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Thursday 21 February, 2008
Gameplay:
The interesting thing about RPG's is that they always have side quests; Mario RPG is no exception. You can go on side quests and obtain weapons, armor, rare items, or frog coins, which are a secondary form of currency. You can unlock optional levels, like Yoshi's island, or a casino, where you can bet away all of your hard earned coins. The wide array of secrets in this game was addicting; I sometimes had trouble sticking to the storyline because I was too busy playing a random, nearly pointless sidequest.
The thing that stood out to me about the enemies is that many of them weren't from the Mario games, but they also had ones like goombas, koopas, bom-ombs, etc.Other than that, all of the bosses and quite a few of the enemies were original and created only for this game, never seen in a previous or future Mario title (which is unfortunate because I liked a lot of the characters in the game).
In the end, the gameplay was fun, the characters were cool, and the world was expansive. I would recommend this timeless classic to anybody looking for a good RPG. Five stars, hands down.
Design:
The combination of Nintendo and Square (the ancestor of Square-Enix) working together to create an RPG was phenominal. For starters, the game was in 3D, which was somewhat rare in a SNES game. You could move up, down, left right, diagonal, etc.; so the controls were easy to use, especially for a 3D game on the SNES.
The level design was really good and the camerawork was perfect for the style of game. All of the levels required a lot of jumping, climbing, running, or figuring out puzzles (to a certain extent). Other levels were just plain unique, such as being n the lost forest, falling down the waterfall, or using Yoshi to win a race.
Mario RPG is a very unique game for its time and, to this day, still has more fun gameplay aspects than a fair amount of more recent titles. With an amazing game like this, it is crazy that a sequel was never even considered.
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