Welcome to the Warthog Report, the home for my fiction and non-fiction. This post is part of the regular feature ‘Let Me Talk To You About,’ where I ramble about creative works of any medium that I enjoy. You can adjust which segments you receive here. This month is about a fangame that’s a crossover between two of Nintendo’s biggest games.
Romhacks and fan games are massive works of labor, it takes dedication to pour effort into something that by definition cannot make any money and has a chance of putting you at risk. Yet from that scene comes many games of high quality, such as Super Mariomon, a romhack of Pokémon Emerald featuring Mario characters. You can find the patch to play it on your dumped Pokémon Emerald cartridge here, do not trust any other websites, those are scams designed to appear before the genuine article on google search.
Super Mariomon is more than a Pokémon game with Mario sprites, its a whole new game where the Mario elements are built into the design of the game, such as the region being broken up into distinct worlds you travel to from a central hub. Even if you have no interest in the Mario world, it’s worth playing just for how fresh it feels as a Pokémon game.
The story of the game is lighthearted, with Princess Peach hosting a special ‘capture challenge’ that everyone is taking part in, which is structured like a Pokémon game with needing to travel to defeat eight ‘star leaders’ before taking on the elite four. Various Mario enemies take on the role of captures, which are this game’s equivalent to Pokémon. Professor E. Gadd is naturally the one who take the role of the game’s professor, introducing the game, the starters to pick from (Blooper, Bob-Omb, and Piranha Plant), and handing Mario a Tattledex to fill out.
Luigi takes the role of the rival, with Bowser filling both the secondary rival and evil team leader role. Even without being some of gaming’s most well known characters, Luigi and Bowser bring new things to the Pokémon role they play in Mariomon. Mario and Luigi being brothers gives them an entirely different dynamic from the typical player character and rival in Pokémon, and Luigi nicknames all of his captures. Bowser meanwhile concludes each of his fights by fighting you directly. While the stakes don’t get too high or intense, the ending of the game was charming. I enjoy the way Mario and Luigi’s relationship is written.
The roster of captures spans across all of the franchise’s long history. It makes better use of the Mario world than most actual official Mario spin-offs. Games like the RPGs are well represented in Mariomon while the average official spin-off avoids any mention of them. It made me appreciate just how many different enemies there are in the mainline games alone.
This variety helps the game, as you never quite know what you’ll see next. Entering a new area feels exciting with the anticipation of seeing which Mario enemies will appear as captures, whether your reaction is shock based on knowing them or shock at not knowing what is about to be sent at you.
Each world also has its own distinct features, it’s not just a rinse and repeat of going to the next city and walking over to the star leader. My favorite was world 5, where you team up with Captain Toad for double battles and puzzle solving as you explore DK Island and can build a whole separate team for Captain Toad. In contrast world 4 is oriented around a casino and has its own currency you need to earn to progress.
Even the captures that are clearly designed to fit a familiar Pokémon role tend to have something that lets them stand apart. Yoshi is set up as the game’s equivalent to Eevee, but unlike Eevee is a three stage line, starting as Baby Yoshi and becoming Yoshi, with four different possible evolutions after that. One of the Yoshi evolutions is acquired simply by reaching level 50, and that evolution is Mariomon’s own pseudo legendary.
A feature I especially enjoyed was the optional Toadette battles in her battle school. These are a step up in difficulty from the ones in the main story, taking advantage of the more technical Pokémon mechanics. Beating them unlocks access to move tutors and special items, including ones that can change a capture’s nature or ability.
There are many convenient features veteran Pokémon players will appreciate. Key items are used in place of the HM system like modern entries, moves can be relearned at any time, and you can swap captures in and out of your party from anywhere once you get an early item. Naturally there’s also only one version with the complete roster and no evolutions that require trading.
For those into playing with nuzlocke rules, there’s even a built in nuzlocke mode you can turn on. There’s also an option to enforce a level cap based on your current progression and immediately bring all captures up to it, completely eliminating any need to level up via battle. Beating the game normally also unlocks an item that raises captures to around the level of your strongest ones. I didn’t need to do any grinding to beat the game normally, but the level cap item was useful in post game for playing around with new teams and filling out my tattledex.
At the same time there are a few tedious things that bothered me, such as the oddly high number of move tutors spread throughout the game that can be difficult to keep track of. And healing items are thrown into the same part of your bag as the various held items, making it annoying to dig them out at times.
One notable sour spot for me is The Pit. This is an optional challenge area where you travel through seven large dimly lit rooms with a team of rental captures. Many of these captures have terrible movesets focused on mechanics that only matter in a six vs six battle while being used in a format that’s one on one. It’s better to avoid fighting as much as you can between the limited resources and weak captures.
If you want the full Tattledex you have to engage with The Pit, because a legendary is locked behind doing three successful runs of it, and you used to need to do them consecutively until a patch mercifully changed that. Once I finally got said legendary I ran out and didn’t look back. Not the mode for me.
That annoyance doesn’t take away from how much I enjoyed everything else about the game. I was messaging some friends of mine non-stop as I was playing because of how exciting I found it, regularly sending pictures of new encounters. I’m even considering another playthrough with various challenges, like only using captures who debuted on the Gamecube. It’s a game I’m eager to fiddle with.
As of this writing the game still has at least one more updated slated, 2.0, which is set to add even more captures among other things. I’m as excited for it as I used to be for official Pokémon games.