I’ve dropped hints about this game before but never actually dedicated a post to it. I didn’t even do a Classic Video Game Monday about this over at Clockwork Hare because I wanted to wait until the time was right, and then I never got around to it.

Okay then. Here, I’m going to talk about my favorite RPG game of all time, my favorite Mario game of all time, my favorite Super Nintendo game of all time, and my favor– okay, do you see where I’m going with this?

The only game I like more than this is SMAC. And that’s saying a lot.

It’s hard to pin down what, exactly, makes this game special for me. I can give you an idea, though. Think of mid-to-late-90s Squaresoft. This game is the epitome of that. Now either you know what I’m talking about here, or you don’t, so here’s a quick rundown, in case you need a refresher:

• Music that can be beautiful, haunting, or fun
• Characters with real personalities, stories, and motivations
• A long and convoluted storyline that takes you all over the world and has you visiting a variety of cultures
• Minigames
• Hundreds of random items that you may or may not need during the course of your game
• Final bosses that have two or three different “forms”
• Magical attacks that look like they should wipe out everything on the screen but actually only do seven hit points of damage to this one guy in the corner

And so on. But, above all, I think, you have that story. THAT STORY. This was the first RPG I ever played. Back then, I had never, ever, seen a story this deep before in a video game. And it left an immense impression on me.

In other words, it was all that old-school Square quirky charm combined with a solid story and characters that really drew me in.

Okay, now I’m going to tell you about an optional boss in the game, called Culex. Culex is hard. Really hard. He’s like the equivalent of Mewtwo in Pokemon; he has nothing to do with beating the game, but you go after him as an extra challenge.

Culex has this whole mysterious presence going on that really has nothing to do with the rest of the game, and so he’s a bit of an anomaly. He’s a self professed Dark Knight with a a bunch of Elemental Crystal companions; he’s certainly nothing like we’ve seen in a Mario game before.

…that is, of course, the point. Culex gets a special boss battle theme that you don’t hear anywhere else in the game. It goes like this:

…sound familiar? No?

How about now?

Yup.

That’s not all Culex gets. You get a special victory fanfare when you beat him (three guesses as to what that fanfare is), and you get yet another special song after that. It is at that point that Culex breaks the fourth wall and says “Thank you, brave knight. I will treasure this memento of my journey here. Perhaps in another time, another game, we may have been mortal enemies… Let us part as comrades in arms.”

There are a lot of theories as to what Square was trying to say here, ranging from Culex being a reincarnated Final Fantasy enemy to simply being a mere fun homage. Well, I dunno about you guys, but the whole Culex thing and his conversation at the end always just gets to me. There’s something touching about it. It’s Square giving you this whole special enemy and boss fight because they know it’s what you want. It’s their one last huzzah before leaving Nintendo for years to come– this was the last game they produced for Nintendo before hitching up with PlayStation. It’s a genuine thank you from the game developers to the players, a respectful handshake between both– all done through the interface of the game itself.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Who knows? It still gets to me, though.

Now Super Mario RPG came out to largely rave reviews toward the end of the Super Nintendo’s lifespan and then promptly disappeared and no one heard from it again. There have been no sequels (beyond its spiritual successors in Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi), there have been no rereleases except for one on Virtual Console, and most of the original characters made for the game also have not been seen since. The typical explanation is that Square and Nintendo have some sort of weird copyright drama preventing either of them from really doing anything with it in the future.

Perhaps it’s better that way. Super Mario RPG is a relic of a different time: a time when RPGs weren’t about who has the fanciest cutscenes or who has the most photorealistic hair or who has the most immersive fantasy world. Rather, they were about traveling from weird town to even weirder town, beating up random enemies for gear, and saving the world. No nonsense. Just beating the big bad guy at the end with all of the epic loot that you had to cross the universe to find.

Oh, and Geno is the greatest character of all time.