He knows about timed hits! Let's play Super Mario RPG!

The first character looks like it could be the precursor to the character for sun/day and the second the one for water. After that, I got nothing.

Well, see... I believe I mentioned that I was kind of the worst player ever when I first played this game. I would usually die at least once or twice to every new boss I encountered just as a matter of course. Mario RPG is one of those games were you get to keep experience when you die, so frequently I would charge, lemming-like, into a boss over and over until I'd finally accumulated enough experience to defeat him. And it was so sweet when I finally did.

This had two results, one of which I'll discuss later in the LP. The other is that I haven't the slightest idea how difficult this game is for an "average" player. When I first played it I was so terrible it's a wonder I didn't hold the controller upside down, and now I've played it so much that I can beat Culex standing on my head, so I've kind of lost my perspective on how difficult the bosses are in absolute terms...

When last we left off here at Let’s Play Super Mario RPG, we had kicked Bowyer’s ass all over the forest and released the humble burg of Rose Town from his dark shadow. Now we return there, to be greeted as liberators.



It’s all nice and cheerful there, too. The sun is shining, the people are mobile, the empty void is blue… clearly our work here is done.



Our first stop is the inn, to vindicate Gaz.



Bleh, Mom makes Scully look like a believer.



Geno tries to explain why he can’t stick around, but trails off once he begins to realize how absolutely ridiculous he’s sounding.

He has only one option: Improv!



With Mario and Mallow’s help, Geno gives the art-house-movie version of the Star Road’s normal function.

Then they demonstrate how things are now. Their performance is mesmerizing. Visionary. A tour de force!



Bleh, this audience just doesn’t “get it”. Maybe we’ll have a better reception at Sundance.



You’d think he could have just started out with this instead of forcing us to go through the Whose Line Is It Anyway bullshit.



In case you’re having trouble telling what’s going on here, Mallow is physically restraining Mario from cleaning the clock of this defenseless little kid. And you thought I was joking when I mentioned that Mario promotes violence against children.



Anyway, the real reason we came here is so that we could pick up Geno’s first weapon, the Finger Shot, from Gaz. You can buy this in Moleville, and we’re about to come into enough riches that we could swim around in them Scrooge McDuck-style, but I’ve never been one to waste money frivolously.

There’s only one way to answer this question, I think. And I don’t even drink coffee.



Also, upstairs, Link from The Legend of Zelda is a-snoozing. He won’t say anything or get up, but he will play the “puzzle solved” music from Zelda if you talk to him.

Back in my Nintendo board days, there was a guy who swore up and down that if you played the Zelda melody on Tadpole Pond, Link would get up and join your party. He steadfastly refused to reveal what the song actually constituted, though.



Finally, we help this poor bastard get back into his house. He begins to give us his bogus treasure room directions, but upon (somehow) realizing that we’d already found it, he gives us a Frog Coin for being better at his chosen profession than he could ever hope to be. He then goes back inside to try and put back together the shattered pieces of his life.



While in Rose Town, I go ahead and pawn all my soon-to-be-obsolete Mushrooms and Honey Syrups. We won’t need them for the Pipe Vault, and we can upgrade them to superior versions after that.



Speaking of the Pipe Vault, it’s our next destination. Pipe Vault is technically optional, but it’s a very easy area and you’d have to be a fool to pass up on the mountain of treasure we can find here and just beyond, at Yo’ster Isle.

Into the pipes we go…



The cool thing about the Pipe Vault is that it’s only one space wide, it’s filled with a ton of classic Mario enemies like Goombas, Thwomps, and Piranha Plants, and it’s got the classic 1-2 music. It’s a homage to classic 2-D Mario, remade in Mario RPG’s 3-D isometric splendor.

Note that the lava here is harmless… If you fall into it, you get sent back to the entrance of the area, but there’s no permanent damage.



Here we see Geno testing out his spiffy new Finger Shot. It’s hard to see against the background, but Geno is releasing a swarm of tiny bullets from his fingertips. Those bullets are dealing about 30 more damage than Mario and Mallow’s regular attacks, even though Geno’s a level behind.



While dealing with the Sparkies, Mallow makes it up to level 7.



I find it disappointing that you can’t actually fight Thwomps. If you’re anywhere nearby when this one hits the pavement, you’ll be knocked back to the bottom level.

You can fight Piranha Plants, though. The Plants have about 150 HP, and generally go down in two timed regular attacks. They use status effects and can sometimes appear in annoyingly high numbers, though, so they’re the most dangerous part of the Pipe Vault.



We were smart enough to suit up with Trueform Pins before entering the vault, so spells like the Plant’s Scarecrow Dust are harmless against us.



In a room filled with pipes, we discover this hidden room, which contains a hidden yellow platform. Atop it…



Hidden treasure chest count: 13/39

We find a hidden treasure chest.



Hidden treasure chest count: 14/39

A few paces away, we discover another hidden treasure chest. Combined with the visible treasure chest, that’s a pretty decent haul for a hidden room.

We then drop back down and use the classic “duck while running” trick to scoot under a narrow opening, picking up a Frog Coin. This is the only place in the game you can do this.



Another hidden room contains this mole entrepreneur, who’s running a “Goomba thumping” minigame. For ten coins, the goal is to try and pound as many Goombas as you can as they emerge from those four pipes.



Regular Goombas are worth one point. The gold ones are worth three. And hitting a Spikey deducts a point. I have trouble judging distance correctly for the north and south pipes, so I usually just stand in the middle and hop left or right depending on which one is currently offering the best point gain. The less time is remaining, the faster the enemies appear and disappear.



The trick here is to get exactly the amount of points you need to win a prize, then stop. When you win, the mole sets the bar for the next prize at your high score plus two, so if you go crazy and get 31 points or so on your first try, you’ll be hard-pressed to beat that score and win another prize. Stop at 21 instead, assured that you can easily beat it on your next try.



The first two prizes are a Flower Tab and a Flower Jar. After that, I think it’s just Frog Coins, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a Flower Box or a Red Essence or something somewhere down the line. I don’t have enough patience with this minigame to play it more than two or three times, so I usually just get the Tab and the Jar and move on.

We continue on, avoiding the worthless Goomba fights…



We get enough experience from actual fights to put Geno up to level 7 somewhere in there, though.



Occasionally, you’ll run into this enemy group, containing a foe called a Shy Ranger. The Ranger is far faster than any of our characters and always runs on its first turn, so we can’t engage it yet. Look for a rematch in the penultimate “random weirdness” update.



These Nippers are not enemies, but stage obstacles. If you hit them, they knock lose a few of your coins. If you ever have to make a choice between jumping on a Nipper and jumping on a Piranha Plant, take the Plant.



Eventually we reach the end…

Hidden treasure chest count: 15/39

And make our way to beautiful Yo’ster Isle, where a hidden treasure chest awaits.



Yoshis, like all dinosaurs, have a taste for cookies, an addiction to gambling, and a need to run. Combine those three things and you get Yo’ster Isle, where the dinos bet their confections on Yoshi races.



Foreshadowing?



The Yoshis don’t speak our language, but the Yoshi does, so we seek him out and saddle up.



Don’t worry, though, as we can feed him some yummy berries to keep him going strong!

It seems that in recent days, a heavyweight known as Boshi has come to dominate the Yoshi racing scene, but he won’t race just any amateur. He only races one-on-one, and only if his challenger can bring him a batch of cookies to bet.



Thankfully, Yoshi’s friends are a giving bunch, and we have little trouble finding the cookies we need to convince Boshi to accept our challenge.



Which, uh, he does.

Check out the shades and the studs…



The Mushroom Derby is one of the few minigames I always do the tutorial for. It takes me a few minutes to get into a groove for the races.

The Yoshi races are a rhythm game; you’re supposed to alternate the A and B buttons in time with the beat. This is pretty easy to do once you get the hang of it, but…

…Unfortunately, I had not anticipated the dreaded emulator lag. I’ve played this game enough that I can win the Yoshi races basically on command, but playing on an emulator rendered my well-honed timing absolutely worthless. Having Super Jump be made weaker because the timing is screwed up is one thing—it just makes the battles last longer. But here, there is no recourse.



This was actually one of my closer races. If you’re not doing the timing right, Yoshi just hops in place, which is immensely frustrating. Consider my hat thrown firmly into Parish’s ring on the emulation issue.

Eventually, though, via a stint of Herculean button mashing and a heavy dollop of luck, I managed to eke out a win. Thank god you only have to do it once.

Yoshi graciously gives up ultimate power in order to begin the races in earnest again. Even Boshi gives in.



As thanks, Yoshi gives us some Yoshi Cookies. These unassuming Cookies are actually our ticket to infinite wealth—more on this in a bit.

So how do they work?



Use a Cookie in battle to summon Yoshi and have him (try to) eat an enemy. If he succeeds, he’ll leave behind an item, some of them very rare. Some enemies have a higher chance of being eaten than others—these Sparkies, for example, are hardly ever eaten, but when they are, we snag a powerful Fire Bomb, a single-use attack item than bathes the entire battlefield in flame. We’ll be using this to make mincemeat of a certain boss in our future.



If Yoshi fails, though, he leaves behind a Yoshi Candy, seen here. The Candies restore 100 HP, making them the most powerful single-target healing item available until the Max Mushrooms become available at the very end. On top of that, each one sells for a whopping 70 coins.



You see where I’m going with this. Collect an ass-load of Cookies, convert them into Candies, and sell them for cash. By doing this until my inventory is filled with Candies, I will basically never have to worry about money again.

This is easier to do if you can consistently win the races. Unlike the first race, later races allow you to bet up to ten Cookies on a race, and will pay out multiples of that depending on the odds if you win. With a bit of practice, you can be pulling down 20 or 30 Cookies on a single race.

I currently can’t do this, though… So I have to perform the trick the slow way, by begging this Yoshi for more Cookies every time I run out. He’ll give you three free of charge as long as you don’t have any in your inventory or in the Cookie “bank” (where your Cookie winnings in excess of empty space in your inventory are sent), but that means you have to go convert three Cookies, come back, go convert three Cookies…

You can also choose to hop off Yoshi and have the computer run the race for you, but that’s basically a crapshoot and I don’t recommend it.

Next stop: Moleville.



Moleville, unsurprisingly, is a rocky mining town inhabited by working-class moles. The place is pretty much deserted to start with, though…



Our first stop is the shop, where we sell off our excess Candies for profit, then go to town on the shop’s inventory. The Punch Glove and Cymbals are upgrades on Mario and Mallow’s weapons, respectively, so that’s one each. We replace our Honey Syrups with Maple, which restore 40 FP a pop. And finally, we suit up with three pairs of the almighty Work Pants.

Work Pants are awesome. All five characters can wear them, and in addition to the usual defense boosts they also raise speed and attack slightly. They render the Mega line completely irrelevant, as well as the Happy line found in the next town. Work Pants are Bowser’s best armor until the very end of the game. We’ll get more value out of Work Pants than we will any other armor in the game, with perhaps the exception of the Lazy Shell. Bow before Work Pants.

Hello, what’s this?



Evidently while we were introducing Bowyer to our fists, Bowser was getting his ass handed to him over at Bowser’s Keep. His army is significantly smaller than it was the last time we saw him, and the big guy is more than a little shaken.

If you think about it, Bowser’s modern characterization was invented basically whole cloth for Mario RPG. Before this game, Bowser was just generically evil—he had no personality whatsoever, but was never portrayed as being any less evil than, say, Ganon, who has never been anything other than a serious villain.

After Mario RPG, though, we get Bowser as we know him today, a blustering, bumbling villain who worries about his image and is more concerned with evil for its own sake than doing anything that could actually be considered evil, and who wouldn’t know what to do with the Princess if he got her. Even in post-Mario RPG games where Bowser is the actual villain (as opposed to teaming up with Mario as he does in this game, Super Paper Mario, etc), he’s still never been taken quite as seriously as he once was, and I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’ll argue that this is not a good thing. Modern Bowser is quite a bit more loveable than he once was, and he fits much better into the tone of the Mario world that way than he does as the only truly evil force in a land of humor and whimsy.

Also, if you’re careful you can inch right up to where Bowser is positioned before this scene triggers, causing him to rant about how he can’t let Mario hear about his plight… then walking right by Mario as he goes to leave.

Enough about that, what’s going on in Moleville?



Ho-hum, another star, another town in peril…

Moleville, as it turns out, is a very small and boring place until you’ve solved their problem du jour. We’ll see a few more interesting things once we get our hands on the third Star Piece.

At least this time the Smithy Gang isn’t involved. Seems that when the Star Piece fell into the mountain, it caused a cave-in, trapping a few kids and workers inside. And you know what that means:

We’ll have to venture into the Coal Mines and save them. (Of course.) Look for that in the next update.

Next time: The dungeon is full of monsters

Oh man, I completely forgot about Mole Town!

hmmm, I seem to remember that some swanky mode 7 graphics are coming up.

There's a way to get around the lag, actually - since it's a delay, you can just time it so you press the buttons *just* before the beat lands, aiming more for a b-DUMP b-DUMP b-DUMP b-DUMP. Once you get it down, you can earn Yoshi's cookies just as quickly as you used to (at least, it works for me most of the time).

I've never noticed this emulator lag everybody's talking about lately... I always just assumed I sucked.

Mode7? I thought they had to invent Mode8 just for this game.

Oh wait, that was SBCG4AP. I guess the awesome factor of this game made me mix the two up.

I always felt modern Bowser's personality was driven from the US cartoons. The character of King Koopa from Super Show to Mario World was always sort of the same narcissist and bumbling boss as SMRPG's Bowser.

It's been a lot easier of a transition than Robotnik had, starting out as Generic Boss and then either being a good guy gone bad, an idiot, or an evil genius depending on which spinoff fiction you liked best. Then voice clips became possible and Sega decided to compile all those personalities together along with some Japanese only elements that confused the hell out of people.

I actually prefer Ganon as Generic Evil, though. Link is literally a guy who wanders into a cave and is handed a sword and told to save the world. Why shouldn't his bad guy just be a big ugly thing taking up twice as much screen space as anything else (except for the hydra)?

Never, not once, in all the times I played Mario RPG have I ever, ever beaten the Yoshi Races.

I could beat Culex so fast your head would spin, but Boshi would always humiliate me.

This. This so much.

I suck at rhythm based puzzles.

Also in the Japanese version, Boshi's name is "Washi," in the style of Wario. Makes me wish his color scheme were yellow and purple.

I always felt a bit bad for Bowser. Everyone deserted him.

Moleville and the seaside/sunken ship are, at least for me, the least excitiing parts of the game. It will be nice to see someone get through that damn 3D puzzle, though.

The next time someone starts an LP we have a name for the protagonist.

Sorry this took so long… I’ve actually had this next part played for several days now, but whenever I sat down to sort the pictures and do the writeup something would come up, including, but not limited to, schoolwork, election results, and amazing laziness.

That said, into the mines!



Last time on Let’s Play Super Mario RPG, Moleville was up in arms due to the cave-in in the mine, trapping a few kids within the dark depths. Inside, Ma’ Mole is in a panic, and the menfolk are at a loss.



The miners speculate as to a possible solution, but are all too willing to pass the buck to Mario.



Mario agrees to enter the mines and head up the extraction.



With a boost from the miners, we’re able to jump to the entrance.



The Coal Mines are one of the first really good leveling places in the game. Most of the enemy groups here go down in a round or two, so I usually fight as often as I can here, until all the enemies are cleared out. The crystalline Clusters, for example, go down in one regular attack…

…while Mallow can use Thunderbolt to clear out the high-defense Magmites.



Mallow can also use his spiffy new Cymbals to attack enemies… somehow.



In one of the early rooms of the mine we encounter this guy, who’s searching for a treasure rumored to be hidden somewhere. Keep an eye out for this guy once we’ve got the third star.



Once we enter the mine proper, we encounter a spring placed right out in the open for no apparent reason, just begging us to jump on it.

…This thing has “schmuck bait” written all over it. Screw this; there’s gotta be a better way. Maybe we could go find that treasure the other guy was nattering on about — he seems content to wander around in circles, so he’ll hardly miss it.



With treasure on the brain, we take the left fork instead, defeating enemies as we go.

Somewhere along the line our whole party reaches level 8.



In addition, Geno picks up his second spell, Geno Boost. Geno Boost raises an ally’s attack power by 50%, and if you time it correctly, it raises defensive power by the same amount. Geno is at his least awesome in single-enemy boss fights, but even there Geno Boost alone is enough to secure his worth.



We also run into another classic Mario enemy, Bob-Ombs. These guys don’t attack, but occasionally they’ll blow themselves up for a bit of damage.



At the end of the line we find not treasure, but Pa’ Mole and a dead end. Pa’ Mole suggests using a bomb to blow open a passageway, but all the explosives are missing from the storeroom…



We return the way we came. The spring sits there, taunting us.

How about the right passage, then?



No dice; the right passage, as well, ends in a dead end. Now what do we do?



Oh, come on, Mario. This is crazy. What do you think you can possibly—



Hey, I warned him.



Mario comes to just in time to spot a familiar face picking his pocket. See, if he’d just listened to me this never would have happened.

He really did, too: When Croco is through with us we find ourselves without a coin to our names. After him!



Croco also finds himself stymied by the dead end, but not for long… seems he’s got a few high explosives.



Hm. See also: “two birds”, “one stone”.



Oh, he pursued and I withdrew…



And I pursued and he withdrew…

Catching Croco triggers a boss fight, but we don’t want to engage him yet. Instead, we hunt down the three members of his gang, who have hidden themselves in various places around the mine. They have a tendency to run often, but…



…defeating each of them grants us a Flower Tab.



Yeah, right, kid. Take a good look: You’re not “getting” this any time soon.



Tabs collected, we chase down Croco and engage him…



This version of Croco absolutely kicked the shit out of me on my first playthrough, and several times thereafter.

This was my first RPG, and I hadn’t the slightest idea how you were supposed to play RPGs back then. “Level grinding” wasn’t even a gleam in my eye at this point, so I would basically run from as many random battles as I could. This obviously didn’t serve me very well when I ran into bosses, but as I’ve mentioned, Mario RPG lets you keep your experience when you die. So, against most bosses I’d just charge them over and over until I’d finally generated enough experience to beat them, which kept me more or less properly leveled for most of the game. In subsequent playthroughs, however, I became familiar enough with the bosses and the battle system to beat them without the numerous false starts — but I still wasn’t fighting any random battles, so I was consistently three or four levels underleveled for most of the game. I was basically doing low-level runs before I realized such things were possible.

I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong: I vaguely remembered being at much higher levels on my first playthrough, but I couldn’t figure out what I was doing differently to make me so much weaker. I’m not sure at what point the light bulb came on and I thought “Hey, asshole, why not fight your battles for a change?”, but if I had to take a guess I would probably say it was 1998 (Pokemon, my second RPG, where low-level runs are basically not a option for unskilled players). This version of Croco isn't very forgiving for underleveled players or players who don't know their way around the battle system...

…Anyway. Croco starts out using the same tactics as he did back in Bandit’s Way — bombs, regular attacks — except that Fire Orb is now too weak to be much more than an annoyance to him, so regular attacks are better. (Nintendo Power recommended using Super Flame, but I shudder at the amount of naked grinding it would take to get to level 10 before this fight.)

Once you’ve depleted about half his HP, however, Croco does the unthinkable and steals your items. Bastard! You can only take my crap for so long, Croco — before you take it all, and I say “Enough!”



With no items to fall back on, you have to be extremely cautious with your hit points.



It does not help that Croco also starts using his “Chomp” attack, in which he pulls an enemy out of his bag and tosses at you. This can be blocked, but if you don’t, it deals nutty damage, and without items your HP will drop like a stone.



If necessary, use Mallow’s HP Rain to restore your HP. (This is why it’s important not to use any other specials during the fight – you have to conserve your FP.) Croco doesn’t have a whole lot of stamina, so if you’re at level 8 and use regular attacks every turn, he won’t last too long…



Eventually, Croco surrenders our stuff and bails.