So 25+ years ago, Nintendo wanted to mix things up a bit with Mario and decided they wanted to make an RPG. Since they had no background in RPGs, they teamed with Square (the Final Fantasy people) to do it. The result was Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, which ABSOLUTELY FUCKING WHIPS. I played it a little bit as a kid because my brother rented it, but I didn't get very far because I never got very far in video games in the 90s. Then in college I discovered the wide and wonderful world of video game piracy, said "hey, I remember that one" while downloading a truly unhinged number of SNES games, and played the whole thing on an emulator.
Super Mario RPG is a beloved classic, but even though the Square partnership is the reason it's so fucking good, it was also a one-off. Which means this game essentially has divorced parents, because Square and Nintendo are both huge companies now and huge companies only give a shit about What's Theirs and not about what would be nice for the legacy of a game that's no longer making any money. So Super Mario RPG, DESPITE ABSOLUTELY FUCKING WHIPPING, never got a sequel and the characters it introduced have mostly fallen by the wayside.
Instead, it has SPIRITUAL SEQUELS, aka Nintendo was like "that worked, but hammering out an ongoing shared custody agreement with Square would be a hassle, so let's just do more unrelated Mario RPGs." The Paper Mario series is the most well known, but apparently there was also a handheld series: the Mario & Luigi games. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga was the first in 2003, and they did a 3DS remake in 2017 that I asked for for Christmas in 2018 for reasons I no longer specifically remember but I'm sure involved me googling "best nintendo DS games" and finding something that said this one was similar to Super Mario RPG (which, again, ABSOLUTELY FUCKING WHIPS). Then I tried it for like an hour and forgot about it until now.
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga doesn't absolutely fucking whip, but it was a good time! It absolutely had Super Mario RPG vibes and while it made me miss SMRPG more than it scratched the itch, it was at least in a nice way and not in a "why am I playing this when I could just be playing the game I actually want to be playing" kind of way.
( [incomprehensible italian-accented gibberish] )
Super Mario RPG is a beloved classic, but even though the Square partnership is the reason it's so fucking good, it was also a one-off. Which means this game essentially has divorced parents, because Square and Nintendo are both huge companies now and huge companies only give a shit about What's Theirs and not about what would be nice for the legacy of a game that's no longer making any money. So Super Mario RPG, DESPITE ABSOLUTELY FUCKING WHIPPING, never got a sequel and the characters it introduced have mostly fallen by the wayside.
Instead, it has SPIRITUAL SEQUELS, aka Nintendo was like "that worked, but hammering out an ongoing shared custody agreement with Square would be a hassle, so let's just do more unrelated Mario RPGs." The Paper Mario series is the most well known, but apparently there was also a handheld series: the Mario & Luigi games. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga was the first in 2003, and they did a 3DS remake in 2017 that I asked for for Christmas in 2018 for reasons I no longer specifically remember but I'm sure involved me googling "best nintendo DS games" and finding something that said this one was similar to Super Mario RPG (which, again, ABSOLUTELY FUCKING WHIPS). Then I tried it for like an hour and forgot about it until now.
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga doesn't absolutely fucking whip, but it was a good time! It absolutely had Super Mario RPG vibes and while it made me miss SMRPG more than it scratched the itch, it was at least in a nice way and not in a "why am I playing this when I could just be playing the game I actually want to be playing" kind of way.
( [incomprehensible italian-accented gibberish] )
