Month of Mario: Super Mario Strikers (GameCube)

With most Mario sports titles, you can expect the sport featured to be accessible, colorful, and supplemented with a few gimmicks to make it a bit more interesting than just a reproduction of the normal rules. The idea of a Mario soccer game doesn’t seem that unusual or unique, just another romp with Mario and his Mushroom Kingdom pals, but the title chosen for the game certainly seems a little unusual. Super Mario Strikers doesn’t even mention soccer, and even in Europe where it goes by Mario Smash Football, that “smash” part of the title feels a little out of place. However, once the characters hit the field in Super Mario Strikers, you start to see this is the sport where these usually jovial heroes are really letting their aggression out. Performing full body checks to ram each other into the electric fence lining soccer stadiums that feature things like rusty metal flooring instead of turf, this isn’t just soccer with a twist, this is soccer with a full-on mean streak.

Super Mario Strikers is portrayed with a lot more grit than your usual Super Mario game, the character art drawn in a scratchy style and even when you see the characters’ 3D models, everyone’s playing up how furious this game of football has them. Yoshi the friendly dinosaur is shaking his fist, the kindly Princess Peach is scoffing at her opponents, and characters like the tomboyish Princess Daisy and the usually rather rancid Wario crank things up even further. Wario will smack his rear as a taunt making it shake like a bowl of jelly while Daisy touches her butt and has to pull her hand back because it’s so hot it’s steaming, while Waluigi celebrates a successful point with a borderline inappropriate gesture. These family-friendly characters never cross a line beyond that raunchy Waluigi moment, but this heightened aggression from the cast is quite appropriate once you actually hit the pitch. This is no slow-going game of soccer, the energy much higher because there are no penalties to worry about and everyone is ready to exploit that. While you can press B to try and slide in and steal the ball from whoever’s handling it, you can also press Y instead to do a powerful ram. The sliding steal will give you possession while a tackle will send the ball rolling off after impact, but not only can you usually chase after the ball and grab it, but a slamming shoulder charge is definitely going to leave the other player reeling for longer.

In a match of Super Mario Strikers, you can expect constant collisions as the players on defense are repeatedly going to try and strike you, and the ball holder does at least have some options like a twirling dodge or the ability to speed up their run to throw off the incoming striker. Usually a failed ram will mean the responsible player won’t be catching up after their miss too, so while it’s effective and certainly satisfying when landed, the game doesn’t devolve down to constant tackling. However, it is common enough to keep that aggressive energy intact, the player with the ball having to treat the defense seriously because they’re tough enough to take the ball with ease. This helps with the shooting featured in the game as well. When you try to kick past the Kritter gator goalie, you actually have pretty strong control over your ball’s trajectory. Aiming for a specific region of the goal is surprisingly natural despite the perspective of the pitch closer to what a spectator would see rather than the players, tilting the control stick giving you the ability to add a good curve. Goalies aren’t sloppy but they’re not perfect either, but if you want more control of your shot, you’ll need to charge your kick, leaving you open to a tackle. For a mix of strength and accuracy though, you can try and set up perfect passes, passing a teammate near enough to the goal making a green trail appear behind the ball with time slowing down as you prepare to launch a shot after. Of course, being near enough to the goal with two players likely means the other team has their players nearby and the goalie has a good shot of being close to one half of the perfect pass, but it does give a more reliable set-up for scoring so both offense and defense feel like they have a hope of getting what they want when its time for shots on goal.

Super Mario Strikers takes the format of five-on-five matches, the field being smaller to match the team sizes and the timer by default set to only 5 minutes to match the speediness of this highly aggressive format. You can set the time to be as low as 2 minutes or as long as 15 with many steps between though, and Super Mario Strikers is actually pretty good about letting you set the desired parameters of a match even in its single-player tournaments. While its high octane approach to the sport already sets it apart from standard soccer, the Mario touch does bring over more familiar alterations to the sports he features in. Of the five members on your team, you’ll have four “sidekicks” who are similar creatures like the Koopa Troopa turtles or the big-mouthed Birdo dinosaurs, but the team captain is a character with more personality and a Super Strike to match. Super Strikes are invoked when the team captain charges their shot on goal long enough, a little meter appearing where you need to try and hit two small green indicators to help the shot do its job. Mostly, Super Strikes are pretty similar looking across the cast beyond some posing and sound cues, but their main role is they are worth two points when they get in the net and if you hit those green spots on the meter perfectly, it’s guaranteed to go in. Not only is that precision not likely to come in the middle of an intense match, but it’s rather likely you’ll get tackled if you set up the Super Strike sloppily. Messing it up means the ball might be blocked or even launched back to hurt your captain instead, and the other team can even make the meter shake to try and throw you off.

With it just being a two-point shot that needs proper room to execute, Super Strikes are a fine addition to play, but you can turn them off if you like. You can also choose whether you want items in play, both sides of the game able to get usable power-ups and weapons from time to time, usually if someone on their team was tackled despite not possessing the ball. The items are a fairly good bunch, impactful, not overbearing, and not overly common unless you choose to make them so with needless aggression. Bananas work like barriers to control where people move unless they wish to slip, shells come in various colors and can be launched forward to knock down or even freeze a foe, and the real heavy hitters are given only to the losing team as a way of potentially nudging them towards success. The Star that makes a player briefly invincible doesn’t last too long in their hands and the Chain Chomp that crashes down and tries to bite enemy players are both strong but not impossible to play around, but there’s also an interesting hazard that can effect both teams. Mario’s nemesis Bowser doesn’t make the roster as a playable character, instead appearing as a hazard that will leap onto the field at times and attack whoever is near by. He doesn’t hang around too long and his equal-opportunity anarchy probably won’t effect things much more than someone throwing an item like the Mega Bob-omb that blasts out a chunk of the field. Bowser’s area denial is interesting but like many other over-the-top things in Super Mario Strikers, it’s reined in just enough so that the intensity is present but doesn’t distract from the fact you’re still trying to kick a ball into a net.

The intense and thrilling action is all there for a rollicking good game of soccer, but beyond just playing it against friends or computer-controlled opponents, the game mostly just focuses in on some traditional tournaments. You can play these cooperatively with other players on your team, teammate switching easy and responsive even on a shared team, and again these tournaments will allow you to change rules like the timer and presence of some of the game’s gimmicks. Tournaments are about earning points by playing the different teams, earning 2 points for a win and 1 if you manage to get the other team to overtime but end up losing, meaning that wins are necessary but a loss doesn’t necessarily mean you will end the tournament empty-handed. The tournaments do get tougher across the four standard cups and there are four unlockable cups once you finish those, but while later cups do have unlockable stadiums and the like to earn, the arenas are just different in appearance rather than function. Playing through the cups is pretty much the only solo content, although there are unlockable “cheats” to earn for performing certain actions often during the tournaments like tackling players, making super shots, or winning games. The cheats tied to milestones contain some more simple customization options like setting the items to only be a certain type, but others like the ones that weaken the goalies or make all Super Strikes immediately perfect are definitely there for embracing chaos. The one unlockable team is probably the more interesting reward, but even though Super Mario Strikers doesn’t have a lot of different formats for experiencing its gameplay, the hard-hitting action makes it thrilling to play even when you’re just playing the game for fun.

THE VERDICT: Super Mario Strikers is brimming with a wonderful ferocity, the Mario cast willing to smash each other as hard as they can to win these soccer matches. Not only just an interesting take on the usually squeaky clean heroes of the series, it leads to quick matches full of turnarounds, the defense able to enjoy their heavy tackling while the player shooting on goal has a strong sense of ball control to help make each attempt feel like it has a reasonable chance to score. Items, Super Strikes, and Bowser interruptions can add to the bedlam or be toggled off in some very flexible game options, but it is a shame the game only offers a few tournaments and straightforward multiplayer matches as its ways of experiencing this high octane take on soccer.

And so, I give Super Mario Strikers for Nintendo GameCube…

A GREAT rating. A thrilling twist on the sport of soccer, Super Mario Strikers didn’t just settle for throwing some items and super moves into European football. It filled the moment-to-moment play with constant action, the tackling system perfect for leading to constant excitement as players are slammed all about the field. It can be a bit shocking to hear Princess Peach wail in pain when she hits that electric barrier on the sidelines, but she gets back up immediately after covered in a little ash but ready to play the game like nothing happened. The game is able to have its characters surprisingly hostile and yet never crossing the line that would make the extra grit feel like too much for these beloved heroes. All the characters are pumped to be playing and most every other element seems to match that brimming energy, items often huge and damaging the pitch and the whole idea about Bowser storming the field is really just about a somewhat random injection of additional chaos. The Super Strikes do feel like they could be better catered to the individual characters. The gorilla Donkey Kong punches the ball and Wario hits it with his belly, but more interesting effects like altering the field or having diverse trajectories would help, and the animation is a bit simple despite bringing things to a brief halt to show the character about to execute their special shot. More chances to play Super Mario Strikers is really the bigger concern though, the action quick and electrifying but it does feel like a bit of a shame that you essentially have eight cups to conquer and will probably fulfill the unlocking quotas for the extra cheats along the way so even that doesn’t inject the most longevity. However, it is definitely the kind of action-packed experience great for jumping in repeatedly for multiplayer fun, the excitement the game offers making up for not laying down enough goals to shoot for beyond the literal ones during a match.

Super Mario Strikers is snappy, the action is constantly moving forward or getting disrupted in exciting ways, and you even have a very clean degree of control over your shot when you aim for the net. The game doesn’t become too easy because of it and it’s also not too difficult despite how strong the defense is allowed to be, Super Mario Strikers succeeding because it gives both sides great power. Offense and defense both bring the heat, Super Mario Strikers executing its unique vision for how to shake up soccer superbly.