![]() ![]() ![]() This is a thoughtful, approachable, and irrepressibly jolly reframing of Square’s stock-in-trade for a first-time audience and for a character that has always expressed himself through action. That’s not to say Square made no concessions to Mario’s world for Super Mario RPG. These are pairings of great artists, but the flavors don’t quite go. The cognitive dissonance I experienced playing a Mario game made by Square is similar to that I had watching A.I., a Stanley Kubrick film completed after his death by Steven Spielberg. This was no simple work-for-hire job, and the resulting game has Square’s personality stamped all over it, from the characters and the structure to the storytelling style and the gameplay. Square was a role-playing giant at the time - Mario RPG was released between the sixth and seventh Final Fantasy games, probably the all-time high point for that series - and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, looking to expand into RPGs, came to Square as a supplicant, seeking the studio’s expertise. ![]() But also, it becomes abundantly clear as soon as you start playing it that Super Mario RPG is barely a Nintendo game at all. This brings with it some rights issues - Square Enix owns original characters created for the game, for example - that needed to be negotiated. Why? Mario RPG was a then-unprecedented co-production with another Japanese super-studio, Square (now Square Enix). Nintendo has seemed to keep this curious episode in Mario history at arm’s length. Despite its position as the first role-playing, narrative-forward adventure for Nintendo’s mascot character - and the progenitor of not one but two much-loved series, Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi - Super Mario RPG has been unavailable for long periods, especially outside Japan and North America. The further we get into Nintendo’s decades-long project of reexamining, repackaging, and reselling its past, the more interesting and surprising some of the choices get - few more so than Super Mario RPG, a new Switch remake of the 1996 Super Nintendo game, originally subtitled Legend of the Seven Stars. It also lavishes select titles with remakes that go quite far in their reworked control schemes or reinterpreted art styles, but invariably stay true to the original’s spirit. Through initiatives like the Virtual Console and Nintendo Switch Online, Nintendo keeps a raft of retro games available in their original versions. Nintendo has been remaking and reissuing its classic titles for at least 30 years, all the way from 1993’s Super Mario All-Stars (which gave the 8-bit Mario games a 16-bit makeover) up to this year’s Metroid Prime Remastered and Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp. While it might be a stretch to call Nintendo a friend to game preservationists, there’s no denying that the company is in a class of its own when it comes to respecting its own history and curating its back catalog. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |