What makes Super Mario RPG’s music work so well is its mix of virtually everything good about music: It can somehow be both heavy and melodic at the same time, mixing catchy beats and swelling orchestra at the same time. While most good music has at least one of these elements, and many games have songs with some of these elements and other songs with the other elements, this game is one of the few to have all of these elements in individual songs.

Nowhere is this better present than in “Fight against a Stronger Monster,” the music that plays during minibosses, and what is hands-down my favorite video game song. It starts with marching drums, followed soon by shakers, and then a heavy organ begins to swell. The song continues tag-team between this heavy orchestra and a high-pitched instrument that sounds like a mix between an alarm clock siren and a high-pitched horn, ending each bar with a short scratch.  The song ends with the organs gradually swelling into an apex, only for the song to begin again. It is hard to imagine how a song could fit everything in barely more than half a minute better.

If the other songs do not contain all of these elements in individual songs, they do at least provide them with the variety of the whole group: From the jazzy “Rose Town” and “Going Shopping in Seaside Town,” to the melodic “Grandpa and the Delightful Tadpoles” and “Let’s Go Down the Wine River,” to the symphonic “Still, the Road is Full of Dangers” and “The Merry Marry Bell Rings” to the beat-laden “Fight Against Monsters” and “The Axem Rangers Drop In,” to the heaviness of “And My Name’s Booster” and “Fight Against Smithy, Who Likes Transforming,” to the aptly named “Sad Song.” Hell, the game even has elevator music in the form of “Welcome to Booster Tower.”

Of course, when Super Mario RPG’s music is mentioned, the song that usually gets the most attention is “Beware the Forest’s Mushrooms,” a song that was even remixed for Super Smash Bros. Brawl (only to be left out of the final product); and though I would not consider it one of SMRPG’s strongest songs, it does match the general style Shimomura seemed to go with for this game, being both melodic and upbeat. Hell, this song somehow manages to be both rather dark and upbeat in the same tune, falling into rather foreboding-sounding strings around the twenty-second point, and then immediately rising back into jauntier notes.

Actually, one of the most interesting but subtle aspect of SMRPG’s music is the variety of instruments used: From the aforementioned scratch beat in “Fight against a Stronger Monster” (and a similar version in “Melody Bay” and “Grandpa and the Delightful Tadpoles”), to the tick-tocking in “Hello, Happy Kingdom!” the whistling in “Let’s Go Down the Wine River” and “Let’s Race,” the various horns I can’t even name in “And My Name’s Booster,” and… whatever that horn (?) that sounds like a frog gurgling in “Beware the Forest Mushrooms” is.

Interestingly, despite all of this variety, there is still a common sound (the particular orchestral instruments being the most conspicuous) among every song so that one can easily identify every song as part of the same game.

This will just be a quick comment on the writing of Super Paper Mario with no judgment on its gameplay or overall quality (I’ve never actually played it, just watched it, though its gameplay does look interesting).

My overall assessment of Super Paper Mario’s writing is that they saw the success of The Thousand Year Door’s use of both some minor seriousness and its wit and then tried too hard to implement them in this game, making it forced. This is especially noticeable in its attempt at drama, which is mostly lackluster.

The main problem I have with Super Paper Mario’s story is that I do not like Count Bleck as a villain, mainly because his motivations are stupid. Essentially, he’s butthurt his girlfriend’s dead so he wants to destroy the world. However, he’s not some crazy psychopath who just goes around fucking shit up out of pure grief, which would be understandable, but spends at least a year concocting a detailed plan to do so. With this kind of sanity and this long a wait he should have been sane enough to get over his grief. More importantly, why does he have such close henchmen that help him do this? What do they gain by destroying the world—and thus themselves, too?

You might be surprised to learn that he eventually learns the error of his ways, only to be surpassed by another evil. Luckily he’s able to save the day because of he and his girlfriend’s love. Yeah. No, it isn’t explained how this works and, yes, it’s an utter deus ex machina.

Super Paper Mario does actually succeed in a legitimately touching and surprising scene in which some young heart lady needs to essentially kill herself to save the world, but this is completely ruined at the end of the game when she is magically revived. And then the writers had the gall to have her mother say, “We don’t know how she came back to life, but who cares?” as if the writers themselves were just throwing their arms up in the air and saying, “I don’t fucking know.”

The humor is also forced. The Thousand Year Door had a good balance between the original Paper Mario, which barely tried to be funny much, and this, which tried too hard. Whereas The Thousand Year Door had a lot of wit and some subtle silliness, Super Paper Mario just tried to throw silliness at your face to the point that it sometimes becomes annoying. There is still some wit, such as most of chapters two and three, but a lot of other parts are just annoying. Pixls, who are much less memorable than the partners from the first two games, merely have pointless gimmicks or strange speech patterns like a bad standup comic rather than actually witty dialogue. And then there’s O’Chunks, who’s just full or the stupidest of random humor. At one point he literally yells, “Broccoli!” or something else inane. The Thousand Year Door was able to be funny without relying on such lazy crutches. For instance, in that game Goombella would sometimes make short comments during her tattles or scenery comments that made them more entertaining; but she did not speak in silly accents. I mean, she did say “like” sometimes, but she wasn’t all “Yo, yo, Daddy-o! Yooz got the stache with the plan, my man!” like one of those insipid Pixls might. Shit, even the Yoshi partner, who came close to that line, wasn’t that bad.

This is not to say that Super Paper Mario’s story isn’t entertaining (and it’s still much more interesting than the average RPG story, which I could never even talk about since I would fall asleep during any of them and forget any details about them); but it did have quite a few awkward moments, which The Thousand Year Door seemed to avoid.

I never understood why Final Fantasy IV is considered so highly among the series (at least compared to the other five of the first six games; I never really played any of the newer ones, and thus will abstain from writing about them). In terms of actual gameplay the fourth iteration is far less interesting than any of the others. The odd-numbered games had the class system, the sixth had the esper system; even the unpopular second game had the interesting (if unintuitive) experience system. Final Fantasy IV allows no such customization: What characters you get to use is based on the whim of the story, any spells they learn they learn when the game says they should, and the story is very linear save for few sidequests.

Final Fantasy IV’s gameplay is not merely less interesting than the first three; some of its gameplay aspects actually hinder its quality. While Final Fantasy VI—the only other game out of the first six to have character differentiation that is out of your control—has many characters that are great to use in their own ways (if you know how to use them), a lot of Final Fantasy IV’s just suck. What other game makes you play as a fucking bard? He is objectively inferior to the other characters in every way except that he can split potions to heal every character a tiny fraction during battle, essentially wasting said potions (this only applies to the Japanese or Game Boy Advance versions; in the US Super Nintendo version her really sucks).

Or how about the dipshit spoiled brat twins, mages too early in the game to have any magic abilities (later on they develop better magic, but only in the Game Boy Advance remake; and by that point Rose and Rydia are superior, still, anyway)? They do have this one move that does quite a lot of damage, but it makes both of them useless in battle for so many turns Cecil and Yang will likely defeat whatever enemies—or one of them will be killed—before the attack even gets a chance to be used. The fact that they’re so weak that they die in so few hits, and that one of them is the only healing-magic user, makes the latter very likely[1].

This is made worse by the fact that your character roster changes all the time, killing off characters in out-of-nowhere scenes just so they can dump you with another character you’ll have for maybe two minutes. And if they’re equipped you lose that equipment forever, unless you de-equip them first, which requires you to already know they will die, essentially punishing new players for not being psychic, which is objectively a bad game design decision.

Granted, Final Fantasy IV is mainly praised for its story, not its gameplay. But its story doesn’t fare much better. The aforementioned character changes are a story problem as well as a gameplay issue. The game introduces characters, kills them a few minutes later, and then expects the player to be devastated. Hey, remember those two dumb ass twins you just met and hate? Well, now they’ve turned to stone to keep a tower from collapsing randomly. And you can’t heal them because of some rule we made up, which doesn’t even apply in-game[2]. Telah kills himself by using a spell that costs more magic than he has… somehow? And you can’t bring him back to life with a Phoenix Down or anything, because, uh… Magic! It’s all so silly you can’t take any of it seriously. For god’s sake, Rydia gets teary-eyed about a character she never even met dying, before she even rejoined your party. Her parents died earlier, but apparently this Telah person she never met was more important to mourn over.

What’s worse is that at the end of the game it turns out everyone is alive. I’m not making that up. Yes, even Cid, who straps a fucking bomb on himself and dashes himself against a tower, lived somehow. Why have these characters die only to bring them back later? It’s stupid from a story perspective and it’s stupid from a gameplay perspective. It’s annoying having to readjust to different characters in battle and it disperses the story’s attention among so many characters that none of them get properly developed, and thus I don’t care when their dumb asses are killed because I know when my magic person dies he’ll soon be replaced with other magic users who are virtually the same. I think it would have been better had they limited the game to only a few characters throughout the whole game and then developed them instead of the clusterfuck they gave instead.

This game’s story is often praised for its depth, but I fail to see it anywhere, to the point that I wonder if these people played the same game I did. The villains have no motivations; they just want to collect all the crystals so they can ruin the world. Why? Because it’s evil! The king doesn’t attack innocent countries because he’s greedy or any other motivation that causes real humans to commit evil actions; he’s just brainwashed! Why does Kain keep betraying you? That darn brainwashing Golbez! Hell, even Golbez, a kindergarten caricature of pure evil with his dark knight clothing and dialogue that would make an airport fiction novel villain look deep turns out to be brainwashed by the true villain, Zeromus, whatever the fuck it is. You learn this at the very end of the game, and learn nothing about what Zeromus is. The game just says, “Oh, hey, we tricked you, this random blob monster’s the real villain instead!”

The best that can be said about Final Fantasy IV’s story is that it’s so awful it’s hilariously awesome. Not only do you need to collect all four elemental crystals, but then you need to dive underground to find the four dark crystals. Then you’ll be able to fly to the fucking moon, where you confront Golbez and later Zeromus (as well as gaining, and then quickly losing, yet another unremarkable character).

And yet, in some cases the story’s stupidity actually harms the gameplay. Magnet Cave is a great example. At the end of it is a “Dark Elf” boss that is so strong that it instantly kills you. This was so original the time it was already done in Final Fantasy III, except in a much more logical, overall better way[3]. With all of the monsters you fight in this game a fucking “dark” elf is the one that is so dangerous? Really? Furthermore, in this game in order to be revived you need to have some certain harp. How do you get this harp? You need to take a guess and talk to that stupid spoony bard to get it from him. But he’s mentioned in-game in such a nonchalant way that no one would think to bother talking to him. I’m sorry, but when someone mentions that Edgar’s resting because he’s hurt (an excuse to keep him out of your party), my first thought is, “Good, tell him to stay the fuck out of my party,” not, “Oh, I’d better talk to him so he can give me some magic harp to revive me when the evil Dark Elf one-hit kills my party.” The whole plot thread is completely random.

Sometimes such randomness is just silly, rather than harmful. At one point you’re about to be killed by another scripted boss. “Oh no, we’re done for no—Oh, wait, Rydia’s randomly arrived to help us. How she got here isn’t answered, but sure, why not?”

The usual defense of Final Fantasy IV’s flaws are that it is old, so criticism is unwarranted. This ignores that this game can be compared unfavorably to older games. I’m not saying Final Fantasy IV is not as good as those new-fangled games that I’ve never even played; I’m comparing it to the first and the third—the latter of which is certainly superior. And to those who defend its cliché medieval environment because it’s old I give two games released earlier: Earthbound Zero and Phantasy Star.

And even if Final Fantasy IV might have been the first truly story-driven RPG, it wasn’t the first story period, was it? You can’t just say that because no other video game has had a story about a hero who starts out evil and turns good that nothing else, such as literature, has done it, either. Video games do not only compete with each other for one’s time, but with other mediums, including books. If a particular video game’s quality is based almost entirely on story, than it better have a story interesting enough that I would rather play it than read a book—especially when books were much cheaper then; why pay sixty dollars for a boring game just for the story when you can pay only five dollars for a book with the same quality story? If it cannot do this, then it should not base its quality on mere story. The other five Final Fantasies do not fall under this trap because they have gameplay that is interesting (even if none of their stories—except perhaps the sixth iteration to some extent—are particularly good, either). Of course, if an RPG has a story that truly does compete with other mediums, then it can succeed. For instance, Mother 3 is mainly story-based, but its story is so creative and interesting that it competes not just with other video games, but books, too. Mother 3 could be written as a book and it would be a solid story; I could only imagine Final Fantasy IV as some airport fantasy novel.

Now after all of this ranting, and after probably already turning-off anyone who might be consoled by this, I will say that I do not think Final Fantasy IV is a bad game, and I have beaten it, which is more than I can say about most RPGs[4]. I just consider it more an okay RPG than good. And, in fairness, there are certainly worse RPGs. Don’t get me started on the sheer blandness of Golden Sun.