By Dustin Cabeal

When deciding if you should read Super Mario Adventures you have to ask yourself, how much do you like Mario Bros? If the answer is a lot or even a shit ton, then you will have no need for this review and can safely buy this collected trade from Viz and call it a day.

If your interest waivers, then let’s continue.

Super Mario Adventures is just a fun story set in the world of Mario. It assumes you have some knowledge of the world, but it doesn’t necessarily take place in-between any particular game but does seem to assume that the first three games have happened. Mario and Luigi are called to the Princesses castle to fix the plumbing. It’s a goddamn mess, to say the least. They just start connecting similar colored pipes until some green ones show up and then it’s go time. Koopa wants the Princess to marry him, or he’ll turn everyone to stone, his logic is that his shitty kids need a mother figure and who better than a woman that has no children and no interest in raising them. Mario gets turned to stone, but they massage him back to normal. It only takes a week. They find Yoshi along the way, and they try to eat him until he pops out of the egg, apparently, having been imprisoned by Koopa at some point. Yoshi village is full of Yoshis, and that’s the only word they say… Yoshi. There’s a white businessman that’s everywhere they need him to be and his always selling convenient crap, but the story wouldn’t move forward without his help.

That’s the first half of the book. There are more stories and Wario eventually makes an appearance and reveals that Mario is just a bully. Mario talks like he does in the game and it’s bad. I’m sure that fans won’t mind, but reading it, it makes you realize just how offensive it can be. After the third “Weege” I started rolling my eyes heavily. Nothing about the story is bad. The entire time though it feels as if the creator was trying to find that fine line of kid and adult humor. It never found it for me.

The art would have been the best place for this to happen, but there’s only one instance that I can recall that it did. The art style is that of the game, but the coloring looks like colored pencils which did the art no favors. If the goal was to make this look incredibly old, then they achieved their goal. At any rate, there’s one scene in which Mario screams and his face looks realistic and overly detailed. I loved it. I kept waiting for more, but I don’t recall it every happening again. Luigi switching clothes with the princess was okay, but they missed any jokes that could have been done about Luigi changing a woman’s clothes while she was unconscious. I was hoping he would be called Hentai from that point forward and that the creating of Luigi Hentai would be a thing, but it wasn’t. The pencil work is good and looks like the game, the coloring is shit and makes it look like a kid coloring book. Granted, that would mean the kid was fantastic, but it’s still would be a coloring book.

I’m not particularly fond of Mario and his adventures. I’m not a Nintendo die-hard and after numerous Loot Crates of Nintendo merch I’ve come to realize that while everyone knows they’re brand, their designs are dated and suck. It’s just that my entire generation grew up with them and unlike all other mediums, they were never advanced. They were left in the past and so people that hate change, such as updated Ghostbuster, different Captain Americas, love Mario Bros because they’ve never done anything with him. And why would they at this point? It makes a lot of money and will continue to make money so continue to enjoy your Mario Bros. I will continue not to give a crap about them.

Score: 3/5

Super Mario Adventures
Writer: Kentaro Takekuma
Artist: Charlie Nozawa
Translator: Leslie Sawn
Publisher: Viz Media