(Originally published to Glitchwave on 6/10/2025)
[Image from glitchwave.com]
Mario Superstar Baseball
Developer: Namco, Now Production
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre(s): Sports
Platforms: GCN
Release Date: July 21, 2005
One does not really need an explanation for why Mario and the other Mushroom Kingdom citizens have banded together to load the bases. Eventually, Mario and company will have branded themselves onto anything that could possibly be classified as a sport, and it was simply baseball’s turn to be Marioified after golf and tennis proved to work on the N64. I look forward to “Mario Quidditch” and “Mario Foxy Boxing” in the near future. Anyways, like the successful Mario sports titles that have already been established, a portion of their success can be attributed to recognizability and character distinctiveness in the gameplay. Sure, baseball fans are probably familiar with the graphically rendered MLB players in a 2K game, but Mario characters also come with pronounced gameplay characteristics in addition to their familiarity. One vital aspect that separates Mario and friends from the real world’s super sluggers is that their fantastical platforming skills are translated into the game of baseball. Mario and each of the major characters are blessed with skills that reflect their respective special abilities in a standard platformer. For example, when either Mario or Luigi is up to bat or is on the pitching mound, using a unit of power (provided the player hits the ball) will ignite the ball in red or green as it blazes past the opposing team. Yoshi can throw an egg with bouncy, ricocheting properties, Bowser will transform the ball into a bullet bill, and Donkey Kong will fling a banana with the trajectory of a boomerang. Mario’s earliest rival also substitutes a proper baseball bat for a boxing glove. The big ape must be onto something brilliant, for he can belt homers with this cushioned mitt like nobody’s business. Common Mario enemies that join the ranks of the outfield and basemen do not possess any extraordinary abilities on account of being faceless creatures, but even their integration into the game of baseball exudes personality. For example, the piantas from Super Mario Sunshine take a note from Donkey Kong and bend the rules of what constitutes a baseball bat by bringing a goddamn tree up to home plate. When is Bryce Harper ever going to present something that ballsy and brazen in a regular MLB game? Never. While the general rules and regulations of baseball still exist in Mario Superstar Baseball, it’s the kooky, fictitious elements that pop and sparkle for someone as uninterested in the sport such as I.
Sprucing up baseball with Mario’s whimsy isn’t limited to the character’s attributes. Six of the major Mario characters are the proprietors of their own baseball fields, and each of them comes with their own quirky, character-centric elements. Well, except for Mario’s vanilla baseball field set on sunny Isle Delfino, but isn’t balance and order fitting for our main character’s renowned accessibility? Peach has fashioned a baseball field in her castle’s courtyard, which features blocks suspended slightly overhead that can block incoming baseballs. Apparently, Yoshi is wealthy enough to own farmland on his titular island and build a baseball field on it like Kevin Costner, but is too lazy or cheap to eradicate the piranha plants with some weed killer substance, as they’ll be interfering with the field by swallowing the ball and spitting it out in inconvenient places for the outfielders. Players have to contend with the roaming of giant barrels and the nibbling of Klap-Traps at their ankles in DK’s jungle, while abrupt sand cyclones will carry the ball wherever it damn well pleases in Wario’s desert palace. Lastly, Bowser’s stage is his fiery final domain seen across all iterations of Super Mario’s history, reconstructed as a baseball field. I can’t say for utter certainty, but I’m pretty certain that the thwomps blocking the outside sector where home runs are hit are sentient and biased towards the home team. I call shenanigans! Anyways, must I elaborate further on how Mario Superstar Baseball’s six fields add to the element of wacky fantasy, unfeasible for how the real sport is played?
The player is sure to visit at least five of these fields during “challenge mode,” which is essentially Mario Superstar Baseball’s story campaign. Bowser sends Mario and all of the other team captains (Peach, Yoshi, DK, and Wario) a foreboding snail mail invitation to challenge his team at his lair. Before the player’s captain of choice can step up to Bowser’s intimidating proposition, they’ll have to work their way up the ranks by defeating all of the other captains. Instead of being conducted via an arcade fashion of progression, the game’s “challenge mode” allows the player to choose the sequence of their opponents non-linearly on a fully traversable overworld map. I thought that running around freely in this open space was awfully cool when I was a kid, and now I can appreciate its condensed, fillerless accessibility as an adult. With little space between them, the player’s choice character can quickly ring the doorbells of the other captains to test their mettle. Still, progression in this mode extends beyond simply racking up more points than them. Ideally, the player should be ousting the other teams completely, which results in them waving a white flag and being absorbed into the player’s roster. Doing this requires completing peripheral tasks that pop up randomly during games with a plethora of potential conditions, such as getting a hit, striking out an opponent on defense, or executing a gutsy “sacrifice bunt” for the benefit of your teammates. Once the player meets at least two to five of these white flag conditions, depending on the character, the captain will concede to a conditional surrender and join the marching coalition towards Bowser’s baseball stadium. Meanwhile, the team members that the player didn’t meet the white flag requirements for can still be picked up from Bowser JR. 's team, which will involve a shooter match with truncated conditions to take them from the little twerp. I’m astounded at how meaty this optional progression condition is to the game’s campaign mode. One victory needed to just unlock Bowser’s domain suddenly stacks up to potentially tons of matches between the other teams. The player isn’t forced to prolong the campaign through conquering each team completely, but the blind spots of each starting roster will likely prompt the player to take the extra initiative. If they decide to go the distance, seeing a white flag raised over another team’s domain will prove to be incredibly gratifying. Sometimes, the journey is more rewarding than the destination.
Completely decimating another team and taking their assets is also far more daunting than achieving a single victory. If the player feels that they need a boost to totally wallop a rival team out of existence, such a stimulus can be purchased at the Toad houses (nice utilization of a Super Mario Bros. 3 asset), ranging from stronger bats, quicker cleats, to using a captain’s special ability. However, one obviously has to gain a certain amount of coin currency to purchase one of these items, which can be earned by completing the minigames located at different corners of the map. These auxiliary excursions factor as alternative ways to use one’s baseball skills, and one could practice for the main event with them. Well, at least “Bob-omb Derby” and “Wall Ball” can arguably improve the player’s batting and pitching. Other minigames like “Chain Chomp Sprint” and “Piranha Panic” feel like rejected implants from a Mario Party game. One’s results from “Barrel Batter” feel less indicative of the player’s skill and more like a stroke of luck due to the uncontrollable trajectory of the ball when hit. The first two minigames mentioned are engaging enough, but their implementation in the challenge mode overworld, along with the other unsatisfactory ones, is unfortunately stricken with inconvenient conditions. The player can only play any of the minigames a total of three times per campaign, also counting times where the player fails to reach their intended score. Not only that, but the player is also fined for an unsatisfactory performance, an ass backwards punitive measure considering that gaining money is the primary reason for entertaining these minigames in the first place. These conditions are rather harsh, which contradicts the accessibility factor that Mario always upholds. The one minigame that is free of these strict stipulations is the Toy Field, a thirty-round coin-based bout where victory ultimately depends on luck like an extended Mario Party feature. Because the results aren’t tied to the campaign’s conditions, the player is free to laugh with glee at whatever the outcome is, but the joy is best experienced with another person.
Sprinkling a bit of Mario magic onto the sport of baseball proved to be quite effective at making me care about something out of my comfort zone of interests. Yet, I can’t say that Mario is the inherent factor that caused this sensation. Even if Mario wasn’t the one at the helm of a baseball video game with outrageous elements that only this medium could provide, the final product here would still prove to be a solid sports game with plenty of tight gameplay mechanics and wacky ways to subvert the traditions of “America’s favorite pastime.” Because Mario’s fame in gaming eclipses everyone else's, it naturally led to the Mushroom Kingdom’s finest taking the reins of baseball like they do with every other sport imaginable. With its vast options of ways to swing a bat at an incoming ball and loads of content it offers, Mario Superstar Baseball is one of the more loaded of the plumber’s sporting side projects that will keep gamers glued for hours.
