Christmas Eve on Shooting Star Summit

This is not a Mario blog, although you could be forgiven for thinking that. Personally, I blame Nintendo. The one-two punch of Super Mario Bros. Wonder and then the Super Mario RPG remake was just too much in a short amount of time, and as a result, the mustachioed one has occupied more of my brain than he usually does. This is not an apology, I should point out. There is a lot to the Mario games (and a lot of them, too), and I’m always keen to draw attention to some aspect that maybe other people haven’t considered.

And this is that, but it’s also about Christmas.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the localization of the original Super Mario RPG and how it stacks up to the one done for the remake. In some ways, the newer version attempts to rein in Ted Woolsey’s creative license and put this game’s elements into the context of the larger Mario universe — or in most cases, anyway. In fact, I’ll be posting something in the near future about how the remake doesn’t always accomplish this. (And then there’s also the weird business with Mallow and how the English name for his homeland denies us a pretty good mushroom pun.)

Officially, Super Mario RPG never had a sequel, with Paper Mario coming along a few years later as a spiritual successor. I did a post about how one enemy character from Super Mario RPG seems to have resurfaced in Paper Mario despite this, and I think I’ve actually found another thing that exists in both and might actually be a throughline for all of Mario’s RPG subfranchises. It just wasn’t ever translated in a way that made it obvious.

In Super Mario RPG, one of the locations you venture through is Star Hill. It’s an oddly… underrealized area, honestly, where it’s technically a dungeon but there is no boss and no real puzzle-solving that must be done. You just go in, take the item you need, and then leave. The area looks like a giant meteor, and it’s covered in small stars that, if examined, turn out to be the various wishes that characters in the game have made. It’s a nifty vibe that you kind of hop through in a few minutes, never to return. It’s probably not the most memorable part of Super Mario RPG for most people.

In Paper Mario, one of the first areas you encounter is Shooting Star Summit, which is a mountain dotted with various stars that have crashed into it. You can’t examine these stars like you can in Super Mario RPG, however, and it basically only serves as the setting for Mario to get this game’s quest explained to him. Aesthetically, these two locations are pretty far apart, but looking at their names in the original Japanese versions, it seems like the intention was to consider these two spots linked, if not one and the same.

In the original, Japanese version of both Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario, the name for both locations is Hoshi no Furu Oka or “Falling Star Hill.” (The characters used to vary, however, with Super Mario RPG using 星のふる丘 and Paper Mario using 星のふるおか.) The Super Mario Wiki even lumps in a third location from Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time that is also called Star Hill. It has a different name in Japanese — Sutā no Oka (スターの丘) or literally “Star Hill” — but if this was supposed to be a version of the place seen in Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario, than it’s one of the few unifying influence to appear in each of the Mario RPG series. And I really want that to be the case, because it’s nice to see some continuity even when each family of games is trying to do its own unique thing.

That is the meat of the post: that a link between Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi might have been obscured by a localization choice, but there is actually another reason why I’m posting about this now. I tend to think of Shooting Star Summit — the version from Paper Mario — as being something that makes me think about Christmas.

It’s hard to explain to someone who’s not played the game, but Shooting Star Summit is beautiful in a way Mario games usually weren’t back then. There was a period where the Mario aesthetic meant slapping smiling faces on everything, and it might have been iconic in its day, but it also made Mario games look like they were for little kids. Paper Mario works a little differently, because the pop-up book aesthetic overrides whatever was passing for Mario back then, but even then, Shooting Star Summit seems like an exception to that too. It’s a whole vibe: quiet and calm, with pulsing colors and a a synthy, ethereal soundtrack by composer Yuka Tsujiyoko. This was one of the few locations in a video game where I lingered just because it felt like a nice place to exist in, even if it didn’t really exist.

I grew up in the country in California, so my Christmases have just never been white and most of the decorations we associate for the holiday don’t make sense for my experience of it. We didn’t have sleigh rides and snowballs, but a big part of every Christmas has always been sitting outside, looking up at the stars — specifically because I was looking for Santa when I was a little kid, but the tradition remained even after I stopped caring about Santa. Looking up at the stars is a nice way to experience the existential weirdness of realizing how small you are, but in a good way. It’s maybe not most people’s Christmas, but it’s been mine more years than not.

So I’m posting this because I did something that’s outside the parameters of why I made this site. I took footage of Mario (and Goombario) on Shooting Star Summit, and then I futzed with the color and slowed the music down to accentuate the vibes, so maybe you can experience what I get out of this part of this one video game. I’m not sure if you’ll be able to understand how I get Christmas from this, but maybe it will give you something serene and spacey to look at for a few minutes, regardless of what kind of sky you’re under.

This, I guess, is my Christmas present to you this year.

And in case you want to enjoy the slowed-down, spaced-out version of the Shooting Star Summit theme, you can play or listen to it separately below.

And a special thanks to Joe Almanza for recording the Paper Mario clip that I used for this.