Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga Cinematic Playthrough Part One
0In an unexpected turn of events, Princess Peach has been kidnapped, and it's up to Mario, Luigi, and Bowser to rescue her! That's right, Bowser is NOT the culprit this time! Explore the Beanbean Kingdom for allies and tools to help you bring the princess home!
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Review: 3/5
Superstar Saga is one of the best showcases of the sheer amount of content that was able to be packed into a GameBoy Advance game. The base game alone, without doing any side quests, took me over 15 hours to complete, and the hours just blew by; I was constantly kept amused.
The idea of a Mario and Luigi based RPG was laughable to me at first, (not knowing this was not the red mustachio'd man's debut in the RPG genre), but I was immediately impressed by the active take on a turn-based combat system, the original music in each area along with some nostalgic remixes of classic tracks, and the amount the game was able to make me giggle. There was plenty of dialogue that made me do a double-take before moving on; I think the humor is one of the game's biggest strengths.
I liked the incorporation of several Mario characters as well. Along with the plumber brothers, you'll see Peach, Bowser, the Koopalings, Toads, Yoshis, and hell, the majority of enemy mobs you're up against are copied and pasted straight from the Mushroom Kingdom. If you've played any Mario game before, you're sure to see plenty of familiar faces, and it was fun to see them characterized with dialogue versus the basic platforming I'd been accustomed to.
My biggest gripe with this game has to be its difficulty. The final section of the game is composed of two boss fights, back to back, and up until that point, I think I'd died and had to restart a total of one time. However, the first boss fight in the ending sequence took me well over a dozen tries, and the second one had to have been AT LEAST double that. Because of the fact that the last boss fight has two phases, I ended up using save states simply to avoid having to re-fight the first "easy phase" just to get one shot on phase 2 and start all over. The jump in difficulty was just absurd; I was totally taken aback and it felt strongly out of place.
I think the game's got a lot of charm, and I can agree with it being listed all over "must-play GBA games" lists. It's a classic for sure, and I don't think there's another experience remotely like it that you're gonna find on the GameBoy Advance. That said, I did see it was also remade for the 3DS and, while I've not played it, I do see that it's by and large referred to as the superior version, so I may need to give it another run in the future. One way or another though, it's definitely worth playing.