Ubisoft earned a wave of attention last year when it announced it was partnering with Nintendo to make a turn-based tactical strategy game featuring the cast and locales of the Mario games.
The fact that Ubisoft convinced Nintendo to give Mario a gun was surprising, but it wasn't the first time Nintendo partnered with an external company to put Mario in a new kind of game. Notably, in the '90s Nintendo partnered with Squaresoft to make Super Mario RPG for the SNES.
"We didnt want to make a normal RPG that simply substituted in Mario characters, like some cheap Final Fantasy sprite-swap," said director Chihiro Fujioka in newly-translated interviews from 1995.
Great game, I still have my SNES cartridge.
Can't believe this wasn't dug up sooner! I think I'm going to read the longer interview, because this short snippet wasn't enough for my curiosity.
Definitely one of my all-time favorite games, which I still have the cartridge and box to.
This is the Mario Rpg that needed a sequel. Shame we'll probably never get one.
How is it that Square kept the rights to Geno but not the rights to Sora