I know I say this about a lot of games, but the original SMRPG is a masterpiece. I never owned it, but on its release in 1996 I made significant use of a deal Blockbuster had where you could re-rent something for another week at a significant discount, similar to what I did the previous summer with Earthbound. These two games made up my introduction to JRPGs. I was aware of them (I mean, I had a founder’s subscription to Nintendo Power, so I read about them all the time) but apart from Earthbound and SMRPG I didn’t really play any of these other games until Final Fantasy 7 (on PC). Upon immediately establishing that “whoa this slaps, and there’s seven of them???” I rapidly caught up via emulation.

At this point I think we’ve seen examples from every imaginable point on the triangular spectrum of re-release / remaster / remake. I consider SMRPG to be an absolutely perfect balance between what you expect from both a remaster (it’s the game exactly as you remember it, even down to the quirks and bugs) and a remake (they threw out the engine and all assets and started over from scratch). SMRPG was able to punch waaay above its weight on the SNES by used pre-rendered 3D assets and here they’ve replaced all those assets with nearly identical ones, but they’re all real 3D, all fully animated, and they look outstanding. They did a similar upgrade with the soundtrack, but have left the ability to use ether the new or the original.

There are a very slight number of straight alterations from the original:

  • Triple Attacks - Successful timed attacks now charge a global meter that can be used for a super-attack for each unique lineup of 3 characters. Streaks of timed attacks also provide passive boosts that increase as you keep it up, so you’ve got three reasons to Get Good with timed attacks.
  • Mid-Combat Swapping - Shockingly similar to Sea of Stars, you can now swap out characters mid-combat without losing a turn, so long as you have more than 3 characters.
  • Level-Up Screen - Totally re-done graphics, plus it now shows you exactly what the impact will be of your stat boost choice.
  • Post-Game Ultra-Bosses - They added beefier versions of all major bosses as post-game content.

Those first two changes are great but somewhat unfortunate because they vastly change the game’s difficulty. I know in the original I very rarely used Geno and Mallow, opting to rely on Bowser (for stupid physical damage) and Peach (for cheap heals and revives). I also basically never used magic that required doing a 360 on the dpad, because it was horrible. These changes to the remake allowed for a much more aggressive and varied party loadout. With the right equipment you could basically lead off every combat with a multi-target spell from Mallow or Geno, or even Bowser since doing 360’s is easy. The ability to “bank” a triple attack also trivializes boss fights if you can lead off combat with – for instance – a beefy multi-target / multi-hit attack that’s going to buff your party once it’s done. Also, note that this is all with the game on normal difficulty, I assume the easier difficulty is… easier.

I don’t know how I feel about these changes. They’re amazing and obvious quality of life changes, but they also really throw the balance of the game out of whack, but if you tried to re-balance the difficulty to account for them that would suck and probably suck worse than having the game be too easy.

All that said, I think as a whole this release is objectively better than the original. There’s nothing wrong with the original, it’s still a fantastic and nearly perfect game, but this so perfectly presents what the original had to offer and then some, and it’s significantly easier to acquire and play in 2023. Highly Recommended.