If there’s one thing that classic turn-based role-playing games (RPGs) can be guilty of, it’s repetitive, unengaging combat. As much as I love the genre, playing an RPG with constant encounters and a battle system limited to selecting moves from a menu can, admittedly, get boring. However, these aren’t issues that players will have to worry about in Nintendo’s upcoming Switch remake of Super Mario RPG.
In fact, these aren’t problems that the original 1996 game, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, ever struggled with. With the option to scooch past enemies in the overworld to avoid encounters entirely, and a battle system that rewards players for timing their button presses when landing or receiving hits (to deal more damage or take less of it), the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) game deftly avoided two common, major pitfalls of the genre.
