Image Source: Nintendo.com
Spoiler-Alert.
Geno “dies” at the end of Super Mario RPG.
OK, maybe “dies” is a strong word. Geno, a wooden puppet who becomes animated and joins the party at an early stage, only ever gains sentience because a “higher power” sends him to aide the Mushroom Kingdom in its quest to retrieve the Seven Stars and save Star Road. When the game’s titular quest is fulfilled by the heroes, Geno’s soul simply rises up from his body and returns to the cosmos, reverting “Geno” back to his original form of a puppet.
There’s not a ton of dialogue in Super Mario RPG fleshing out Geno’s self-sacrifice. We are never treated to much melodrama exploring how anyone else from party feels about it. We can assume Mario and the crew liked having Geno around, just as we can assume that Geno enjoyed the time he spent in his corpeal form. When, in the game’s final moments, Geno’s “soul” is seen rising from his body and ascending up over the top border of the frame, we haven’t been told how we’re supposed to feel about it. Mallow – Mario’s cloud sidekick – simply says something like “when we do this, you’ll -“, and Geno and the rest nod along in understanding.
Since the 90s, most role playing games feature what is often described as “way too much talking”. But during the SNES-era and prior, it wasn’t like this. Prior to, perhaps, Final Fantasy IV, video game narratives were not always so hand-delivered to the player, and the RPG faithful had to sometimes use their own imaginations if they wanted more detail around the characters they were controlling and the story in which they were taking part. That is one reason why fan-fiction and video game novelizations became popular online during the 90s. The games sparked the imaginations of the players, who in turn felt compelled to answer questions from their own minds to their own satisfaction.
Games today, with their full voice acting and 100s of hours of content, rarely are willing to leave so much to the player’s imagination. Take Octopath Traveller II, which came out this year, as an example. While I loved the game and the absorbent amount of time I spent with it, I was taken aback by the sheer volume of writing contained in a game that was stylized as a retro JRPG. At no point in Octopath Traveller II is the player spared any detail about what a main protagonist could be thinking or feeling, and I’ll fully admit that, somewhere around 30-40s hours in, I was sick enough of reading what some characters had to say that I’d simply starting skipping a lot of it.
Or take another game I loved, Horizon Forbidden West, as an example: that game features both fantastic writing and world building, to be sure. But the amount of talking that Aloy does is often cited as a criticism, and for good reason. When I am made subject to Aloy’s every passing thought, how I am then expected to ever feel like Aloy’s thoughts are really my own thoughts, or that her struggle is my struggle?
One might say that we’ve got it too good these days, and as a result, the relationship between player and game has changed to something that is undeniably more passive, even as game developers strive to make gaming more immersive.
I probably won’t remember what Super Mario RPG was about, but I’ll always remember how it made me feel.
Specifically, I’ll remember how it made me feel because of stuff near the end involving Geno. Sitting from the sofa, I can’t really say I know how Geno felt about leaving Mario and his friends. I don’t know what it was like for Geno to be alive, for however short of a time that it was.
As the credits rolled, we’re shown an image of Geno reverted back to his puppet form, once again being played with by a child in their room. Over the collage of bright graphics and catchy music, I catch my thoughts drifting to the meaning of life itself: in particular, what it means to be alive, and to have relationships, no matter how transient both may ultimately be. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine a modern production with a large budget giving me so much space to grapple with my own thoughts and feelings. I imagine that giving a player space to sort out their own thoughts carries a certain risk.
What I do know is that I was grateful to get to know Geno just as I was delighted to spend a dozen or so hours with the Mario gang. The credits are rolling now, and the Yoko Shimomura soundtrack is starting to hit. I feel like I’m back on the school bus, looking out the window at my imaginary friend, Mario. And dang it – I’m welling up.
The Tingle Review 