Adventure of Hourai High School!! Transfer Student Scramble (蓬萊学園の冒険), released 4/19/1996, developed by J Wing

This is a game based on a somewhat extensive 1990s franchise that began with a “play by mail” game in a magazine — this is about the third or fourth game I’ve covered that started as one of these magazine games. From there they made a tabletop RPG with supplement books, and several manga and novelizations. This was the only video game. The setting is a huge island with a sprawling high school campus as well as some other locations that can serve as places for adventure.

The main feature of the system are the school clubs, which I imagine was a big part of the other versions of the game as well. Each character can be a member of 3 clubs, each of which has 3 levels. This is basically a job system, and when you “master” a club you can keep its abilities even if you switch to another club. Each club requires a certain kind of personality to join, so only certain people can join certain clubs. Some also have level requirements.

This is an interesting system but there are three issues that make it not as good as it could have been:

1. You cannot see what abilities do in battle, only from the out of battle status menu. This is annoying given the large number of abilities.
2. Switching clubs is a hassle because you have to go to the club building for most of them, but some of the better clubs are in other locations that require you to go through dungeons or make long trips. When you have a party of 10 people or more it’s tedious to do that.
3. Finally, the game is so easy that the club abilities aren’t really necessary. The random encounter rate is very high. You do recover HP and GP (for the abilities) on level up, so you could use your abilities frequently, but it’s easier just to hold down a turbo button and speedup key. The bosses are easy enough that I beat them all just using a few basic club abilities, mostly the “triple hit” from the Kendo club and the heal abilities that you can get from one of the starting clubs as well. Although I rarely even had to heal in a boss fight.

You get a lot of companions throughout the game and earn “friendship points” that you can level up people’s connection to you, which strengthens their friendship ability that you can use before a battle. I tried using these a few times and they failed so I pretty much ignored this.

Sometimes I feel like this kind of criticism is a bit unfair to the game and may not reflect everyone’s experience — because of this project I’m doing, I’m usually looking to cut corners to finish a game faster unless it’s an exceptionally fun game. I imagine that if I had this game as a teenager I probably would have spent a lot more time with the job system.

The story involves one year in the life of a transfer student, who you name and choose the sex of. She is complaining that the plane trip is taking too long and so they push her out of the plane — her parachute doesn’t open so she lands in the middle of the new semester assembly, sending one student to the hospital. She immediately joins the school newspaper, and a lot of the game involves seeking scoops for that paper.

As you might be able to see from that description of the start, the story is relatively silly and involves a lot of gags and surreal things. It takes place over thirteen different dates in the year.

The first chapter is in April, and is basically just the introduction. Trying to get a scoop, you overhear someone seemingly hypnotize the student council into approving a “horse fight” competition (which you can see above). In the US we usually do this in a swimming pool, but when I was in Japan on the JET program I saw them do this on dirt fields in both elementary and middle school — I couldn’t believe people didn’t get seriously injured (you have to try to knock the top person off).

In May the first of the new “rules” goes up, that students have to exercise every day. In the jungle we do the competition, but also free someone named Hinako from a cell; someone unknown imprisoned her because she’s descended from some ancient priestesses.

The third chapter in May involves tracking down the Twilight Penguin group who stole test answers to sell — it turns out one of the teachers was involved, but we foil their plans.

In June (chapter 4) we meed Isaac and Julia, an international student couple (interracial! in the US even in 1996 this was unusual in media, and in some ways still is). A ghost joins our party, and we defeat a Devil Jinn accidentally summoned by a member of the occult club.

Chapter 5 (July) involves going to Shinmachi north of campus to a Star Festival, but some mysterious group (not the penguins) has stolen the necessary prayer book for the festival, and we have to track it down.

Chapter 6 and 7 (August) involve a school trip to Africa where the plane crashes midway and we’re stranded on an island. There the young principal sneaks into a forbidden temple to try to recover some kind of ancient artifact, which turns out to be a notebook owned by the founder of Hourai. It also turns out that we crashed on the Hourai island, the plane barely made it out of the runway before crashing.

Chapter 8 involves the inventor club’s robot going berserk; it is controlled by Shin, one of the people in the same group as Rachel (who was hypnotizing the student council at the beginning). His goal was to implement strict new rules for campus, but nobody is following them.

In Chapter 9 we learn the secret group is “Kouzan Nostra”, looking for some kind of secret items to take over the school. Chapter 10 is Christmas, and you have to investigate fake Santas to find out which one is working for Kouzan Nostra.

In Chapter 11 we go to the campus’ research lab to once again stop Kouzan Nostra from acquiring an item they want, and we learn the name of their leader, Jomra. Professor Daiouji tells us that KN needs to implement all the rules in their secret book to be able to take over the school, but we can stop them with three secret items (a pencil, a ledger, and the first student ID card). We happen to already have 2 of them, and Chapter 12 nabs us the third one.

Now in Chapter 13 it’s time to stop the Kouzan Nostra. First, we fly into the student assembly to stop the hypnotizing of the entire class.

Jomra flees under the school, and reveals that the Kouzan Nostra are descendants of miners who were excavating ore from the island when Hourai High School was suddenly built on top of them, trapping them underground. Now it’s time for revenge. He shows us the Mogemoge Idol which is the god they all worship, and then uses the power of the “Keystone”, a special stone made with the island’s ore, to transform into a monster.

After beating Jomra, the Mogemoge idol comes to life, which surprises Jomra because he had just made up Mogemoge as a way to intimidate Kouzan Nostra into following his plans. But it seems all the bad feelings in the campus have crystallized to give life to the “god”. The three items give us power to fight the final boss.

The game ends with the closing ceremony, and you get your “grades” which is a record of what you did in the game. But what happened to the Keystone? It was destroyed, right? Dum dum dum…

This is a pretty average game. There is a lot of content and a lot of stuff to do in the game, even if a lot of it isn’t very meaningful (I didn’t search for the “7 wonders of Hourai Campus” for instance). If the interface and system were a little more up to date it would have been a lot more fun.

Mahoujin Guruguru 2 (魔法陣グルグル2), released 4/12/1996, developed by Tamtam, published by Enix

This is the followup to the first Guruguru game, released about a year later. In my post on the original game I gave some background on the series but I failed to notice that although the original manga had ended in 2003, there is a “Mahoujin Guruguru 2” that started in 2012 and is still running in the online version of Monthly Gangan.

The first game was only marginally an RPG; it had no real story and was based on randomly generated dungeons. This game is a full-fledged RPG though, essentially an unusual type of action RPG.

As in the first game, you only control Kukuri, while Nike automatically fights the monsters. However, this time the battles take place on the same map as the exploration. When the battle starts, Nike will face up against the enemy and try to attack. You can change AI settings for him but without the instruction manual I was never sure what they did. Meanwhile, Kukuri can run around the map and cast spells to support Nike or damage the enemy. The spellcasting is the same as in the first game and I can copy my comments from the post there:

“To cast a spell, you first choose one of four elements (wind, fire, life, water). Then you pick an area of effect, and then a style (like “powerful”). This makes a possible 64 combinations that result in 64 different spells. The idea is interesting but as with most games that offer this many spell choices, there are a few that are really powerful and the rest aren’t worth using.” In the 2nd game you get all of the effect/style/element factors by moving forward in the story. None of them are hidden or optional. I don’t remember if this was the case in the original, but here you also have to have Kukuri at a certain level to be able to cast each spell. It’s hard to keep track of what is what; I had to make a list of the useful spells in my notebook.

If there is more than one enemy in the area, the other enemies can attack Nike or Kukuri with spells or other moves. Kukuri can try to deal with those enemies on her own but for the most part she’s more effective helping Nike deal with the monster he’s fighting. Nike often is not all that effective; his attacks frequently miss and it takes him a long time to kill an enemy unless you are way above the enemy’s level.

The game balance is problematic beyond what I just mentioned. There are bosses that will kill Kukuri in one hit from full HP even with the best equipment she can buy, meaning that there is no way to beat the boss other than levelling up. For the majority of the game, I found that if I was strong enough to reach the boss I was also strong enough to beat it, but there were a few times (the last boss in particular) where grinding was necessary. Fortunately there is a code where you can set the XP you get from a battle; if you set it too high it messes up but if you put it around 500 XP per battle you can quickly level up to wherever you need to be.

The plot is as usual mostly a parody of Dragon Quest-style RPGs; overall it’s pretty light and has only a few turns. According to the kusowiki description, the plot makes more sense and is more satisfying if you have read the manga.

The beginning of the game is actually the hardest part — you have to do a tutorial battle with only Nike and also one with only Kukuri. You can’t do any levelling or upgrades, you just have to beat the fights. The battle system is very unintuitive at first — I died so many times in these tutorial battles that I seriously thought of skipping the game entirely, but I watched a video where someone beat the Nike part just by holding down the attack button at the start of the fight, and while that didn’t work completely for me, it was enough to beat the boss. To beat the Kukuri fight you need to figure out how the initial spell works; it’s easy to hit yourself with it and at level 1 that does a huge amount of damage (of course you have no healing items).

Once you get past that the game is still a bit tricky until you level up a bit because you still have to be careful of hitting yourself or Nike with the fireball. Fortunately all but the very early spells autotarget the enemies so it’s not an issue after the first area.

The game is entirely linear. You come to a new village and have to solve a problem there, then you automatically get moved on to the next village — you can revisit old areas with a flying shoes item, but the only reason you would want to do that is that grinding is easier in previous areas than in current ones.

Basically you do the same thing in each area — fight the monsters in the area and find the treasure chests until you can reach the boss (and have the best equipment and a good stock of healing items), and then beat the boss. Level up if you can’t do it. If you die you lose half your money but keep everything else.

The hardest part for me other than the beginning was the Nekojita Valley because the healing items weren’t keeping up with Nike and Kukuri’s HP and I had not gotten the healing spell yet, so I basically had to grind until I was much more powerful than the enemies.

Eventually you get the glimmer of a story — in order to defeat Giri in the Underworld, Kukuri and Nike need the power of the four spirits. At the same time, they hear about another person from Kukuri’s clan who tried to get the power himself and sealed the spirits away.

This turns out to be the final boss Rido, a failed guruguru user who tried to get the power to defeat Giri himself but realized he was too weak, and now decides to test the heroes to see if they can do it. Giri actually extends his power to corrupt Rido for the final boss; Kukuri has to be level 77 to survive his attack but once you’re there the battle itself is not too bad as long as you immediately heal Kukuri. For Kukuri I spammed the spell that makes Nike attack faster.

The ending is bizarre – Rido tells the heroes they are strong enough to go into the underworld and face Giri. First the heroes decide to go say goodbye to everyone, but then after that they decide the underworld sounds too scary and give up, and nobody knows what happened to them after that. I guess this fits with the comic tone of the series?

Overall this is an OK game. The system is unusual and original, but everything seems not quite fully polished, and the battles can be frustrating when enemies are spamming attacks that cancel Kukuri’s spells or when Nike can’t seem to hit at all. You can also switch screens and have Kukuri get stuck inside a monster and if you can’t manage to free yourself you can’t cast any spells. But this certainly is far from the worst game I’ve played and it’s better than Guruguru 1.

As I said last time, I am just going to give a general review here of the game rather than going through the entire story. Unfortunately I think my view of the game was somewhat colored by how long it took to play it and the circumstances I was playing it in, but overall I would say it’s one of the better Super Famicom RPGs.

One thing I wish I had done differently is not try to play each storyline day by day; I found it too hard to keep track of the stories as well as remembering where I was supposed to go next (this is a flaw of the game I will discuss below). I would recommend that if you try this, as much as you can stick to one story at a time — only switch to another one if you are totally stuck and want to try the other ones to learn new mantras or just take a break.

I’m going to revive my old review categories that I used in the early days of the blog.

Story/Characters

This is a strong point of the game; the story is detailed and interesting, and they do a good job of having each of the three stories have a self-contained arc and resolution while still tying in with the other stories and the final ending.

Perhaps the main complaint here would be that the sub-characters in each story are not always fleshed out very well; some of them basically seem to just exist to fill out the party.

World

The world is a cyberpunk-ish setting mixed with fantasy, something that was pretty normal for RPGs at this time (including Square’s recent Bahamut Lagoon release, Chrono Trigger, FF6, etc.) There is also an underworld and sky world.

Game Flow

When I came up with this category it was meant to indicate how smoothly the game plays. Things that hurt this category are excessive backtracking, very high encounter rates, sudden jumps in difficulty that can only be overcome with grinding, and such.

A lot of the difficulty and smoothness of the game depends on your mantras. You can definitely end up in places where the mantras you have simply are not sufficient to deal with the enemies, and I did find that the game needed a fair amount of grinding.

One big issue I did have was the complexity of travelling the world along with the amount of backtracking you have to do. There is no in-game world map (as far as I know), nor are there any town warp spells or airships/etc. It can often be complicated to get from one place to another — it’s not uncommon later in the game for the method to get from point A to point B to involve warping to the underworld and taking another warp, exiting the building and going to another place, then using that warp 3 times to reach a place, then leave that place and go east to your destination. This is another reason I suggest playing each story in turn; I think it may be easier to keep track of where you’ve been and how to get back.

System

The mantra system is of course the big distinguishing feature of the game. It is well done in the sense that you can gather mantras from all over the place, including seeing enemies casting them. You can also guess some mantras. One annoyance were the chests in the dungeon that give you a mantra with one symbol missing. I’m not sure what the intent of these chests was; in some cases they are English loan words you can fill in but a lot of the times you would just have to randomly guess, which doesn’t have a very high rate of success.

I was not a big fan of the elemental system; in the end it seemed more cumbersome than fun. As I said in the first post, virtually every piece of equipment has an elemental property, and you can see at the bottom of the equip screen what elements your character is currently favoring. The problem is that unless you’re using a walkthrough there’s no way to know what the best element will be for upcoming dungeons. You might spend all your money on the strongest armor in the equipment shop only to find that most of the enemies and the boss of the next section use the elements that armor is weak to. It means you have to carry lots of equipment and buy most of what’s in the shop if you want the best results. I suppose it does increase the tactical choices and I can see some people liking this aspect of the game a fair amount.

The ability to choose the order your party moves in is a nice touch and one I wish was offered in more games.

Side Quests/Optional Content

There are a few genuine side quests, but there are also plenty of times when you can ignore what you are supposed to do next and instead visit other areas or towns to find treasure/items/etc.

Interface

By this time, major developers like Square are no longer struggling to present a useable interface to the player…I would have liked to see the actual stat difference when buying something in a shop rather than just an arrow pointing up or down, but that’s a small thing.

Graphics/Sound

The graphics are what you expect from a late-era SNES game, and are a definite high point. The music was fine but did not leave any lingering impression.

—

Next up will be Mahoujin Guruguru 2 — I expressed some doubt about whether it would be an RPG or not but unlike the first game it is a full-fledged RPG.

Rudra no Hihou (ルドラの秘宝), released 4/5/1996, developed and published by Square

This is the last RPG developed by Square for the Super Famicom (they published at least one more but it wasn’t developed by them). The title means something like “Secret treasure(s?) of Rudra” — Rudra is a Hindu god associated with Shiva.

The basic setup for the story is that through the history of the world, different races have been in control of the world — Danans, Merfolk, Reptiles, Giants, and finally humans. Every 4000 years a race is nearly wiped out and the new one takes control. The game begins 15 days before the end of the 4000 year time period for humans.

The effect this has on the story is that the entire game takes place in 15 days, although the progression of the days is controlled by story progression rather than the actual time you take. You have control over three parties led by Shion, Surlent, and Liza, which all take place at the same time. Having multiple parties is not a new thing, but what is unique (I think?) to this game is that whenever you load your save, you can choose any of the three stories. So you can play the game in a number of ways; you could complete each scenario independently, you could play one day of each character, or any other combination. I started out playing Shion’s scenario but around day 5 I decided to switch to playing day by day. This can get confusing, though, trying to remember where you are in the story or what you are supposed to do next.

Another big feature of this game is the spell system, which takes place through “kotodama”. You can create spells by simply entering any combination of up to 6 katakana. Any combination of symbols will create a spell, but guessing randomly will most likely give you a spell that is weak and overcosted.

Instead, you can learn the “real” spells by a variety of means. Sometimes people will simply write them for you. Bartenders’ drinks give clues, and you can find some clues in chests. If an enemy uses a spell you can then write that spell yourself. Some of the spells are created from suffixes or prefixes — Shion begins the game with “igu” (a fire spell) and “iguna” (a hit-all fire spell), so you can immediately see that the “na” suffix will allow you to target all characters.

This also means that if you have already played the game or use a guide, you can begin the game with very powerful spells. But even if you are not cheating, playing multiple character’s paths can let you learn spells in all 3 paths, and if you are struggling against a boss in one path you might be able to learn a spell in another path that will help.

I’d be interested to know how this was dealt with by Aeon Genesis in making the translation patch. From what I can see in the English walkthroughs, the mantras in the fan translation are not all simple transliterations of the Japanese terms. Some of them are, but others are not; it seems like it would have required fairly extensive hacking to get this to work but maybe it’s not as hard as I think.

Other than that the system is fairly normal. One minor aspect is that you can control the order your party will act, by pressing triangle and then moving the white circles around. Another aspect that I find rather annoying is that virtually all equipment has an elemental property. This becomes annoying when you are in boss fights because you may suddenly find that all your good armor has weakness to the boss’ spells and then you have to either switch to inferior stuff or take everything off. I can understand that it perhaps adds some strategic choice to equipment but it just feels fiddly and time-consuming.

Unfortunately I’m not done with the game yet so in this post I’m just going to cover the beginning of each scenario to introduce it, and then I will do more spoilery stuff in the next post.

Shion is a soldier from Cryunne Castle, who spends the first few days participating in a fighting tournament during the day. During the evening/night he is investigating cultists who are sacrificing children to Rudra, who is supposedly going to end the world (I don’t believe that the characters are initially aware of the “15 days until the 4000 year time ends”).

Shion pursues the cultists to the Giant Tower; he wants to get something called a Jade from the “Lago stone”. There is also a giant trapped in the stone, and another giant called Surt who is there — in the process of fighting Surt, Shion slices off his arm, and the jade from the lago stone goes into Shion’s eye. Surt runs away, killing two of Shion’s friends in the process. Back at the Giant Tower, Shion gets another giant (Ture) to join his team, and he also has a woman named Foxy.

During the first few days, Shion sees things that are happening due to other stories. The world has very polluted seas and air, but on day 2 the air is suddenly purified. On Day 4, after finishing the final valiant competition, Shion ascends to the top of the tower and meets with the Chancellor, who tells him to continue to pursue the Rudra Cult and destroy it. Of course Shion is also looking for revenge against Surt, and he is also told at this point about the “12 days to destruction thing”. As if this weren’t enough, the place they are standing suddenly lifts into the sky! This was the point where I decided I wanted to play the other scenarios to see what was happening there.

Next on the list is Surlent.

Surlent is working with Dr. Muench, who discovered the Lago Stone of the Giants on the tower, and has also found the Lago Stone of the Reptiles in ruins (these stones preserve the previous civilizations, or at least a piece of them). He wants Surlent to borrow the Holy Grail from a manor to the west, but thieves steal it before he can bring it back.

Surlent goes back to his master Solon to find out if any other items can be used like the Grail; Solon had initially sent Surlent out to learn more about the Lago Stones. Solon does know of some more items and so Surlent goes out, seeing the purification of the air along the way. Surlent journeys further to find more about the Lago Stones and these items, and ends up going to the underworld itself…

The third character is Riza (or Liza).

Riza is a young woman from the town of Karn, who already has a jade on her forehead. She is going out to search for her mother, who went out on a journey many years ago to try to purify the air, but never returned. Her grandfather suggests starting in the City of Babel, which has the only clean air in the world. There she meets Garlyle, who joins to help deal with the issue in town — it turns out a rich man there has imprisoned these butterfly spirits to clean the air, and once we release them the air is purified (this is what the other two characters saw). After this, Riza sets out for the Eastern continent to pursue another lead; apparently a scientists named Dr. Muench knew her.

As you can see, the stories have their own elements but also intertwine. It’s a fairly complicated story (at least in presentation); I doubt that I will fully describe it in the next post. Not only is it long and complex but due to the covid and vacation I’ve been playing this game for almost a month, some of it sick, and I’m not sure I’m up to writing a post of the length necessary to describe it — most likely next week’s post will just be a general review of the game after I’ve completed it.

Here’s my master list for the next period:

Out of these, the bolded ones are SRPGs I already played. I do not intend to play the Ocean Fishing game, and a few of these I’m not sure if they are RPGs or not. Especially Mahoujin Gururu 2, since the 1st one didn’t quite measure up.

Sorry for the short post but I needed some padding in July thanks to illness and vacation — but I am fully recovered from Covid and back from my vacation so I am playing Rudra no Hihou (alongside some Another Eden) and we should be able to move forward at a steady clip now.

Ys V: Kefin, the Lost City of Sand (イースV 失われた砂の都ケフィン), released 12/29/1995, Expert version 3/22/1996, developed and published by Nihon Falcom

This is the 5th game in the long running Ys series. The first three games were originally developed for computers and then ported to a bunch of different consoles (usually not by Falcom). Ys IV had that unusual circumstance of having two completely separate games called “Ys IV”, by two separate developers. I believe that Ys V is the first time that Falcom themselves handled the original console release of the game. As of now the game has been released only twice — the original Super Famicom release, and a PS2 remake (or reimagining) in 2006. Since they went back to computers for Ys 6, I would be interested to know why Falcom broke their pattern for 4 and 5. My knowledge of Japanese computers is pretty slight but I wonder whether the Japanese-produced computers, by 1995 or so, had not kept up technologically with the consoles as well as they had before. It took 8 years for Ys VI to come out after this, and by then, the Japanese-specific computers had been supplanted by Windows machines.

Back to Ys V, this actually has two releases. The original, and then an “Expert” version 3 months later. Who knows why they came out with this second version so soon. I chose to play it because it (reportedly) is not that much harder, and fixes some bugs, adds a bonus dungeon, and has a bit of additional content.

For the first time in a top-down Ys game, Adol can swing his sword and block with the shield, and jump, rather than simply running into the enemies to attack. But it maintains the idea of having to approach from the proper angle, and you get bonus damage for attacking from the back or sides. Different swords also have different attack styles (piercing or swinging, etc.)

There’s also a magic system but I found it rather cumbersome to use. You can combine elements you find around into jewels that you then equip to Adol to give him different spells. To use them you have to hold down R until a gauge fills up, then you can use the magic (dependent on your MP). You have a separate magic level that gains XP when you use magic. Honestly I used this a bit when the system was first introduced but I found it so tedious that I just ignored it for the rest of the game.

The story as usual involves the silent protagonist Adol arriving in a new land seeking adventure. This time he has not even brought a sword or armor, just a map of the area. The big discussion in this new area is about Kefin, a lost city that supposedly has a lot of treasure. Also recently monsters have appeared and the desert is encroaching on the rest of the land. Adol agrees to help a rich man in town find Kefin, and the adventure begins, although first our goal is to find the daughter of the item shop owner. The original owner left to try to find Kefin many years ago but he never came back.

I had to level up a bit before I could survive the initial enemies, but once you can buy the basic equipment and maybe are at level 3 or so, it’s not too bad.

Another thing that makes this game much easier than previous entries is that you can carry up to 9 healing herbs and use them in boss battles, so often even if you’re not doing very well avoiding or dealing with the boss’ attacks you can just use a bunch of heals until you win.

The first goal of the game is to find a set of crystals that will supposedly open the way to Kefin. At the same time, there is some ghostly presence named “Stalker” that is following you around, and flashbacks show that he has some wife or girlfriend trapped in ice. Eventually we recover the crystals (and also discover that our original employer is a bad dude) and gain access to Kefin.

Kefin is a huge place. Here Adol finds Stan (the adventurer who disappeared long ago) and also joins a resistance movement against the powers running Kefin. But as I said before, the bosses are all really easy.

In the end this game is quite short, probably 5-8 hours depending on how much you grind. The story is OK but not fleshed out very well, and the gameplay has a lot of useless elements in it. I feel like Falcom was uncertain where to go with the series at this point — the old “run into enemies” thing they did for 1, 2, and 4 was clearly outdated. Perhaps the Super Famicom was not powerful enough, or they just didn’t know how to use it well enough, to do the kind of game they wanted to do.

It’s not a big surprise given this game that it took so long for Ys 6 to come out, and I wonder if fans at the time thought the series was dead. That would have been a fair assumption, but it roared back into action with Ys VI which was a huge hit — but that is a story for a different blog.

If you want to give the game a try go ahead — it won’t take you very long and there is a translation patch.

As a final note, the music is pretty disappointing as well. Falcom games are known for their great Falcom Sound JDK-composed music, but somehow it falls flat here.

Super Mario RPG (スーパーマリオアールピージー), released 3/9/1996, developed by Square and Nintendo

This is the best known of the RPGs on my remaining list, partly because it came out in English — if you look at the list of Super Famicom RPGs, by the end of 1994 they had basically stopped localizing RPGs for the system. From 1995 to the end of the system there were only four RPGs localized: Lufia 2, Chrono Trigger, Terranigma (only in Europe), and Super Mario RPG. This is out of nearly 100 RPGs released for the system in Japan.

Also by sheer coincidence, Nintendo just announced a remake this week for the Switch.

The idea behind this game was apparently to create an RPG that would be popular in the US as well, since JRPGs were generally regarded as a dead genre in the US that nobody cared about. This changed (or at least began to change) with Pokemon and Final Fantasy VII, but the idea that a Japanese publisher would care about Western reception of their JRPG was unusual at the time. Of course the game was popular and did well enough that it spawned a whole series of Mario based RPGs (Paper Mario and Mario&Luigi RPG), with the newest Paper Mario game released in 2020.

My younger brother actually owned this game when it came out, but for some reason I had basically abandoned console RPGs and was focused entirely on computer RPGs like Might and Magic, the AD&D Gold Box series, and such. It wasn’t until around 2003 that I got a PS2 and got back into JRPGs. So I didn’t play this game at all until now.

The graphics are a 3/4 isometric view. The game begins with Mario rescuing the princess from Bowser (“Koopa” in Japanese). The princess has always been called Peach in Japanese but her name was still Princess Toadstool in English at this point — SM64, released later in 1996, was when her name officially became Peach in the English version as well.

After this initial homage to the series, the actual storyline starts when a huge sword comes down into Bowser’s castle.

Mario is ejected from the castle and can’t find Peach. He lands near Toad, who goes off to inform the Mushroom Palace of what happened to Peach, and Mario follows.

The battles in this game are all symbol encounters, not random. They are essentially standard RPG fare except that you can try to just frame button pushes on attacks and defense for more damage, and the special moves often have things you have to do (like rapidly press the button, or hold it down, etc.) Mario’s Jump move has a special thing where each 2 uses of it increases its power by one, so if you keep using the Jump throughout the game it can be quite powerful even at the end.

Special moves consume FP (Flower Points), which are shared among everyone. You can find items and blocks that will increase your max FP, and FP restore items are pretty cheap.

The maps have a lot of platforms, moving things, and such in them — for me this was the weakest part of the game. The isometric view often makes it hard to do the jumps, and I just didn’t think it was well suited to the game. But I suppose it did distinguish it from a normal RPG and fit in better with the Mario theme. There are also a number of hidden blocks (as in classic mario games) but I didn’t find most of them.

Mario soon learns that the sword in the castle is from Kajio, the bad guy who is mass producing a bunch of robots and other machines. Kajio has broken the Star Road into seven stars, and without the Star Road, people’s wishes cannot be fulfilled. So the goal of the whole game is to recover all seven stars and rebuild the star road. There are a number of people that join you as companions:

• Mallow, a marshmallow-like thing that was raised by frogs
• Geno, one of the star road beings (fairies?) who inhabits a children’s doll
• Princess Peach
• Bowser (who wants his castle back!)

You can only use 3 at a time. My usual team was Mario, Peach, and then one of the other three depending on what I felt like at the time. Peach has strong healing moves that are very helpful. Each person has three equip slots — weapon, armor, and accessory. Money are the classic Mario coins, of course.

When you level up, you gain stats and then can pick to gain additional stats in either physical, magic, or HP. Each level gives better bonuses for one of them, so check all the options before choosing.

The plot is pretty weird and has a lot of gags more than anything serious. But some of the parts are pretty funny.

There are a large number of minigames; some of them are entirely optional, and others are required although typically you don’t have to do especially well at them to move on in the game.

I was enjoying the game reasonably well until the last two dungeons. I felt that here the isometric jumping stuff got way too annoying (I used save states for the part above, which only gives you 10 falls to clear a whole bunch of rooms in a row) and I was glad to finally finish the game.

While this game was overall enjoying I think it does show its age, and I definitely did not like the last two dungeons (which is a shame because it finishes the game with a bad impression). I’m hoping that the Switch remake will touch this up a bit. But it is nice to see developers at least trying something new. Too often these mixes of IPs generate weird or bad games, but Nintendo was able to pair with Square rather than some random people making it, and I think that ensured some level of quality.

Finally, the music is quite good as well. I was already familiar with “beware the forest mushrooms” and the boss theme but overall the music is a strong part of the game.

I imagine many retro players who do SNES games have already played this, but if you haven’t (or if you have), give the remake a try when it comes out!