What I'm Playing (Volume 120): Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars

I am admittedly in a moral gray area here. I have definitely beaten Super Mario RPG before, but did so on an emulator, and almost certainly abused save states to get through battles like Culex and Jinx, but I honestly can't remember. So I've decided to dub this as Volume 120 of What I'm Playing, rather than Volume 1 of What I'm Replaying.

Super Mario RPG is a very interesting capsule in time. It comes at the tale end of the Super Nintendo's relevant lifespan, and features some very interesting attempts at new technical achievements on the system, as well as a very early example of Nintendo being willing to license their IP to other developers, launching a wave of fresh creativity using Nintendo IP. The game features 3-D, isometric environments with pre-rendered character models similar, if a bit uglier than, those seen in Donkey Kong Country. Making these characters exist in 3-D, however, is a significantly more challenging job than the 2D sidescrolling of DKC.

The game looks ugly today, but at the time it was really revolutionary. It looks a bit like the characters are toys on a stage, which is seemingly intentional, given the claymation box art. It's jarring when the stage just...ends...and has a weird background outside of it.

Yikes

With that being said, there's a lot of cool graphical stuff going on. They created dozens of 3D models for enemy characters with several unique battle animations each. Each playable character has several magic spells that use the SNES hardware really nicely. Each playable character can equip many different weapons, each with its own battle animation. They definitely did a ton of work on this game, and the love they gave to it shows today, especially in comparison to the battle animations of its peers.

The story is a tropey JRPG tale featuring Mario, but that's kind of what you're signing up for. What really sets the story apart is the writing, which is sharp and funny throughout, with an excellent translation by JRPG fan cult hero Ted Woolsey. The game features two new characters, Geno and Mallow, as well as time honored Mario characters like Peach and Toadstool. The "get Geno in Smash movement is well deserved", but I actually would prefer that Mallow be added before Geno. Sure, Geno is way cooler, but Mallow is adorable, has a great story arc with peaks and valleys, and would lend himself to some interesting combat mechanics in Smash. So let me be the first (probably not) to suggest that Mallow is actually the better choice for everyone's favorite Nintendo-centric fighter.

The battle mechanics are really revolutionary, featuring some timing elements included in battles to introduce more skill and tactics than your typical JRPG of the era. You can press a button at the right to time increase the damage you're dealing, but also press a different button during enemy attacks to reduce incoming damage. This makes battle a more lively affair than you'll normally see from this era, but it's not without its faults. Timing the attacks is in general simple and monotonous, and you'll rarely miss a button press, making the "action" a bit too predictable and lacking energy. Knowing when to press the defense attack during enemy attacks can be really frustrating, as there's no feedback given to you for when you press the button too early or too late. I'm still not even sure if you can defend against magic attacks, or what counts as magic attacks, or if I'm just totally failing on my timing during those attacks, but I'm fairly confident that you can only mitigate physical attacks, which is pretty lame. The battle system included in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga improves on the basic concept here by leaps and bounds, but this game deserves credit for forging a new JRPG concept that has been mimicked a ton since its inception.

The game's length is absolutely delightful for those who want to play an RPG, but don't want to get sucked into another 40 hour campaign. This one can be comfortably beaten in 20 hours by an amateur, so it's a bit more luxurious than your typical RPG experience.

The music, composed by Yoko Shimomura of Street Fighter II and Kingdom Hearts fame, is flat out excellent. It has a silly nature that is fitting for the tone of the game, but is also capable of going for sinister or heroic as the story dictates.

On the whole, I was a bit disappointed by the battle mechanics in particular, and felt like a better introduction for people looking to get into Mario RPGs would definitely be Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. But this is an excellent game still, and despite a few cracks showing through the ages, is definitely worth a playthrough, particularly given the relatively low investment of time necessary to complete it. I'll give it a 9.2/10.

Up next on on the home console edition of What I'm Playing is a game I've already teased, so stay tuned!

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 119): NBA 2K19

Wow. It's been over a month and a half since I last reviewed a game! This is due to two factors. I picked two really long games for my next choices, and I've been travelling a lot for work which takes away my hour lunch break for handhelds. Put these two together and you have some slow progress on two absolutely huge games! Anyway, I finally won an NBA Finals with MyPlayer (a 6'11 rim protector who plays like Nikola Jokic on offense), and I'm ready to review the game. I probably could have reviewed it weeks ago, but it feels better to wait until games are complete before reviewing them, just in case I have any additional insights.

NBA 2K19  is the most recent iteration of my favorite basketball game series of all time. It's another reskinned and roster updated version of the exact same game as when I last played it, which was NBA 2K16. This isn't quite fair, but it's closer than saying it's a brand new game.

There is a new story mode for both owners and MyPlayer, which I generally preferred to the Spike Lee joint from 16. The story in these games usually follows a pretty standard formula-get drafted, overcome squabbles with teammates and family, and reach NBA super stardom. This one is pretty close to that, but with a compelling wrinkle. What if you didn't get drafted at all? The game, rather than starting in college or high school, starts with you in China, learning the hard lessons of how to make it to the NBA in a foreign environment. I thought the story was pretty good.

It is somewhat strange that you have to be online in order to experience the story part of the MyPlayer mode. I could certainly see needing to be online to participate in the Neighborhood part, in which you can play pickup games with other players, recruit players to your team, and play little minigames like dodgeball. But walling a single player experience like MyPlayer off behind an online paywall is pretty nasty, to be honest.

The mechanics are as solid as ever, although there will be at least one guaranteed facepalm "that's not how basketball works" moment in each and every game you play. The most frequent is the old drive into the lane, get stopped and pick up the ball, but rise awkardly for a jump shot after way too long a time moment. It always goes in, and it's always frustrating. You'll also see a ton of 8-10 foot layups from the side angle that would be fiendishly difficult for even the craftiest real life NBA players, but the guys in 2K can them with ease. Anyway.

The game is also not particularly good at approximating the flow of real team offenses or quirky players, which is something that Madden at least tries to do. NBA teams are growing increasingly homogeneous in real life, with a lot of high pick and roll going on, but this game does very little at attempting to highlight those teams with some uniqueness to their game. Where is the 5 out Harden isolation with Capela in the dunker's spot? Why do the Utah Jazz not run anything approximating advantage basketball? Where is the midrange specialty of the San Antonio Spurs? Why do the Denver Nuggets not run their offense through Nikola Jokic? It also messes with the way NBA teams run their rotations, using a more hockey style "line" approach, running a full set of five guys onto the floor in unison, and back off. The Clippers, for example, balance their offense by having Lou Williams and Montrezl Harrell on the bench, enabling them to cobble together above average offense for their whole time on the floor in real life, but in 2K, they're starting.

Player tendencies are even more maddening. I watch very little Philadelphia 76ers basketball, but from what I've seen, Ben Simmons is not a sweet shooting midrange specialist, even though he's swishing them at will in 2K. Joel Embiid, noted from his overpowering back to the basket game, becomes some kind of cross between smooth crafty post operators Kevin McHale and Al Jefferson. Throw in a handful of bizarre ratings (Boogie Cousins is an 89?????), and you have a bit of a weird experience that pulls you out of the immersive experience a bit.

They totally fixed my biggest complaint with 16, which was that you actually had to go to practice to raise your guy's skill caps. Now, performing well in games will increase your skill caps gradually, and it's very well balanced so that you'll always have some aspect of your game to work on, even if you're capped out in some stats. It's kind of weird, though, that you don't get boosts to your scores for attaining career milestones such as making an All-Star team, All-NBA team, etc.

There are still plenty of ways to break this game. The high pick and roll/pop is remarkably broken, and a skilled big like myself can control the game completely through this one action. There are also weird quirks to how the players will always defend a given play that can be exploited through certain passes and moves at a give time, and you'll find ways to break the game that even I didn't.

My biggest concern is with the MyPlayer mode, because that's what I play, but I did fool around with MyTeam and MyGM a bit. MyTeam is microtransaction cash in at the most egregious level, and I hated it. Seriously, if you can build a viable team to compete in this mode without cash, you have an absurd amount of time on your hands. MyGM is a nice franchise mode with a ton of cool new options. It's also pretty easy to break the game here, though, as you'll always get at least a handful of bizarre trade offers if you put a guy in which you're uninterested on the trade block. But on the whole, it's a really fun experience.

The commentary is the best it's ever been from a 2K game, with a hug amount of recorded dialogue from a wide range of commenters, including Kevin Harlan, Chris Webber, David Aldridge, and my beloved Doris Burke. Seriously, if you don't like Doris Burke, you might just be blinded by the fact that she's a woman. There are also a handful of guest commenters like Bill Simmons who will show up in games. I've been playing the game for hundreds of games, and still being surprised by some of the detailed dialogue that they recorded.

All in all, this is still a really good game. Contact sports like basketball and football are just harder to approximate in video form than noncontact sports like baseball, but NBA 2K19 ultimately does a very nice job. Its most frustrating point is the cash grab nature of the game, along with some occasionally wonky physics, but it's been the best basketball game on the market for a very long time, and I spent a ton of time diving back into the world of 2K. I'll give it a 9.0/10.

Up next is a game I'm really enjoying and should be done with far quicker than a month and a half! Check out a little teaser below...

-TRO

The Subjective Scientific reTROview Console Tier List Part 6: reTROspective

Having this many consoles makes the back of my TV look like this.

So, after all of this arduous work to assemble the Grand Tier List, what have I learned? I'm giving out some awards below!

Best Console Manufacturer: Nintendo

Trash Tier:

Wii

I'm Pretty Sure I should Own This?:

Wii U

Game Boy Color

Switch

The Console Middle Class:

Gamecube

DS

3DS

Game Boy

The High Fliers:

N64

The Cream of the Crop:

NES

GBA

SNES

Wow. What a titanic accomplishment! Of the top seven consoles, Nintendo had 4. Of the top 4 home consoles, Nintendo had 4. Congratulations to Nintendo for beating the competition by a mile.

Worst Console Manufacturer: Sega

Trash Tier:

Sega Master System

Sega Saturn

Sega Dreamcast

I'm Pretty Sure I Should Own This?:

Sega Genesis

Oh boy. I probably should award this to the folks at Atari, for only having one console on the list, and that console coming in as the worst console, but the fact that Sega had three in the trash tier alone secures this award for them. I like you, Sega, but I need a much better grounding in Master System, Dreamcast, and Saturn before you'll move up in the rankings. Or maybe it's just an emotional attachment unsupported by data.

Biggest Surprise: Nintendo 64

Gosh, I was stunned at how many N64 games I absolutely love. To be fair, I really know this library, but this one was way higher than I would have pegged it. I would have put it below PS1 for sure, but the data never lie. And they're usually plural.

Most Obvious: SNES

This was was foretold from a casual conversation with a friend telling me about something called "emulators". It began with playing bad translations of Pokemon Gold, and led to downloading and playing every game on a list of Super Nintendo RPGs. A love affair soon began, and now I know the vast majority of the library, and absolutely love everything about the console, save for that the controllers feel a bit cheap, and that the dang things turn a gross shade of yellow.

Most Likely to Improve in 5 Years: PC/Arcade

This one is almost true by definition, and I can't pick between the two of them. We're going on 40 years of PC gaming here, and the same with arcades. What's more, I really may get to the point where I have to kick SNES out of the top spot, but I probably won't, even if the numbers say I should. The fact that the SNES was able to pack in that much goodness into a brief 7ish year run is mindblowing. Honorable mentions here go to Game Boy, Sega Dreamcast, and Switch, which probably have the most growth potential for more traditional consoles.

Anyway, I had a great time making this list, and I hope that my faithful reader enjoyed it as well! I'm really working hard slogging through some long games at the moment, and I anticipate breaking my What I'm Playing fast sometime this month. It's been almost a full month!

-TRO