[Rom Hack] Super Mario RPG: Talkative Mario Edition

[Dr. Mechano]

 

Hey all! I'd like to share the Super Mario RPG text hack I've been working on.

In the original game, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, Mario is a silent protagonist. I thought it would be fun to edit the text of the game to give Mario full lines of dialogue like the other party members. I went for a kind of blend of his personality in the old cartoons with Captain Lou Albano and Walker Boone, as well as incorporating a lot of inspiration from how Charles Martinet portrays him at those live trade show Q&As.

Anyway, I thought I'd share the hack for anyone who might be interested in replaying Super Mario RPG with a somewhat more chatty Mario.

Preview screenshots:

IPS Patch: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oFno2sN0tbnJgFatmUC_K0pAu8mTQv34/view?usp=sharing
 

This is not a rom of Super Mario RPG. Sharing a rom here would probably be legally dubious at best, so I won't be doing that. However, you can use this handy guide on how to apply the patch to the original game: https://fantasyanime.com/patching

 

What's changed

• Most cutscenes have some dialogue from Mario added.
• Some NPCs that can be optionally spoken to also have responses from Mario added to them.
• Certain optional events, like checking the wishes at Star Hill, also have some dialogue between Mario and party members
   

Some small problems with this hack:

• There are a typos and formatting errors (like a new character's dialogue not always being on a new line) here and there.
• In the original game, certain blocks of text are reused multiple times as a space-saving measure. This is fine in the original game, since they were always contextualized properly - but here, one reused text block that wasn't noticed until after the game was patched was that, in Moleville, Mario mentions finding missing children and getting out of the mines. This line is also used in a different context that has nothing to do with this scenario, which makes Mario's remark nonsensical in that scene.
• The very final scene in the game, after the Smithy fight, has some text boxes that simply say "Okay"

 

The above errors can't be fixed without corrupting the entire game, as far as I know. I simply can't edit the text anymore. It was getting to the point where every time I'd save the rom, chunks of the text would get corrupted. The stability of this project was basically hanging by a thread the entire time, owing to my inexperience with rom-hacking! This was totally a learning experience!

But, if the occasional oddly-formatted line doesn't take you out of the experience too much, I really hope you can find some enjoyment in this slightly different take on one of my favorite Mario titles!