In 2020, Mario’s Super Picross for the Super Famicom finally got a worldwide release. Presumably it is somehow tied to Mario’s Picross on the Game Boy, which came out during the same year in Japan. It is only available as part of the Nintendo Switch Online subscription. As the title suggests, it is a Picross game that is Mario themed.
More Picross
The only thing you do in this game is pick Picross stages and then do Picross. If you don’t know what Picross is, basically you have a grid of empty squares and you have to fill them in to make a picture. On the top and left side of the grid it says what how many squares should be filled in for that column or row. Each number that is listed is how many connected squares should be filled. When there are multiple numbers, those amounts of connected squares should be filled in separately. For example, if it says 4 and 2, you would fill in 4 connected squares and then in that same row or column there should also be 2 connected squares that are not connected to those 4 squares. If it says 4 and 2 in that order, you would fill in 4 squares first (closer to the left or top), and then the two squares further right or down from those 4 squares.
This game has a few tools that make this task easier. One of these tools is the ability to cross out squares that you know won’t be filled in. Another one is selected from the pause menu. It lets you try a hypothetical scenario where you fill in squares and cross them out in a new color. If the logic works out, you can tell it to lock in your selections. If it doesn’t, you can undo all of them at the same time.
Since Picross is a pretty fun game concept, it is not surprising that this game turned out to be fun as well. As far as difficulty balancing goes, they did a decent job. It is on the easier side for these style of games, but it was also one of the earlier Picross games so it isn’t totally fair to say it’s too easy for someone who has played more Picross than existed at the point it released. Still, they probably should have concentrated the harder puzzles closer to the end. You will occasionally be required to think more than one step ahead, and this doesn’t even happen at the end so it is a bit off-putting seeing it at a random point in the game.
It isn’t translated
One annoying thing about this release is that it appears to be not translated at all. This doesn’t matter for most things, but it can be annoying. For example, when you are using the menu tool to try hypotheticals it asks you if you want to keep your squares or not in Japanese. This is also the case for when the game asks if you want a random free column and row at the start of some puzzles. Eventually you will learn which side is supposed to be yes and which one is no, but it would have been greatly appreciated if they could at least translate yes and no. Some of the puzzles were changed in this release, so it couldn’t have been that much more work to change those two sprites.
There are also some messages from Mario and Wario when you beat the groups of stages that aren’t translated, but they probably aren’t that interesting in the first place. Still, it would have been nice to see them translated too since it isn’t that much text anyway. It may have been impossible based on how many English characters it would have required, though.
Sound and Graphics
This game isn’t that amazing in either of these areas. The soundtrack is probably the better of the two. It doesn’t ever get annoying and some of the songs are actually pretty catchy. Still, you will see way better music on the SNES and elsewhere. This game doesn’t lose any points for its sound, at least.
Graphically this game often doesn’t look like it was originally intended to be a Mario game. As you can see from the image at the top of the article, the Picross screen is just grey. The screens where Mario and Wario talk to you look kinda cool for a SNES game, at least. Overall they clearly weren’t trying to impress with this game and as a result you probably won’t be impressed.
Should you play it?
Since this is just one of a very long list of games included with the Nintendo Switch Online service you can’t really complain about the price or lack of translation too much. If you like Picross there is no reason to not check out this version. If you don’t like Picross this definitely won’t change your mind. If you like Mario you should play this game because Picross is good, but you will probably be disappointed by how little this game has to do with Mario. The game is a pretty good and accessible way for people to get into Picross, which they should do.
Overall the game is an 8.5 out of 10.
