Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga | The Completionist

thank you for watching and welcome back to another brand new episode of the completionist super mario RPG legend of the seven stars is absolutely one my favorite games of all time it's a game that taught me how to read more importantly it's a game I always think about till this day and we never got a sequel we're never gonna get a sequel unfortunately maybe I'm gonna jinx myself one of these days but what we did get was Paper Mario and the superstar saga series so today I've already done Paper Mario I thought let's take a good look at Mario Luigi superstar saga let's begin yes [Music] in 2003 Nintendo is probably in a pretty weird place with regard to where to take their entry in their next series of RPGs involving Mario thousand-year door the sequel to Paper Mario was still at least a year away and even though the brand spanking new GBA basically allowed them to develop brand-new better-looking SNES games on the go we still had a problem we never got a proper Super Mario RPG legend of the seven star sequel and already enough the whole mario RPG thing was a super rare occurrence the lack of a partnership with Squaresoft now Square Enix and the fact that the European audience probably wouldn't even know what the Super Mario RPG series even was since it never was released there probably didn't provide much of incentive for them to work together and develop some type of direct super mario RPG sequel instead it seems like they opted to start fresh with a brand new more stylized 2d RPG series that borrowed many of the fun mechanics that made the original so unique while also cleaning them up giving them a whole colorful new coat of paint and boldly applying a custom Western localization to really capture and amp up the intended humour thus our topic at hand today Mario and Luigi superstar Saga which let me just say the superstar saga aspect of the game yeah great title except it sounds like it's a bunch of games in one but the other ones make sense so yeah I'll let you have a Nintendo now these changes all seem to have worked - this game is widely loved by people and even today young hipsters playing for their first time on their vintage GBA micros would probably consider it one of the most definitive games on the console as far as RPGs go I'm pretty excited to complete this one since as it's a simpler game meant for a wide appeal everything including the few side quests there are are supposed to be incredibly straightforward admittedly I've completed bowser's Inside Story for the DS and it made me want to go back and talk about all of the others in the series but that doesn't necessarily mean that this will be complete breeze to give you a little taste there's 175 of these things called hidden coffee beans that I'll need to find all over the world to get some important items from Professor egad who apparently they were trying to make a thing outside Luigi's Mansion for a while he looks like a weird old Benjamin Button baby version of Jimmy Neutron still this might be a game I can finish in one super-clean playthrough and if that's the case hell yeah I honestly don't have anything else to really say other than that more than anything I just love playing good games and it's a rare week here on the completionist where I know I'm gonna be playing an awesome game that's also supposed to be pretty easy to complete so I'm excited to just sit back relax and for the most part enjoy yet I still feel unfulfilled I still dream of a dream in which super mario RPG 2 is a thing most of the team who worked on the original did in fact go on and work on the Mario Luigi series so if that's what it is then that's what it is but we can still dream can't we can't wait [Music] like many of the Mario and Luigi games to come after superstar saga introduces the bean bean Kingdom as it's unique yet perfectly Mario II new realm and its citizens the bean --is-- as its new race as you probably already figured out their thing is that they're shaped like these little cute neon green lima beans and when the game starts Princess Peach is receiving a gift from the Venus goodwill ambassador and her faithful assistant at the castle in the Mushroom Kingdom it turns out that these bean --is-- and voice are actually magical terrorists called cackle Etta and fawful who want to steal Princess Peach's beautiful voice and use it to control the magical bean star which is said to grant wishes to its owner with it they will be able to conquer the bean bean Kingdom and then eventually just like any other egotistical villain out there the world they succeed and kidnap the princess and as you predict in a Mario RPG kind of game tow it eventually goes to Mario and Luigi who apparently have that time to line dry all their laundry by hand I mean I guess that makes sense because there's no washing machines in the Mushroom Kingdom but yeah I guess that makes sense on their way they happen to run into Bowser who was also planning on kidnapping peach but when he realizes that and this is straight-up quoted from the instruction manual chaos reigns when she opens her mouth he decides the risk to his castle will be too great until she gets her voice back so Bowser agrees to help the pros get back her voice so then he can kidnap her again and just continue the mario cycle this is just I get it point is Bowser's on your team again in this one who cares how it makes sense it's just pretty cool but between there in the final showdown for the bean star a bunch of other cute charming events take place and I don't want to risk spoiling me even a tiny bit of it because as unrelated as a lot of it is to the larger story superstar saga always has a very straightforward narrative and in a move that was actually kind of rare in RPGs at the time the large majority of the time you spend playing the game actually pushes the main plot forward instead of distancing you from it with huge grindy side quests that lasts hours and hours without anything but repetitive battle music in the first six seconds of the overworld theme plus in a step beyond even the excellent Paper Mario before it the characters and humor in this game are absolutely top-notch nowadays we're used to clever in jokes and treatable lines and our all new Nintendo games that come chock-full of cool pop-culture and means of the day but when superstar saga came out it was probably one of the first games like this that Nintendo ever put out and fun characters like thoughtful and the sheer amount of times Luigi gets totally roasted in this game make the entire experience worth enjoying however that's not to say the game doesn't look the part either developer alpha dream got the opportunity to make this because of how much Nintendo loved their first game Japanese only release tomato adventure and if you've even seen that game played a lot of what makes it special is also right here in superstar saga big rich sprites with nice fluid animations looking great on a tiny GBA screen we've got a bulky Mario themed interface that makes great use of the screen real estate as you switch between exploring the environments chatting with NPCs and fighting enemies there's also a lot of variety when it comes to its landscapes even though the game is relatively short and each place comes complete with its own little vibe going that extra little mile to make this admittedly ridiculous idea for a world feel satisfyingly textured and alive almost more like a Saturday morning cartoon than your average stuffy old melodramatic JRPG [Music] however the game isn't totally perfect as I sometimes found it hard to tell when something was hidden underground and that weird is a 2d or isn't camera angle sometimes made it harder for me to judge exactly where I was jumping but all in all like most first party GBA games this one is a treat visually and you shouldn't let these little NIT pics from me get in the way of enjoying the experience plus if you're one of those people who listens to game music and full blast in their car like me there's a pretty good mix of classic melodies and completely new songs here and as short as the game is they go a long way towards helping this little new Mario RPG series differentiate itself in tone from the others I know I just said this a moment ago but I really love the cartoony vibe and how the references to the older games work themselves in while still keeping the game feeling new it makes the game feel cheeky rather than retro and whether you're hearing that good old underground theme or you're meeting the viruses from dr. Mario it's always in a way you'd never expect and even series mainstays like Bowser Webb presented in this unique cutesy style how a lot more depth to offer than they do in other incarnations in fact I sometimes find myself taking the characterizations I saw in the RPGs and applying them to games where they're much less fleshed out doesn't imagining it's the Mario & Luigi Bowser that takes the cat powerup in Mario 3d World make it all that much cuter and I know it's weird to say that the game really fits its hardware well when it's basically just an NES controller with shoulder buttons and a screen but I truly believe it does and though we're definitely gonna talk about that more in the next section I do want to call out one last thing that fits this theme perfectly the closest thing to a gimmick that the Game Boy Advance ever had was its weird obsession with voice acting instead of the beeps and Boop's you remembered from classic versions whenever a main Nintendo IP got a new GBA release they've used really compressed clips of voice actors from previous games for example furling to the past they'd use voices from Ocarina of Time Mario 3 would use clips from Mario 64 it was kind of a weird time but with superstar saga they used new recordings of Charles Martinet that really gave Mario and Luigi some new character and although they never really spoke any real words I feel like this was just one of the first real Peaks we ever got at their true personalities together Luigi comes to life here as the butt of a million jokes much more than he ever did in Luigi's Mansion and for that you got to give them props it's pretty damn good [Music] while superstar Saga may seem short to JRPG enthusiasts it doesn't feel short there's a lot packed into this game that will keep you playing for hours on end at the end of the day Mario and Luigi is fun to try and talk about because on the one hand there's a lot that classic RPG players will recognize you walk around on the map there's basic puzzles to solve there's enemies to fight the fights are all turn-based and when you win fights you get a little bit stronger but now that I think about it I guess I could be talking about Mario and Luigi superstar saga or talking about Final Fantasy 1 who knows the basics are pretty much the same but on the other hand when you actually look at how all these mechanics are implemented into the game and how the whole thing is kind of this beautiful evolution of what we started with in Super Mario RPG that's when this really starts getting awesome first of all you're playing as both Mario and Luigi I know it's obvious so while it never really gets as intense as let's say Super Mario World or lost levels the actual world exploration itself does look and feel a lot like the platforming you'd see in a regular 2d Mario game granted you do a lot more finding of objects and bringing them back to people who ask for them in this game and you go to a whole separate battle screen whenever you jump on an enemy but it's still more fun than walking around dungeons in most RPGs and it gets to be doubly so when you consider the absolute coolest innovation this game has to offer the active button pressing system from Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario they took that and then split it between the two brothers between the a and B buttons you move together everywhere you go since there's obviously only one d-pad on the Gameboy Advance and while you can only jump at first eventually this also extends to things like swinging hammers spin jumping over big gaps and shooting fire and lightning out of your hands you can switch through all these abilities on the fly at any given moment which makes it fun to explore and makes early areas worth coming back to once you have more powers but what's even more interesting is that all this also extends into battles a lot of the abilities you can earn transfer into special attacks you can use on the battlefield and while the mechanics are turn-based the mario as a luigi SB system applies here as well pushing the right button at the right time makes it possible to do more damage or even avoid taking damage from certain enemy attacks and you can even team up for short button pressing minigames as part of special brothers team-up combos and while the inputs are always simple to perform and easy to understand the game has tons of satisfying depth if you're willing to put in that extra effort and the more I think about it the more this makes a lot of sense on the one hand Mario games need to be appealing to a younger crowd of gamers who need an accessible game for their portable console that's still fun in short grind free bursts that's why you have simplified things like attacks and bro points instead of spells and MP and short bite-sized quests instead of well you know the gold chocobo [Music] but on the other hand hardcore gamers love Mario too and they're always looking for something to master so for them in a game this short I think perfecting these timed mechanics and learning all the enemy's specific patterns pretty much qualifies here other than this all there really is is jumping around and collecting items on a map and a few basic arcade style minigames which you can often go back and get an extra item or something from but like many RPG minigames they're more annoying than they are a welcome break from the grind and since there's almost no grinding necessary in this game anyway the payoff from this almost feels worth wait a second is that is that Gino is that really Gino right there doing absolutely nothing in the crappy lore Kade minigame and he just teaches you how to tilt the thing that's really all they're using Gino for breathe breathe it's not the first time it's not the first time he's in Smash I'm okay with that you can play as him and smash that's fine here's my QR code for those of you guys out there who want to play as my Gino that's cool we're good we're good we're good at the core of it the game is really fun and much more story forward than most RPGs especially for a portable which is cool it's great at making basic mechanics feel fresh and the two button AV mechanic is very clever both inside and outside the bow screens but while I feel like it was totally successful in battles and kind of immediately set the standard of the series going forward in that sense on the world map because of all the powers you get you need to constantly be switching from them to use them in the main world it can be a little confusing and tedious at times to be switching not only which characters in the front but also which jump to use while then also remembering to switch back to a neutral jump for both characters when you need them I mean look don't get me wrong the mechanic is promising and it often works great but overall it kind of comes off just a little bit clunky but then they were like four games after it and it just gets better and better each time so for 2003 and a Mario RPG that it wasn't - Mario RPG I'd say altogether that's pretty dang good honestly the only thing that was truly even close to a problem were the last couple of bosses because they were way harder than anything else in the game and it required me to grind for a little bit but compared to the amount I would grind out let's say in a game like foul fantasy 15 this was a cakewalk and after an hour or so I was able to beat the game no problem yeah plus the ending actually makes sense Ted what what did I tell you about starting flame wars in the comments I just think he causes an uproar and uprose good for business good for business how'd you even get in my office why are you in this episode I live here no you don't this is your a plot device you are a plot device for me to murder every now and then that's it that's it that's all you are to me Ted no that don't have that fake crying crap [Music] aside from just playing through the main story and doing a couple of side extra minigames and fetch quests to get stuff like rare items and extra mushrooms which I was able to do completely in about 45 extra minutes of playtime the only two things worthy of talking about in regards to completionists are specifically professor egads coffee bean search which i talked about briefly earlier and a short quest for har hauls pants I guess he's supposed to be based off of Andy Warhol which explains his love for sporting on shirts but want to be the version of the game that gets you a bean star fragment as part of the main story you can go back and do it again and again and again to get all the different shirt designs and when you do you'll get hard Hall's pants there's 28 different combos and I know it sounds rightly like it might be a little tedious but in the end the whole thing took me like 15 minutes so I really don't have that much to worry about even the beans of which you needed to collect 175 of all different varieties to please professor egad and get some items including his creepy Gameboy horror SB it was all pretty simple once I unlocked the surfing game island to grind for the beans and even if I'm over guessing it probably only took me at most two hours total out of the 15 took me to beat the game and yeah maybe I didn't have exactly huge amounts of fun actually earning the items but the items themselves are awesome and are actually impactful on the gameplay by giving you things like a floating jump with an excites Pring or the ability to get rare items every time with the Gameboy horror it's as if the awesome game designers at alpha dream read a list of features that every classic RPG has and then redesigned it from the ground up to have as much polish and fun as possible and yeah maybe it's because I am the completionist but more than anything shattering the idea that a good RPG has to be super long was the best of a game that was excellent at every turn in my completionist playthrough of Mario Luigi superstar saga there were twenty eight bosses defeated 70 collectable whoo beans 35 whoo beans 35 hee beans 35 chuckle beans 7 blends 4 egad to taste for seven special prizes zero deaths a total playtime of 15 hours four minutes and 35 seconds and dozens and dozens of great moments with fawful the offal falafel this game was just a peaceful relaxing time like a lazy river at a water park you know except without the P o people p at water parks Ted just quick quick sidebar from the episode you've got to the end you know just I'm glad you're here it's just so we can have this this little mini interview for a second why do you keep showing the up in these videos for no reason like what what is inspiring you just a freaking appeared of no reason in my videos Ted I thought you could use a celebrity feature on the episode yes so you out get out of my office a celebrity feature what do you do Ted I'm a big member in the podcast and I stream on Twitch I'm pretty big and and end of the video Mario and Luigi superstar saga is a wonderful game that I cannot recommend enough to anyone who is trying to play a game on the go if you have a Game Boy Advance SP or a Game Boy Advance or you have a Wii U you can download the game digitally you have to play this game at some point it is a must play it's not very big but it's big enough to keep you going for quite a while in regards to completing the game it's not that difficult and yeah you don't really get anything for it but RPGs are the kind of game that aren't about necessarily going to the end to get the 100% thing so much as the journey itself and the cast and characters in this game just kind of bring everything together to kind of make you enjoy the experience from start to finish so but that of my guys I give this game my completionist rating of complete it completers that's all coming over today guys so please as always let me know you thought about today's episode somewhere on the Internet a little bird told me recently that thumbing ups comments and videos and stuff like that is actually important again so if you like the show you like what you saw you enjoy what you do here on the channel do me a favor hit the thumbs up comment below what gain wanna see me do next in the a Mario RPG franchise do want me to go on the Paper Mario another one or maybe dip back into Mario Luigi let me know in the comments below if you're new here and you like to saw hit that subscribe button to make sure the Bell is on to get all your notifications and if you missed last week's video you can check it out right below the little box that I'm in oh man was last week's episode let me what was someone lego pirates internet dinner at dinner 9 10 10 antenna I liked the fifth movie it was pretty good the fourth was still bad the fifth was on as good as the first three but it's a step in the right direction see you guys next week if you're still here thank you I'll see you guys next week bye

Channel: The Completionist

Views: 754,586

Keywords: Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (Video Game), Mario and Luigi, Superstar saga, GBA, Gameboy Advance, Nintendo, Dream Team, Paper jam, Mario Series (Video Game Series), Video Game (Industry), Role-playing Video Game (Media Genre), Mario (Film Character), gameplay, review, partners in time, saga, completionist, TOVG, jirard, PBJ, game grumps, Sullypwnz, chuggaaconoroy, normal boots, projared, super Mario rpg, legend of the seven stars, luigi, GameXplain, mario, game theory

Id: rIrszf9Pd_U

Length: 22min 31sec (1351 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/MattLocke]

This is in my top five of the franchises I wish he'd play on Beard Bros.

[u/kshanti]

Poor Ted, you can still start flame wars in the comments. Flame on!

[u/[deleted]]

A little bummed he didn't mention the alternate forms of the combination attacks. Would have been a fine thing to mention when talking about depth for older players. For example, the attack where Luigi hits a rolled up Mario like a ball, a couple altered button presses extends that attack indefinitely. All the attacks feature similar mechanics, too.

[u/[deleted]]

I'm so glad he did Bean Team, though I figured he'd do Tekken 3 since 7 just came out

[u/MalionX]

Zero deaths I wonder if that's a first.

[u/[deleted]]

Hahaha Ted was really great in this episode!

[u/Franck420]

Can someone tell me what is the song at 4:10 please?