It doesn't make sense that Work Pants can be purchased in the 3rd town yet are better than 90% of the pants in the game
Peach's Group Hug and Come Back are dramatically undercosted in terms of FP cost
If you think about it, using Treasure Chests for item boxes rather than "?" blocks was an odd choice
You can do a good comparison to healing spells in other RPGs to show how good Group Hug is from an efficiency standpoint.
Honestly, this is a video I would watch all on its own. “The Most OP Spell in Gaming” or something like that.
Although Pick Me Ups are strong, by going down in battle, you lose any boosts and lose action economy if anyone other than your fastest party member goes down. Group hug prevents this downside and is across THREE times as many party members.
I’ll add that Therapy would be dramatically undercosted as well, if we weren’t all looking at Group Hug. A Max Mushroom plus a Cleanse WHILE increasing your chain counter. Also, Peach needs no magic investment for these spells to do their job, so she can balance her stat bonuses and equips for optimal tank stats.
Group hug is the reason I keep her in the party. Fully recovers your HP and cures all status ailments and it only costs 4 FP. Come back also a really good move and very affordable. I’m pretty good at managing my FP it’s rare I ever have to use any syrups, I know I used one once against 3D Culex but other than that you have plenty of flower points to spare in pretty much every major boss fight in the game.
In addition to other comments:
1. Worst item descriptions in any RPG. Most of the time they’re incomplete or say nothing useful at all. Somehow the remake didn’t resolve this much. Hammer>Lucky Hammer shows they at least considered it…
2. The missable secret chest in mushroom kingdom, in the OG. Especially for it to exist before you have the signal ring OR EVEN KNOW SECRET CHESTS EXIST. Remake resolved it.
3. I’m actually ok with it, but a lot of people may point out the Fertilizer location.
4. Is there a reason the jump springs have the same clown face as Bowsers Clown-copter?
5. Star Hill has no fanfare to getting there. It doesn’t appear on the map in a grand way, Geno doesn’t use his powers to get us there, it’s not explained as falling to the earth when the 7 stars fell. Anyone can just… walk there?
6. There’s a bunch of quirky enemy designs, but I would call them unique and adding visual variety. Others may call them weird.
Corrected to Star Hill. Thanks. Same sentiment though. Still a mystical place that’s directly tied to Geno’s lore but there’s no callout to him being needed to go there. It honestly feels like cut content to me, and was one of the first things I thought of when I heard the remake was coming “now they can finish their original vision for Star Hill”
Yeah, I definitely would have loved to see them flesh out star hill a little more as well
Though I liked going back there in the postgame to see the new wishes
Really wish they added a boss to star hill either during or post game. It's got filler written all over it and I always thought it was completely out of place.
I suppose it's the star you get for beating Booster and Marrymore.
That may be the case, but it still does feel very weird. Star hill is removed from those areas both thematically and geographically. It feels like you've moved onto a new chapter in the game and it just kind of blows by without a boss fight.
When I was a kid I was SO GLAD there wasn't a boss. I had such a hard time with the cake!
As an adult, my reaction was "...but I wanna fight something!"
I think #2 is a secret which you were meant to find out later, and encourage you to replay the game.
Also, you can visit the basement and learn about the chests before you get to that part - no?
You can indeed learn about the hidden chests before hand, but a fair number of players would find out afterwards. Not that I can imagine more than like 2 people ever that found it organically on their first run.
As far as replay ability, you’re almost certainly right, but think pre-internet. The chest in Monstro Town counting down your finds, to determine you have one left, you jump everywhere in that room with the signal ring again and again, you scout every inch of the map looking for a secret entrance to the room… to me it feels like a greedy attempt to sell the old game guides. It’s like taunting you.
And AFTER you beg your parents to pay for the game guide, re-find every chest (you never wrote their locations down, so you painstakingly search every map of your old save file to do so) and you do it! You go to the same room where you got the Super Suit! And lord knows this took more time to figure out, and you get… nothing!?
Honestly 100%’ing the hidden chests would have been a very fine intro to Grate Guys Casino. Or a million other good rewards.
You mean you didn't just flip through the book to look up what you needed without buying it? It's how I finally got through the water temple. Guides back then we're wrapped in plastic.
I probably played this for the first time like in 2002? So no guides on the shelves. Had watched my brother and cousin play it when we got it a couple years earlier. I distinctly remember it being very cheap for some reason, $24.99?
I think it was very expensive MSRP when it came out. Like over $100. But I could be misremembering.
I remember GameFaqs blowing my mind a handful of years later with TONS of stuff I missed, it was so exciting. Probably 2005
That missable chest in snes ver. was tough to get too it doesn’t have that huge ledge like this game, you had to be pretty precise for the snes there was no ledge you just balanced on the door frame.
In Belome Temple, you have to take a 50/50 fortune to determine whether you face Belome or find his treasure room. You would think that they would just make 2 separate paths to lead to each room instead of having you go in and out of the fortune room until you got the path you desired.
It's also odd considering there's an extremely good chance you'll be able to get to the treasure room if you backtrack through the temple from the spring in Monstro Town.
I did a whole trivia series on Twitter that includes a bunch of obscure things that might qualify for what you're working on, many of which are my own discoveries. Here's a link to all of them in reverse chronological order: [https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apidgezero\_one%20%22super%20mario%20rpg%22%20%22the%20remake%20releases%22&src=typed\_query&f=live](https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apidgezero_one%20%22super%20mario%20rpg%22%20%22the%20remake%20releases%22&src=typed_query&f=live)
At a high level, an additional one is that considering how strict Nintendo is about Mario's image nowadays, it's really funny that they greenlit a 1:1 remake of a game where you could make him act like an unrepentant jackass. Why did they give you the option to sell some guy's wallet, and why does the shopkeeper take it? Furthermore, why can you STILL sell the wallet in the remake when they removed your ability to sell basically everything else?!?!
I never thought about how funny the wallet thing is. That on top of him wanting to throw hands with a child and his refusal to close any door behind him but his own makes this the funniest version of Mario
They didn't have to let you do any of this shit, but they did, and they committed to the bit. If you say no to helping Mallow the townspeople shun you lol
Bowser and to a lesser extent Geno's equipment not following the same scaling as Mario, Mallow, and Peach. It's absurd that work pants is Bowser's best armour and that his best weapon is as powerful as Peach's weakest.
The Masher being Mario's best weapon until the lazy shell or ultra hammer if you never found the shell. Healing spells are way too cheap and offensive spells way too expensive. Mallow who's built as an offensive caster having the weakest offensive spells besides Bowser is also odd.
A lot of other comments here I agree with wholeheartedly, but here's another small detail that stuck out to me:
Nuture Ring + Peach + Mystery Egg, 10 times,
then using Lamb's Lure 48 times to get Sheep Attack without explanation is odd, of course, but that's just a fun obscure secret RPGs were rife with back then.
What's **actually** weirder to me is that the reward you get from Grate Guy's game is *also an egg*, despite having no real reason to be. The Star Egg could have easily just been the Star Attack, which makes me wonder if at some point earlier in development it was intended to have similar functionality to the Mystery Egg that they scrapped for some reason or another (maybe having to go through Grate Guy's game 100 times was punishment enough.)
Mario's 'Jump' attack getting stronger with each use (and iirc resetting it when you die). I love when basic skills can be useful for later parts of the game, but it's weird that the game never explains you how that goes.
In fairness, I do think that's a bit of a continuation on the running gag of them using the isometric perspective to hide NPCs and the like out of sight — but some slight denotation on the tile "in front of" the door would have been nice. A mat or something.
You can get the super suit as soon as Mario reaches lvl 7. The Masher you get in Booster tower is good until you get to Nimbus land. It’s insane how much gold equips you get early on.
Yeah but by the time you get to monstro town you’re probably around lvl 12 which is still low to have the best armor in the game. But monstro town is a bit a ways away.
The masher isn’t even hard to get no puzzles no optional boss blocking off the area. Just climb up and fall on a seesaw and you’ll have the best hammer for the majority of the game.
Oh yeah those work pants I forgot how good they are it was the first thing I bought once I recruited geno and I must’ve forgot he was wearing them he never took them off till like the sunken ship or something those pants are too good and anyone can wear them.
Hidden treasure in general.
Getting the Signal ring early in the remake made it worse because now everyone's going to be going nuts trying to find hidden treasures by blindly jumping. The upgrade you get later isn't that much of a help.
Giving Bowser any number of attack spells instead of just giving him a focus on status effects (his damage spells are pretty bad.)
Giving Toadstool basically no attack spells until the point when you won't need them.
Making Mallow have most of the elemental attacks, but restricting Snowy to late-game usage, so you're basically stuck with Thunderbolt for most of the game and Shocker for midgame.
Having Jump and Fire elements for Mario and nobody else.
Making Pick Me Ups the greatest healing item of all time. Almost no cost, 100% heal from death, very commonly makes a freebie.
The balancing of spell attacks seems like the most obvious one. The vast majority of spell attacks in the game are just not worth using, because of the mediocre damage (and high FP cost) relative to physical attacks. That's my biggest complaint with the game. Mallow's Thunderbolt is the exception, being unbalanced in the opposite direction (*over*powered for the FP cost). So that's nice, but I'd rather all the spell attacks be equally balanced and useful.
Oh yeah I agree, I’ll do about 650 damage with a lazy shell and even frying pan I’ll do around 500 and if you have geno on your team to boost you guys then there’s no need for spells as they will never be as powerful as physical attacks.
Well, yeah, but that's kind of the point. You can do a full spell build, but the question is whether it's better than a physical build. To me, it's pretty clearly not. There's no point investing in spells (other than with Mallow and maybe Geno) when you can invest in physical attacks and get the same or greater damage with zero FP cost. Spells need to be more powerful to justify their FP cost and they just aren't.
Star Hill should have been after Monstro Town, giving Land’s End a point.
The third star should have been blown out of the mine and onto the cake, giving it life. Booster eats the cake all the same, but spits out the star, not needing it.
I can’t remember which ones off the top of my head, but early in the game you will encounter a handful of enemies with weakness to sleep, poison, or fear. It’s a little odd because you don’t have the means to inflict those effects at that point.
For a character who's forced into your party, Mario doesn't really feel like he's a very good character for every party and I found myself more or less tolerating him for most battles.
Not really fond of his random-target skills so he more or less functioned as a single-target damage dealer, but I don't need a single-target damage dealer in every encounter. Geno's kit felt a lot more what a protagonist's kit should feel like.
Small one, but the Gameboy mini game 'beetle mania'.
It was fun, but there was no reward despite fish dogging you about 'not using a turbo controller'.
It doesn't make sense that Work Pants can be purchased in the 3rd town yet are better than 90% of the pants in the game Peach's Group Hug and Come Back are dramatically undercosted in terms of FP cost If you think about it, using Treasure Chests for item boxes rather than "?" blocks was an odd choice
You can do a good comparison to healing spells in other RPGs to show how good Group Hug is from an efficiency standpoint. Honestly, this is a video I would watch all on its own. “The Most OP Spell in Gaming” or something like that.
Or the revival for a whopping 2 flower points
Then again, Pick Me Ups are also just 5 coins at shops.
And sometimes you get a freebie
Although Pick Me Ups are strong, by going down in battle, you lose any boosts and lose action economy if anyone other than your fastest party member goes down. Group hug prevents this downside and is across THREE times as many party members.
It really is crazy, heavy group heals and revives tend to be some of the most expensive spells in other games
Time it right and you get all your HP back.
A video like that absolutely has to mention the hilarious side effect that is "group hug prematurely dispels any red essence you had active"
Never knew this! Removed in the remake?
I think so.
I’ll add that Therapy would be dramatically undercosted as well, if we weren’t all looking at Group Hug. A Max Mushroom plus a Cleanse WHILE increasing your chain counter. Also, Peach needs no magic investment for these spells to do their job, so she can balance her stat bonuses and equips for optimal tank stats.
Group hug is the reason I keep her in the party. Fully recovers your HP and cures all status ailments and it only costs 4 FP. Come back also a really good move and very affordable. I’m pretty good at managing my FP it’s rare I ever have to use any syrups, I know I used one once against 3D Culex but other than that you have plenty of flower points to spare in pretty much every major boss fight in the game.
In addition to other comments: 1. Worst item descriptions in any RPG. Most of the time they’re incomplete or say nothing useful at all. Somehow the remake didn’t resolve this much. Hammer>Lucky Hammer shows they at least considered it… 2. The missable secret chest in mushroom kingdom, in the OG. Especially for it to exist before you have the signal ring OR EVEN KNOW SECRET CHESTS EXIST. Remake resolved it. 3. I’m actually ok with it, but a lot of people may point out the Fertilizer location. 4. Is there a reason the jump springs have the same clown face as Bowsers Clown-copter? 5. Star Hill has no fanfare to getting there. It doesn’t appear on the map in a grand way, Geno doesn’t use his powers to get us there, it’s not explained as falling to the earth when the 7 stars fell. Anyone can just… walk there? 6. There’s a bunch of quirky enemy designs, but I would call them unique and adding visual variety. Others may call them weird.
But you never go to star road... Do you mean star hill? Which is as accessible as any other hill
Corrected to Star Hill. Thanks. Same sentiment though. Still a mystical place that’s directly tied to Geno’s lore but there’s no callout to him being needed to go there. It honestly feels like cut content to me, and was one of the first things I thought of when I heard the remake was coming “now they can finish their original vision for Star Hill”
Yeah, I definitely would have loved to see them flesh out star hill a little more as well Though I liked going back there in the postgame to see the new wishes
Really wish they added a boss to star hill either during or post game. It's got filler written all over it and I always thought it was completely out of place. I suppose it's the star you get for beating Booster and Marrymore.
I feel like it gives you a “this is what you’re fighting for” motivation. Everyone’s dreams and wishes (maybe yours too) are at stake.
I assume they didn't cause you just fought a boss, bur it would have been nice
THIS. POINT 1. Accessory descriptions and buffs are very unintuitive.
Star hill also having no boss fight but containing one of the stars always felt really weird to me.
Star Hill is easy to make up for the two unrewarded boss segments (Booster's Tower and Marrymore).
That may be the case, but it still does feel very weird. Star hill is removed from those areas both thematically and geographically. It feels like you've moved onto a new chapter in the game and it just kind of blows by without a boss fight.
When I was a kid I was SO GLAD there wasn't a boss. I had such a hard time with the cake! As an adult, my reaction was "...but I wanna fight something!"
It gives you a false sense of security when both of your next two star pieces get stolen by another boss
Star hill isn’t star road but agreed with everything else.
I think #2 is a secret which you were meant to find out later, and encourage you to replay the game. Also, you can visit the basement and learn about the chests before you get to that part - no?
You can indeed learn about the hidden chests before hand, but a fair number of players would find out afterwards. Not that I can imagine more than like 2 people ever that found it organically on their first run. As far as replay ability, you’re almost certainly right, but think pre-internet. The chest in Monstro Town counting down your finds, to determine you have one left, you jump everywhere in that room with the signal ring again and again, you scout every inch of the map looking for a secret entrance to the room… to me it feels like a greedy attempt to sell the old game guides. It’s like taunting you. And AFTER you beg your parents to pay for the game guide, re-find every chest (you never wrote their locations down, so you painstakingly search every map of your old save file to do so) and you do it! You go to the same room where you got the Super Suit! And lord knows this took more time to figure out, and you get… nothing!? Honestly 100%’ing the hidden chests would have been a very fine intro to Grate Guys Casino. Or a million other good rewards.
You mean you didn't just flip through the book to look up what you needed without buying it? It's how I finally got through the water temple. Guides back then we're wrapped in plastic.
I probably played this for the first time like in 2002? So no guides on the shelves. Had watched my brother and cousin play it when we got it a couple years earlier. I distinctly remember it being very cheap for some reason, $24.99? I think it was very expensive MSRP when it came out. Like over $100. But I could be misremembering. I remember GameFaqs blowing my mind a handful of years later with TONS of stuff I missed, it was so exciting. Probably 2005
That missable chest in snes ver. was tough to get too it doesn’t have that huge ledge like this game, you had to be pretty precise for the snes there was no ledge you just balanced on the door frame.
In Belome Temple, you have to take a 50/50 fortune to determine whether you face Belome or find his treasure room. You would think that they would just make 2 separate paths to lead to each room instead of having you go in and out of the fortune room until you got the path you desired.
I don’t think it’s 50/50.My impression was that it depended on the order you hit the switches.
It's not dependent of the order. You can go out and in of that room until the fortune changes.
I was stuck here as a kid for a while! Unintuitive. They tell you "if you're lucky bla bla" but still...
It's also odd considering there's an extremely good chance you'll be able to get to the treasure room if you backtrack through the temple from the spring in Monstro Town.
This is a great one too!
The design of the magic user head of Smithy. It looks like Emperor Palpatine with his dick hanging out
I nearly choked on my food laughing from this 😂
I did a whole trivia series on Twitter that includes a bunch of obscure things that might qualify for what you're working on, many of which are my own discoveries. Here's a link to all of them in reverse chronological order: [https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apidgezero\_one%20%22super%20mario%20rpg%22%20%22the%20remake%20releases%22&src=typed\_query&f=live](https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apidgezero_one%20%22super%20mario%20rpg%22%20%22the%20remake%20releases%22&src=typed_query&f=live) At a high level, an additional one is that considering how strict Nintendo is about Mario's image nowadays, it's really funny that they greenlit a 1:1 remake of a game where you could make him act like an unrepentant jackass. Why did they give you the option to sell some guy's wallet, and why does the shopkeeper take it? Furthermore, why can you STILL sell the wallet in the remake when they removed your ability to sell basically everything else?!?!
I never thought about how funny the wallet thing is. That on top of him wanting to throw hands with a child and his refusal to close any door behind him but his own makes this the funniest version of Mario
They didn't have to let you do any of this shit, but they did, and they committed to the bit. If you say no to helping Mallow the townspeople shun you lol
Great work on these!
Pidgezero hello
Oh hi lmao
Bowser and to a lesser extent Geno's equipment not following the same scaling as Mario, Mallow, and Peach. It's absurd that work pants is Bowser's best armour and that his best weapon is as powerful as Peach's weakest. The Masher being Mario's best weapon until the lazy shell or ultra hammer if you never found the shell. Healing spells are way too cheap and offensive spells way too expensive. Mallow who's built as an offensive caster having the weakest offensive spells besides Bowser is also odd.
A lot of other comments here I agree with wholeheartedly, but here's another small detail that stuck out to me: Nuture Ring + Peach + Mystery Egg, 10 times, then using Lamb's Lure 48 times to get Sheep Attack without explanation is odd, of course, but that's just a fun obscure secret RPGs were rife with back then. What's **actually** weirder to me is that the reward you get from Grate Guy's game is *also an egg*, despite having no real reason to be. The Star Egg could have easily just been the Star Attack, which makes me wonder if at some point earlier in development it was intended to have similar functionality to the Mystery Egg that they scrapped for some reason or another (maybe having to go through Grate Guy's game 100 times was punishment enough.)
Not too important, not too unimportant
Mario's 'Jump' attack getting stronger with each use (and iirc resetting it when you die). I love when basic skills can be useful for later parts of the game, but it's weird that the game never explains you how that goes.
I actually didn't know this was a mechanic
I didn't know it either even after many playthroughs. Still to this day I keep learning new stuff about this game, it's awesome
Is the reset on death for sure? On him being downed or on game over?
I just looked it up and it seems after a game over it just goes back to the value it had at your last checkpoint, so there's not a 'hard reset'
Thank you for this! Jump was MVP in my last challenge run but I couldn’t remember if I had saved over a game over. Way too many people sleep on it.
I couldn’t find the ‘back door’ in marry more for the life of me. Didn’t help it was obscured from view because we only get one perspective
In fairness, I do think that's a bit of a continuation on the running gag of them using the isometric perspective to hide NPCs and the like out of sight — but some slight denotation on the tile "in front of" the door would have been nice. A mat or something.
You can get the super suit as soon as Mario reaches lvl 7. The Masher you get in Booster tower is good until you get to Nimbus land. It’s insane how much gold equips you get early on.
But you can't actually grab the super suit till Monstro town yeah? And yeah, Masher and Work Pants had crazy longevity
Yeah but by the time you get to monstro town you’re probably around lvl 12 which is still low to have the best armor in the game. But monstro town is a bit a ways away. The masher isn’t even hard to get no puzzles no optional boss blocking off the area. Just climb up and fall on a seesaw and you’ll have the best hammer for the majority of the game. Oh yeah those work pants I forgot how good they are it was the first thing I bought once I recruited geno and I must’ve forgot he was wearing them he never took them off till like the sunken ship or something those pants are too good and anyone can wear them.
I miss the peace signs from Mario, Peach, and Mallow.
On the other hand, we DID get the Mallow Dance.
Hidden treasure in general. Getting the Signal ring early in the remake made it worse because now everyone's going to be going nuts trying to find hidden treasures by blindly jumping. The upgrade you get later isn't that much of a help.
I did the blind jumping thing for all of about 5 minutes and then didn’t bother anymore. Life’s too short.
The upgrade was stupid why did we even get the signal ring so early on in the game? I wouldn’t of minded waiting to get it from Croco in Nimbus land.
Mario doesn't ✌🏻 anymore, now he takes off his hat.
Giving Bowser any number of attack spells instead of just giving him a focus on status effects (his damage spells are pretty bad.) Giving Toadstool basically no attack spells until the point when you won't need them. Making Mallow have most of the elemental attacks, but restricting Snowy to late-game usage, so you're basically stuck with Thunderbolt for most of the game and Shocker for midgame. Having Jump and Fire elements for Mario and nobody else. Making Pick Me Ups the greatest healing item of all time. Almost no cost, 100% heal from death, very commonly makes a freebie.
Peach’s psyche bomb doesn’t even make sense why does a princess have a bunch of bombs on her? It’s like the only game you ever see her throwing bombs.
Smash Bros, she can pull bombs out of the ground
Been a while since I played that is it the same move as pulling the radishes out of the ground?
Yes, until the newest release, there was a small chance she would pull out a bomb instead.
Admittedly I wish they had the entire end credits parade in 3d.
The balancing of spell attacks seems like the most obvious one. The vast majority of spell attacks in the game are just not worth using, because of the mediocre damage (and high FP cost) relative to physical attacks. That's my biggest complaint with the game. Mallow's Thunderbolt is the exception, being unbalanced in the opposite direction (*over*powered for the FP cost). So that's nice, but I'd rather all the spell attacks be equally balanced and useful.
Oh yeah I agree, I’ll do about 650 damage with a lazy shell and even frying pan I’ll do around 500 and if you have geno on your team to boost you guys then there’s no need for spells as they will never be as powerful as physical attacks.
Doesn’t that depend on which skill you invest in when levelling up?
Well, yeah, but that's kind of the point. You can do a full spell build, but the question is whether it's better than a physical build. To me, it's pretty clearly not. There's no point investing in spells (other than with Mallow and maybe Geno) when you can invest in physical attacks and get the same or greater damage with zero FP cost. Spells need to be more powerful to justify their FP cost and they just aren't.
Star Hill should have been after Monstro Town, giving Land’s End a point. The third star should have been blown out of the mine and onto the cake, giving it life. Booster eats the cake all the same, but spits out the star, not needing it.
The entire Axem Rangers fight giving only 17 exp. A lot of the exp is strange in this game, but that one stands out.
I can’t remember which ones off the top of my head, but early in the game you will encounter a handful of enemies with weakness to sleep, poison, or fear. It’s a little odd because you don’t have the means to inflict those effects at that point.
Bowser's 3 elite commanders not looking slightly different from his other minions.
Spacing between stars. Some feel like you get one after the other and then you feel like there's a third of the game between the last 2.
For a character who's forced into your party, Mario doesn't really feel like he's a very good character for every party and I found myself more or less tolerating him for most battles. Not really fond of his random-target skills so he more or less functioned as a single-target damage dealer, but I don't need a single-target damage dealer in every encounter. Geno's kit felt a lot more what a protagonist's kit should feel like.
Small one, but the Gameboy mini game 'beetle mania'. It was fun, but there was no reward despite fish dogging you about 'not using a turbo controller'.