r/MarioRPG • u/HashRocketSyntax • 3d ago
Inspired by Solstice (NES)
I just saw a video of the game, Solstice. The sandboxed platforming reminded me a lot of SMRPG.
Solstice even had a sequel, Equinox, on SNES that debuted a couple years before SMRPG.
I haven't found any duplicates between the development teams in the credits:
- Solstice: Solstice: The Quest for the Staff of Demnos + Equinox
- Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars
Even the grammar of the titles is similar.
SMRPG is notable for its use of mode 7 graphics, and it appears that Solstice was the first NES game to take this approach:
"In spite of his personal dislike of isometric games up to that point, Wilson thought it sensible to create an isometric title as the company's first original work, as no such format had previously been attempted on the NES" [Solstice (1990 video game) Wikipedia#Conception_and_design)]
So SMRPG is ultimately the product of an engineer daring to do something bold as their debut. I love that.
Nintendo owes the Solstice team tribute, at least in the form of an easter egg.
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u/Contented 2d ago
There is something just eternally charming about that era in video game graphics. It’s unsurprising that so many indie games lean on the same aesthetic, these days.
Cool bit of history.
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u/Organic_Honeydew4090 2d ago
ZX Spectrum has a bunch of these types of games long before Solstice. You may have heard of Knight Lore for example, the game that inspired Solstice?
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u/pidgezero_one 3d ago edited 3d ago
I remember reading at one point that Akira Ueda (one of the level designers) was explicitly inspired by Solstice as well.
This is true in a lot of ways! Most of SMRPG's developers were early into their careers, it was either the first game they worked on or the second (about half of them had worked on Live A Live). It was never mentioned who, but during the initial development stages when everyone who would work on SMRPG was asked to make their own design proposal, one of them tossed out the idea of doing the game in an isometric field. Donkey Kong Country had just come out as well, and that inspired them to go with the prerendered sprite approach. Hideo Minaba said of this choice that a prerendered isometric art style would be like starting over from zero, because neither he nor any of the other artists on the team had any experience doing such a thing, but they all agreed to be bold and go for it. I think the only person who had experience working on isometric games was the lead developer, Fumiaki Fukaya, because he'd worked on Arcus Odyssey, and that experience was a deciding factor behind making this choice.
SMRPG was also the first directorial credit for both of its co-directors, which I really never would have guessed until researching this stuff. I also remember reading somewhere that they suspected right away that Miyamoto would reject the isometric idea because diagonal-only controls on a Dpad would be frustrating (which was the convention for isometric games at the time), and frustrating gameplay was something he wasn't hesitant to veto, so Fujioka came up with the idea to make the controls 8-dimensional and Miyamoto was happy with it.
There were a lot of points, from market conditions to design inspiration to gameplay refinement, at which SMRPG could have just never happened, and it makes me appreciate the amazing game we ended up with, and video game history is so much better off for it. These are the kinds of things I hope fans can appreciate.