Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is far and away my most-played single-player game of all time, despite the fact that I never actually played it all the way through until recently. For me, Mario RPG is kind of like a movie you’ve only ever seen on cable. You never sit down to watch it all the way through, but you catch bits and pieces of it enough times that eventually it feels like you’ve seen the whole movie. My unconventional experience playing Mario RPG came as a result of repeatedly renting the game over the course of a year and working through it with the help of another kid I don’t know, and never met. For me, Super Mario RPG will always be a co-op game, and a perfect representation of the idiosyncrasies of gaming in the ‘90s.
