Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is by far my most played single player game of all time, despite the fact that I never quite played it until recently. To me, Mario RPG is a kind of movie that you’ve only seen on cable. You never sit down to watch it all, but you catch bits and pieces so often that it ends up feeling like you’ve seen the whole movie. My unconventional experience playing Mario RPG was the result of renting the game repeatedly over the course of a year and working through it with the help of another kid I don’t know and never met. For me, Super Mario RPG will always be a co-op game and a perfect representation of the quirks of gaming in the 90s.
If you come across a Blockbuster video in 1998, you would find a corner of the store stocked with PlayStation and N64 games to rent. Most millennials probably have fond memories of the first time they rented Metal Gear Solid or Banjo-Kazooie, but I didn’t have a current-gen console at the time. Instead, I was across the street at my local Schnucks grocery store, trading coupons from the newspaper for $1 Super Nintendo rent. My favorite game was, of course, Super Mario RPG, despite the fact that I could never get past Tadpole Pond.
I was only allowed an hour of video games each day after school, so every time I got to Mallow’s house, my rent was gone and I had to take it back to the store. I’d try to renew it, but there was always a waiting list for Schnucks’ single copy of the game. By the time I got it back, I would invariably find that my save file had been overwritten. So I’d start over, play to Tadpole Pond and then start the cycle again. I must have repeated this process half a dozen times before one day I got tired of rebooting and just started playing on another save file.
It was confusing at first. I was in a new town that I didn’t recognize, and there was a strange man in my party wearing a blue cloak and shooting bullets from his finger. It wasn’t long before I came across a pipe that took me to an island full of Yoshies, and I knew I had made the right decision. I stopped worrying about what I’d missed and just moved on to Moleville, recruited Bowser, and finally made my way all the way to Booster Tower before having to return the game again.
A few weeks later, when I rented the game again, I was excited to find that the save file hadn’t been erased, but was now even further than where I left it. This time I am in Nimbus Land where I learn that Mallow is a long lost prince. I still don’t know who Geno is or why I’m even looking for star pieces but I’m kicking the shit out of Birdo so I assume I’m on the right track. All the things I don’t know about the adventure just seem to make everything more exciting, and I start thinking about the other person playing the game next to me. I imagine that they, like me, are tired of losing their save file over and over, and decided to make this silent arrangement with me just to get through the game together. I wonder if they are just as confused, and if they are having as much fun as I am.
I defeat Valentina without really understanding who she is, then go into a volcano and fight a dragon, followed shortly after by the zombie version of the dragon. This is the best game I’ve ever played. If you’ve played the game, you’re probably already tense about what happens next.
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get past the Axem Rangers on top of the airship. I fought them over and over, but their attacks were just too strong and they got hit so many times in a row – it was just impossible. I returned the game to the store defeated, but with the hope that my partner would have enough time to figure out how to beat them.
The last time I rented Mario RPG is one of my most cherished gaming memories. Loading our rescue, I found that not only had they gotten past the Axem Rangers, but had stopped just before the final battle with Smithy. I didn’t realize at the time that there was no way to save after you beat the game, so my eight-year-old mind decided my partner had come all the way to the end and decided to let me take the final win. I beat Smithy, finished the game, and returned it to the grocery store with a thank-you note in the box, hoping my invisible friend would rent it again to see if I managed to beat it.
I didn’t play Super Mario RPG all by myself until the SNES Classic came out in 2017. Only then did I finally see half of the game I had missed before. I had no idea there was a ghostly pirate ship or evil wedding cake in this game, and when I finally saw them the other half, it reminded me of my weird co-op experience and the mysterious partner who helped me through it. Those magical moments when you share a fleeting experience with another player always seem to move me. Whether it’s a game like Journey of Dark Souls that intentionally builds in those moments, or just an extraordinary encounter with someone else in an MMO, I always enjoy interacting with a stranger during a shared gaming experience, and I’ll never forget how Super Mario RPG, however improbable, made that possible for me.
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