Super Mario Bros. 2

Super Mario 2 is a rebranding of the Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic game. That’s why there’s no Bowser, no princess to save and not much in common with the original Mario game except the basic platforming elements (i.e. jumping and stomping on enemies). The four characters were originally siblings trying to save kidnapped kids in a fantasy world.

Impact

The game was nonetheless important for the series, introducing a number of concepts and characters that are still key to the franchise. The shape of the characters were more clearly defined, making Luigi slim and tall and making Mario a bit rounder and smaller. The character’s movements were also set by this game. Luigi is harder to control, but he can run faster and jump higher, while Mario has tighter controls but can’t jump as high. Peach also gained her floating ability. The gender-confused Birdo, the Shy Guys and Bob-ombs are the better known characters that first appeared in this game (source). The Mario series could’ve been very different without the modifications made to Doki Doki.

Pokemon Snap

A lesser known rebranding by Nintendo is Pokemon Snap which wasn’t supposed to have any Pokemon in it. There wasn’t anything in particular to photograph which prompt the developers of the game to reconsider the goal of the game. They wondered what people would be interested in taking pictures of and using the Pokemon franchise sounded like a good idea.

Impact

Nothing new came out of this title, at best it strengthened the popularity of the franchise with a solid spin-off of the Pokemon games.

Kirby’s Epic Yarn

Originally called Fluff’s Yarn, Kirby appeared in the game a few months after the development had started. The main protagonist was Fluff which was changed into the secondary character providing the opportunity for a 2 players Kirby game. The designers of the original didn’t seem to be mad when Nintendo asked them to use Kirby.

Impact

It’s difficult to judge what would have been different without Kirby. The game would still have been gorgeous and the game would most likely have received similar reviews. Putting Kirby on the cover probably helped with the sales and Nintendo backing up the title can’t hurt. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Prince Fluff in a future Kirby game. However, Nintendo might have lost the opportunity for a new franchise, though they can probably do a spin-off with Fluff alone with the right concept.

Nintendo has been really successful with its rebranding, bringing obscure games with great gameplay in the spotlight. The changes were good decisions financially as well as for the fans.

Final Fantasy Adventure

Not wanting to be outdone by Zelda, Square decided to create the Final Fantasy Adventure game which really is the first game of the Mana series. There are no Final Fantasy concepts in the game except the basic RPG elements (experience, stats, hit points, magic spells). The game plays like Zelda, but has its own story and tweaks that make it unique.

Impact

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The game didn’t do much for the Final Fantasy series, but its sequel, Secret of Mana, is still regarded as one of the best cooperative games ever made. Final Fantasy Adventure is also the first RPG game that allowed the player to kill townspeople.

The Final Fantasy Legend

Just like Final Fantasy Adventure, The Final Fantasy Legend is not actually a Final Fantasy game and is the first game of its own series, the SaGa series. The title of the game was changed in North America to improve marketing. To its defense, the game shares more features with the Final Fantasy games than Adventure did. The player takes control of a party of 4 characters with classes chosen at the beginning of the game and features turn-based random battles.

Impact

Beside the series that spawned from the game, the game has had an immense impact on the gaming world. Satoshi Tajiri, creator of the Pokemon series, mentioned in an interview that the Legend game gave him the inspiration for the Pokemon games.

I would argue that Square has been far less successful with its rebrandings, in North America at least. Neither the Mana and SaGa series are very popular outside of Japan, except for a few titles such as Secret of Mana. In my opinion, the modifications made to the games were more about selling more copies than about helping obscure games that deserved the spotlight. However, both games have had a tremendous impact on the gaming industry.

The reason behind this has to do with the way the data is stored in memory. Computers only understand binary numbers so every number or word of anything used to communicate with a computer is encoded in binary, each binary value is represented by a bit. The bit can either be 1 or 0.

Here’s how bits represent values:

0000 = 0
0001 = 1
0010 = 2
0100 = 4
1000 = 8
1011 = 11
...

Since only one bit doesn’t give much information, bits were grouped together to make a wider array of values available. This group was named a byte. Typically, one byte is a group of 8 bits. Every information transmitted to and from the computer or console is transmitted using this byte format. Nowadays, computers send multiple bytes at the same time to improve the efficiency of communications, a 64 bit computer transmits information using 8 bytes (8 * 8 bits = 64 bits) at the time.

Now let’s take a look at the range of values one byte gives us:

1000 0000 = 128
1111 1111 = 255

As you can see, 255 represents the biggest value that can be represented by a single byte and that’s why Final Fantasy (and other games) have used this value as the limit for stats. Nowadays, most information is stored using at least 32 bits at the time so we could technically use values up to slightly less than 4.3 billion, but that wouldn’t be so practical.