God, I love Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. I’ve played it so many times, I keep forgetting that video games make me as bad tempered as a goat and as apt to spout obscenities as a small electronic box with buttons that swear when you press them, designed for 12 year old boys and forbidden to anyone under the age of 16.
It’s one of those clever RPGs, the ones that realise that there’s nothing more tedious than wandering around and waiting to be pounced by endless hordes of monsters you can’t see or avoid. There are two ways to deal with this without ruining the RPG standard; one is to have lots and lots of cheap in-game insect repellent taking up most of your practically endless inventory space, as can be seen in Breath of Fire. The other way is to program in an ‘auto’ option – the option that literally translates as: “You know the drill, game. I’m strong enough to just stand here and take a beating without healing all battle and I’m only ever going to use this one incredibly expensive weapon which I upgrade every time I arrive at a new town or settlement, so there’s no point going through the charade of pretending I’m going to use any magic or special items until my next boss fight. And even then, there are no guarantees.” This is normally accompanied by excessive and anal healing after every ten battles of so, or as soon as the numbers turn red.
Alternatively, you can have the (vastly superior) Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi way. Not only can you see and avoid the monsters or else wipe out everything on the screen for a set amount of time, but the turn-based battles have an added element of skill, which when coupled with practice will allow you to evade attacks or do double damage. Quite apart from being satisfying when you hit the cues (and that will become second nature to you very quickly), it is infinitely more fun and involving, allowing you to win battles that you absolutely could not win in any other RPG. Being able to completely avoid contracting damage in battle will let you train for long periods on hard enemies without having to rush to a healing centre / save point – or indeed, you could simply not bother to train your characters at all. It’s must less dogmatic than the traditional way and that makes much more sense. We all have a different gaming style: I am an obsessive, repetition-loving training machine (My Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door dude is Level 50. Pokemon Black squad: Level 95). My older brother is a ‘the start of the game is always crap and I want to skip all the training crap’ kind of guy. Both of us find this type of game to our liking.
It isn’t just the vastly improved battle sequencing, either. I’ve always felt that people who enjoy slow paced games also enjoy a good puzzle, making good use of the controls and character techniques. Mario & Luigi has some ingenious puzzles that fit perfectly into the story, not to mention being loaded with the sort of humour I’m not accustomed to in games. All too frequently they are completely devoid of humour, as if to suggest that video gaming is a very serious business. It’s refreshing to have a bit of U/G-rated humour that isn’t reliant on decent script writing, which I am forced to assume is a concept largely unheard of in the video games industry.
The problem with all this is that the sequels had to match up to this high standard. Partners in Time added the element of time travel - interesting in its own right. What was not interesting was playing as helpless, dare I say useless, babies. That whole dodging thing in the first game? That was an extra. A bonus. In the sequel, you had to rely on it and woe betide you if you didn’t pick it up quick. You’d be dead in seconds. Therein lies the problem; Partners in Time makes you rely on your reflexes and an understanding of the game that you won’t have the first time you play. That means if you’re anything like me and the reason you don’t play fast-paced games is because you have the kind of reflexes and hand-eye co-ordination that would qualify you for the Dyspraxic Olympics, you will end up with a long, uphill struggle that can’t be called entertainment or enjoyment. It doesn’t get better either, because to get better you need to train. You can’t train if you keep dying and you’ll always die if you can’t train.
The second sequel, Bowser’s Inside Story, attractively set in the intestinal tract of a gigantic and heinous turtle, suffered from the same problem. It was massively more involving, owing to the fact that Nintendo returned to its previous state of enlightenment in experienced while making Paper Mario: TTYD, which cottoned on to the fact that people like playing as Bowser because Bowser is big and powerful. No one likes playing as Baby Mario because he is small and pathetic. Indeed, there’s one scene in Bowser’s Inside Story where they make no bones about the whole ‘bigger = better’ thing, as they puff Bowser up so much he fills out one whole screen on the DS.
However, there’s a big issue with Bowser being so obviously superior. In order to train Mario and Luigi, you have to make Bowser swallow some of his enemies. That means he doesn’t get the experience. And, it doesn’t always work, but it does waste a move. So if you’re normal, you’ll fight with Bowser the whole time, because you don’t want to make work for yourself if it won’t pay off. Besides, Bowser has fire breath. Mario can’t top that.
That said, I would have been all right with the idea of carting around two useless plumbers if not for one point in the game where they escape from Bowser’s innards and suddenly, without warning, burst into battle with him. Not only that, but I had to play as them. I nearly exploded at the stupidity of it. There I was, purposefully and tactically making one half of the team much more powerful than the other, under the assumption that they would continuously support each other and it came back to bite me on the bum. Even worse, if I had gone to all the effort of training them up to be of equal strength, why on earth would I want to pit them against each other? It’s like playing chess against yourself. You can never truly win. If one half of you wins, it’s a cheap win because it still means the other half of you lost.
Aside from the obscene amount of boss battles in the Mario & Luigi franchise (which has been harped on about by the whole world and its dog), there is one more issue I have with it and that’s the mini-games. Mini-games are not completely optional. Sometimes, to get from point A to B, you have to do X mini-game. Unfortunately, all - and I mean all - of these games involve jumping at the right time. By which I mean, pressing the button at exactly the right time, several times in succession.
I know I said I like repetition, but not when it makes your thumb joints ache and your rage metre hit terrifying levels. There’s nothing more frustrating than finding that you were one point under the threshold or one second out of the time limit and you’ll have to do it all over again, especially when you’ve got reflexes like mine. I’m serious. If my brother and I go to play catch in the park in the morning, it’ll be sundown before I successfully catch a pitch. I’ve got no guarantee of being able to win a game of in-game jump rope or whack-the-boxes-with-the-top-of-Mario’s-head. It seems a little out of place in a slow paced game and it’s a shame because they’re actually enjoyable games.
So much so in fact, whenever I want to take a break from the story, I go back and repeat them. Like a lot of people, I get a real mental block about things I ‘have’ to do. I love mini-games that involve riding a mine cart and collecting gems! Who wouldn’t? But for some reason, the moment I have to do it in order to proceed, it becomes the most tedious damn thing in the world. It’s a chore, by definition. If game developers are too robotic to understand the way human beings work, it’s time they studied some basic psychology and came to the conclusion that the rest of us know from experience and common sense – the moment it becomes a necessary task and the moment you take away the element of choice, you’ve lost your audience.
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