Mario Super Sluggers Review
Similarly, I've got a deep and abiding appreciation for the Mario franchise, but that doesn't mean that every Mario game gets an automatic pass. Namco Bandai's Mario Super Sluggers is, for all intents and purposes, a direct-to-video Mario game. It's got all the characters you expect from a Mario game, but without Nintendo actually handling the development duties, the whole thing has a real off-brand feel. Mario Super Sluggers is also a baseball game of sorts, albeit one that is simultaneously too casual about the sport itself and not imaginative enough about how it exploits the Mario motif.
The game abides by the basic rules of the sport, focusing most of its energy on batting and pitching, though even then there's not a lot of nuance. When you're at bat, it's simply a matter of timing your swing--there's no consideration for the shape or speed of your swing when using the motion controls, and every character comes with a predetermined batting power. There's a bit more to the pitching, which accommodates fastball, change-up, and curveball throws, though it also seems to require less skill. You'll have varying levels of control over your fielders and your base runners depending on your control scheme, but I found them to be either too automatic or not responsive enough.
You can build your own teams out of the usual rabbit-hole menagerie of characters you expect to see in a Mario game, and in addition to each character having discrete performance stats, you'll find that certain characters work better together. The allegiances tend to break down the way you'd expect, but it still manages to make the team-building an interesting exercise.
Beyond the standard exhibition game and the surprisingly brief story-based challenge mode, Mario Super Sluggers offers some minigames to test and hone the skills you'll need to employ in a standard game. They can be OK on the lower difficulty levels, but at a point the minigames just seem like a showcase for the gameplay's shortcomings. Then there's the Toy Field mode, which crosses baseball with pinball. This is easily my favorite part of the game, simply because it abstracts the sport to such a degree that the simplicity of the gameplay doesn't seem like a liability. In this mode, four players take turns at bat, while the other three players are out in the field, which is divided into a grid of panels, each with its own point value. The fielders then trigger a slot machine that determines the pitch, as well as whether any error items get tossed out. Points are awarded to the batter for contact with different field panels, and fielders can get points for catching the ball, or simply stealing the ball from another fielder. After a set number of turns, scores are tallied and a winner declared. I only wish there was more action like this in Mario Super Sluggers.
As a Mario game, Mario Super Sluggers feels kind of cheap; as a baseball game, it fails to capture the finer points that make the sport interesting in the first place. Its accessibility is probably Mario Super Sluggers' most well-realized characteristic, but what you're getting access to simply isn't much fun.