I quite literally just started the SNES original, for the first time, 3 days ago… Guess I’ll stop and wait for the Switch release. The 2D graphics are surprisingly charming, but I bet the new version will have some QoL improvements.
I’m going to be honest, I find things that can permanently mess up your save (in the sense that you’ll get a lesser experience or not reach the ending) is extremely bad game design. It’s something I’d expect out of a 2 hour arcade game, not a modern release.
There are a lot of horror games in the PS1 that are “if you didn’t do this extremely specific thing, in the right order, with the right coloured t-shirt, on a Tuesday, without any hints whatsoever… Too bad! When you reach the end of the game in another 60 hours of gameplay we will tell you you’ve failed”
Baldur’s Gate might be a great game, but sometimes it’s “dice rolls makes things spicy and each run its own thing!” mechanic gets unbalanced and by a little bad luck you can have a significantly degraded experience, sometimes without even knowing it.
This is bad game design, even if ultimately the game can be good in the end.
Martinet himself explains how he made up the “cowardly” trait because at first, when people asked about Luigi, his way of dealing with it was replying that “my brother is too shy! Too scared! He can’t show up”.
He basically invented Luigi’s personality on the fly.
Luigi was just green Mario, right until they put Martinet with a live 3D face animation rig at an event and “talk to Luigi!” was one of the options.
He then came up with Luigi as the slightly cowardly, not as confident, but good spirited and kind, companion to Mario. The voice tone, the mannerisms, he just made it all up and Nintendo loved it.
Without that, no Luigi’s Mansion and the green Mario dude would still have no personality.