Current Events > Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga playthrough attempt (Spoilers)

(+) Yeah! (+)

I've had this game for ages. I've never beaten it. Something would always distract me. I think the furthest I got to was just after the Cackletta fight.
There's still some time before Scream Fortress and I did just play BiS, so I'm gonna give this another go.

I can't remember what the consensus on this one is but I hope it's good. It spawned the rest of the franchise, it's gotta be decent.

I'm playing through it (slowly) on Switch at the moment.

It's still a brilliant game, but I'm not sure if it's down to different hand positioning/button size, but controlling both characters at once feels like a lot more of a ballache than I remember when it first came out.

TomClark posted...

I'm playing through it (slowly) on Switch at the moment.

It's still a brilliant game, but I'm not sure if it's down to different hand positioning/button size, but controlling both characters at once feels like a lot more of a ballache than I remember when it first came out.

I didn't even know it was on Switch. I'm playing a GBA cartridge on a DS Lite. It's pretty comfy. If anything it's easier since I'm only working with two attack buttons instead of 3 or 4.

I'm LV8/7 right now, just beat the dragon on top of the mountain. I'm doing my Pokemon/BiS approach, fight absolutely every random encounter.

I really like the bros attacks on this one.
Does the difficulty slider also affect the damage? Or just the amount of points I need to spend on the move? Because the Wiggler boss just went down to a single lv3 Chopper Bros.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Yeah it was, I don't know how much they changed it though. I watched some and I don't like how the new music sounds. The GBA sprites are more expressive than the new look too imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yxy3_iEumk

Popple is dumb, but he sure has a jam.

Just beat Chuckolator. The regular boss theme's pretty great too.

And at this point I'm just gonna start keeping track of Bowser's misfortune because he's on a streak.
-First he lost to Mario, one on one, no Luigi involvement.
-Then Fawful one-shotted him. (This makes me like the last stretch of BiS more.)
-And then Tolstar was antagonising him.
-And then he got demoted to Popple's sidekick and lost to Mario again.
-And then Chuckolator apparently defeated and subdued him in the 5 seconds it took me to chase them into the boss room.

Another loss for Bowser. And now he's possessed.

I'm in new territory.
I have to go collect up the pieces of a star.
There's no new items to buy in the store in town, but I got that don't-lose-hp-for-more-EXP badge that was in BiS too.
No idea where I'm going. Signs outside of town don't help.

Geno's in this game.
Not the actual character, but the doll is part of this arcade machine.

There's a few of references actually. Dr Mario, a room with all the different blocks from previous platformers, Luigi's Mansion in the coffee shop. Still though, Geno really doesn't show up much so that's neat.

So what's with the beach level? The one where I'm looking for the first star shard.
All of a sudden I'm starting to level up really fast.
I was lv24 like 20 minutes ago, just hit lv29. Is the bonus EXP badge really out of control in this game?

The star shard collecting has been suspiciously uneventful. I got one for a minigame and another for an egg hunt.
There's one more in the forest on the bottom left. Game probably has something up its sleeve.

Joke's End.
I'm not done yet, but I'm already wondering what this place is like on repeat playthroughs. It's a lot more overworld puzzling and a lot less fighting. And I like the fighting in this one because it moves way faster than BiS.

It's probably my favorite of the Mario RPG games

The Bowser's Castle enemies have some obnoxious hitboxes.
Edit: Wow Roy's a mess. I'm jumping and constantly getting hit on the up. Luigi can send the fireballs back just fine but Mario hammers it and it counts as getting hit?

Beat purple ghost Cackletta.
That was a kind of a nice surprise.
I don't know if that was actually a difficult boss since the damage was pretty low, but that was a pretty oppressive, hectic fight. Especially by Mario standards.
They start you with 1hp, she gets over 9000 turns, constantly regenerates segments, can power up arms and force you to spend turns neutralising them. I thought things were going south when the head started tanking Chopper Bros.

Oh and that's the end of the game.

I think I liked that. Walking around collecting up the things to trade for Neon Eggs and Joke's End were pretty slow. Overworld's kinda confusing too. Other than that I'm not complaining. I'm definitely gonna watch a TAS run of this as soon as possible.

I like this take on the special moves in the battle system. Both characters get a hammer and an element and a list of moves, both moves get alternate routes if you use them enough. I love that the animations are way shorter than PiT and Bi where every attack had to keep getting more elaborate and incorporate foreign objects. This game is just Mario and Luigi tag team wrestling cola and hermit crabs and trees into submission.

This one's better about minigames too. In BiS it's cutscene, explanation, minigame, tutorial, cutscene. And sometimes a giant Bowser fight if you're unlucky. In this one a lot of it is "Tell ya what, you get 30 points on my rapid fire minigame in 20 seconds, you can go through." and it's all fairly quick and harmless.

Neat.

Glad you liked the game, tc. Later titles do go overboard on the minigames, especially in battle. Unfortunately, it's the natural progression to add more "stuff," since there's few other ways make the battle system more interesting.