably as simple as the series had, but the simplicity was also its strength.  The core moves were easy to pull off and strong (jumps, hammer attacks, and fire/ice ball attacks).  Moving up in complexity and strength, the brothers can combine to do Bros Attacks, involving more intricate combo and timing segments to pull off large damage.  This pattern of A and B for each brother then goes into the entire game, whether it’s character-specific actions during combo attacks or actions taken in the overworld for traversal purposes.

Speaking of which, the overworld actions are still a lot of fun to use, and end up being the big puzzle push for the game.  Most puzzles tend to be fairly basic, and generally involve whatever the latest power the bros gained, but they provided a nice break in the action that wasn’t just straight battle grinding.  By the end of the game the brothers had a set of 10 traversal abilities, giving the inevitable Bowser’s Castle run a huge amount of flexibility in the use of different powers.

As far as changes go, there were some dialog changes, a few additional side quests, and the more obvious sound and visual upgrades.  However, the big addition was the Bowser’s Minions portion of the game.  Within the first couple hours, this mode is unlocked, and then runs as a separate independent mode with its own new (and entertaining story).  From a gameplay perspective, it’s a simple mode of assembling a squad of minions and having them faceoff against an enemy squad.  They can be one of three types, giving us an advantage triangle not too dissimilar to Fire Emblem.  The fight then automatically goes, with the player really only occasionally interfering, whether to block special attacks or do a timed input for a damage bonus.

In general, the mode is mechanically solid, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it would have worked out a lot better as a phone game, and that’s the biggest problem I had with it.  Each battle is a generally quick hitting segment, with maybe a few minutes of story the first time you play, then combat lasting maybe a minute or two per battle.  Given the size and number of units you can get, it then encourages you to keep replaying the battles to level up units.  Victory grants more units, as well as beans used as a type-specific XP boost, allowing for even more growth of the party.  In general, this feels perfect for a phone where you’d fire it up to play a couple levels then be done, and less perfect for the 3DS where it’s still just a sub mode to the much deeper main game.  And I’m being serious when I say I’d absolutely play this on my phone because it is a lot of fun.

There’s really not much to say here.  If you liked a previous Mario & Luigi or enjoyed the original release at all, this is still a great game.  The battle system is really solid, the writing is often times hilarious, and there’s a ton of content to be had here.  It also shows that the gameplay of the first couple games in the series is likely what I consider the pinnacle of the series, with a couple of the more experimental entries on the 3DS perhaps going a bit too far away from the core.  Hopefully this means Nintendo is considering a more traditional entry looking forward to the Switch, but if the worst we get is another remake then I suppose we’re still doing pretty good.

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Game Ramblings #49 – Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Turn-based Tactics
  • Platform: Switch

I hope you’ll pardon my pun here, but Ubisoft has managed to pull a Rabbid out of a hat.  This game seamlessly blends the Mario and Rabbid IPs into a single game, throws it into a turn-based game with some fantastic use of the Mario universe for its move set, and popped out a game that is one of the best I’ve played this year.  While there’s a few things that I’d have liked to see improved in the overall mission structure, the end result is still a fine example of what developers can do with the Switch, and an interesting example of a team making a Nintendo quality experience, without being Nintendo themselves.

The visuals would be at home in any of the recent 3D Mario series titles.

The biggest surprise to me is that this feels like a Mario title through and through.  While the gameplay is obviously different, the little details are all there.  It’s the sound of a coin when you pick it up.  It’s the vibrant and varied environments across four main worlds (and the Peach’s castle hub).  It’s the inclusion of red and blue coin challenges scattered throughout hidden areas.  It’s Mario’s jump attack straight out of the Mario series RPG titles.  Everywhere you look, there’s little details that make this feel extremely familiar, despite the huge differences in gameplay.

The nice thing about all of that is that it’s worth exploring every corner.  Scattered throughout the environment are series of small challenges, puzzles, and hidden crates.  While most of them contain little bonus art or music pieces, a number of the crates also contain weapons or power orbs.  Make no mistake, the underlying systems of this game are very traditional to the tactics genre.  Weapon upgrades for primary and secondary weapons are here, giving you obvious damage upgrades, but also adding secondary hit effects, bonus damage to specific enemies, and more.  While there’s no direct XP for killing enemies, the power orbs you earn in battle or find throughout the environment act as a functional replacement, being used to purchase upgrades in character-specific skill trees.  These skill trees act as a way to build out each character’s skill set, as well as provide more obvious passive bonuses like increased health and damage.

The facial animations in cutscenes are universally good, and usually play up the more slapstick comedy aspect of both series.

All of the skill upgrades compound into what ends up being a fantastic battle system.  The basics that are there are all solid, and work in a very XCOM-like fashion.  During your turn, you can run around and hide behind various pieces of the environment.  In a very Mario way, you can warp to different platforms via pipes, or hide behind blocks.  Also of note, brick-based blocks can be destroyed via friendly or enemy fire, and fans of the Mario series will know where not to hide if this is a concern.  However, where the battle system really shows its greatest potential is in its exploitation of movement mechanics, both as an offensive helper, and a defensive measure to keep enemies away.

On the weapon side, the two main mechanics I ended up leaning heavily on were bounce and push.  Bounce does just that; when you hit an enemy, it causes them to bounce in the air, taking additional damage, and also giving them the potential to get thrown off the level for further damage.  Push on the other hand causes the enemy hit to ball up and start rolling around the level.  They can then rebound off walls, blocks, and other enemies to cause a chain reaction of bouncing chaos.  In both of these cases, I could take advantage of the damage increase, but more often than not I was using these mechanics to push the enemies backwards, and control the flow of their movement beyond them just moving towards me.  I could also use things like the rebound on push to cause enemies to be knocked out of cover, offering more opportunities for large damage.

There were also some other traversal-based mechanics that were handy to use.  Each character could dash through enemies, causing damage.  However, each ally also had a special move for traversal.  Mario could also jump off an ally, and jump stomp enemies, giving both additional damage and travel distance on the hop.  Rabbid Luigi could dash and drop Vampire on an enemy, causing an HP siphon to be applied.  Peach could jump off an ally, and heal anyone within range of her landing location.  This all added up to each turn not just being about weapon damage, but in seeing how many things you could chain in one turn for maximum potential.

Even the ghost town still feels very Mario, with Boos replacing the normal lamps above houses.

Given all that, the only real criticisms I had were involved in the occasional parts of the mission structure.  There were a handful of escort missions that work about as poorly here as in every other game that uses them.  The escorted units had no attack, and typically moved slower than the rest of the party, as well as spawned enemies.  These missions usually just devolved into running forward to wipe enemies, then running everyone back to act as a damage sponge for reinforcements flanking from behind.  The other main problem was in the mission chaining within each chapter.  Rather than allowing healing between missions, you could only heal at the end of each chapter, and had to fight with the HP pool you had through multiple battles.  There was healing to alleviate the problem, but I felt like they could have played up to higher difficulty within a single mission if they’d gone with a more typical heal in between battle setup.  As it is, quite a few of the missions in place were simply too easy due to the chaining being in place.

You can never go wrong with an opera boss.

It speaks volumes to the skill of Ubisoft’s developers that they pulled this off.  They managed to seamlessly blend two franchises that have next to nothing in common, beyond a love of occasional slapstick comedy.  They put them into a genre that hadn’t been done for the two series, and yet made it feel like it belonged.  They turned what many gamers assumed was a joke, and made it one of the best games that has come out this year.  It also speaks volumes to Nintendo’s ongoing willingness to let external development teams have the keys to the kingdom, in a manner of speaking.  We’ve seen this with Metroid for years, Zelda with Hyrule Warriors, and a ton of great platformers out of the team at Good-Feel.  Is this worth buying a Switch for? I dunno, I’d save that for Breath of the Wild, but it certainly makes a good case for the console.

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Shelved It #1 – Paper Mario: Color Splash

More Information from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Wii U
  • Shelved At: Bowser’s Castle, basically the last couple hours of the game.

It may seem weird that I shelved a game when I knew I was near the end of the game, but for this game it was basically the point of no return for me.  Paper Mario: Color Splash was a frustrating experience.  Frustrating because it’s a much better game than the previous entry, Sticker Star, but also because the key story points generally introduced changes in mechanics that seemed to counteract everything that had been going on before.

One of the big things that really turned me off from playing Sticker Star was the need to collect stickers just to continue the battles.  This has unfortunately not gone away, but at least for the bulk of the game, is not a huge issue.  There are now a couple shops in the main town that sell standard cards, as well as the more special-case Thing cards that are the primary mechanic of most boss fights.  That said, the convenience of them being there is fairly heavily counteracted by the need for them to be there.  Going into a boss battle, you generally don’t know what you need to do to win.  You may know what cards you’ll need, but not when or how to use them.  Because of this, it was not uncommon for me to go into a boss battle blind, effectively expecting to die so I could actually prepare for the fight.

Because this entry is also not a stat-based RPG, the effective growth curve of enemies results in you needing upgraded variants of cards, and therefore a higher overall cost.  The cost is both coins if buying directly, or amount of paint used if using unpainted cards.  This ended up pushing me to a point where to get past where I shelved the game, I would have had to just grind through battles with cheap cards in order to buy the expensive cards I now knew I needed.  Because the first fight in Bowser’s Castle effectively starts out by removing your paint supply, then limiting you to specific colors of cards, simply stocking up on cheaper unpainted variants was a recipe for death.  While grinding then wouldn’t have been difficult, it wasn’t worth the amount of time needed given how many frustrating boss fights I’d already encountered getting to there.

If nothing else, there were some positive signs in this game if a future entry cleans up some of the less fun shenanigans.  The story itself was much more entertaining than either Sticker Star or the sort of related Paper Jam, and was definitely much closer to the quality of the RPG entries in the series.  While the battle system had some collecting issues, when I was just using the cards themselves, it was still a mechanically tight and fun to use turn-based system, with a lot of variety in the cards beyond the standard jump/hammer.  The visuals and soundtrack were also both fantastic.

At this point, I’m not really sure what this series needs.  My instinct is to say they just need to go back to making a straight RPG experience, and Paper Jam was certainly enough of an indication that a Mario RPG is still fun to play.  That said, they’ve shown that non-RPG Paper games can be a lot of fun with Super Paper Mario, but that was nearly 10 years ago at this point.  I suspect what they really need to do is just take a break and try some other things before deciding to come back, because their attempts at new things within this IP have become at best a mixed bag.