Mario is asleep in bed. It’s a lovely wooden bed with a warm blanket and fat pillows. The bedroom’s a bit odd, though. The room is carved out of rock, and if you were to walk out the door you’d see that it’s one of a handful of rooms built into the scrabbly face of a cliff.
Something else is a bit odd too. As Mario sleeps, three ghostly figures appear above him. Three enemies come to him while he sleeps to offer a challenge. They call themselves the Musty Fears, and they will hide flags across the world for Mario to discover. When morning comes they’re gone. Was it all a dream?
It’s lovely to have an excuse to return to Super Mario RPG, now shorn of its subtitle and delivered afresh with new graphics, a few new combat tricks, and a real attention to detail. This is a devoted and precise remake of Mario’s first RPG adventure, which means the lineage connecting the likes of Superstar Saga and the Paper Mario games begins here. Super Mario RPG’s been available in Europe before, I gather, but only on the Wii’s Virtual Console. This is a quietly lavish recreation of a game you might have missed, then. And, like the visit from the Musty Fears, it all feels like a bit of a dream.
