Saturday Morning RPG (Switch eShop) Review

Nostalgia is a powerful force in gaming. So much of the Switch’s library offers up heavy doses of our favourite gaming memories combined with modern design to give us the best of the old and the new. Saturday Morning RPG finds its way to the Switch and brings a pocket-sized RPG proudly displaying its love for the years gone by on its sleeve, but brings some questionable design choices with it.

As the name implies, Saturday Morning RPG is a role-playing game that heavily draws inspiration from both 80’s cartoons, movies, and retro video games. You play Marty (not McFly), a high school student who wakes up from a dream in possession of a magical notebook imbued with special powers which you’ll need to fight the evil Commander Hood. You’ll encounter a litany of references to franchises such as GI Joe, Transformers, Care Bears, and Back to the Future. The story and writing, for the most part, are entertaining, but a lot of the jokes fail to go beyond the typical “this is a reference to a thing you recognize and is therefore funny” brand of humour you would find in an episode of The Big Bang Theory.

The game is split into five episodes lasting around an hour each. Each episode has you exploring a new area, moving from one combat encounter to the next, and helping some colourful characters with their errands along the way. You can glide around the environment at a snappy pace on a hoverboard ripped straight out of Back to the Future II, and there’s enough variety in the locales to make exploration enjoyable. Looking in the nooks and crannies of the map as well as completing side quests will net you the some of the best gear in the game, which makes it worth your time to venture off the beaten path.

Those upgrades will come in handy for the significant amount of time you’ll spend battling enemies. The combat will be familiar to anyone who has played a Mario RPG, with a turned based battle system that requires active inputs to increase your damage output and reduce damage taken from enemy attacks. You can find or purchase gear to equip into one of four attack slots. There’s a good selection of attacks to choose from, with varying levels of input and skill required from the player to get the most out of them.

The unique aspect of this combat system is the multiplier. You can choose to forgo a turn in order to scream like a Super Saiyan and charge up an attack multiplier, significantly boosting your damage output on your next move. Successful blocks of enemy attacks will also increase your multiplier, hits you take will decrease it, and it resets after each attack. It’s an interesting mechanic, but given the drastic increase in damage a multiplier gives you, there’s rarely any strategy involved of when to sacrifice a turn to charge, as it essentially boils down to doing it on every second turn.

The other layer of strategy in combat comes in the form of scratch stickers you can attach to your notebook. Each sticker has unique buffs such as reducing enemy health or increasing your strength. The trick is that you only have a limited window of time before each battle to scratch your five stickers, and the more powerful stickers take longer to scratch. You’ll need to experiment to find a combination that will give you the best bonuses you can achieve in the allotted time.

Whilst the above systems are unique parts of the game, they’re also the main cause of tedium. You will start each battle by violently rotating the left analogue stick to scratch stickers, followed by madly mashing a button to charge your multiplier on your first turn. This is fine in the beginning, but some poor pacing in parts of the game resulted in an onslaught of battles separated by only a few seconds of walking at a time. I quickly grew tired of the excessive controller assault, and ended up switching to significantly weaker stickers and charge moves to minimise the time spent on these actions.

It makes for a game better played in short bursts to ease the repetitive nature of combat, which lends itself to playing on the Switch undocked. Saturday Morning RPG was originally released on iOS several years ago, and both the interface and visuals are clearly more suited to a smaller screen with touch capabilities.

Navigating the notebook with the analogue stick is clunky and imprecise compared to simple touch controls, and sticker scratching can be done on the touchscreen even if this never seemed as effective as the stick twirling. The characters are presented in classic 16-bit sprites which have a distinct charm, but the 3D environments are incredibly simple with bland textures which can look downright ugly on a big TV. It’s definitely better played as a handheld title.

Those with a fondness for Saturday morning cartoons from their childhood might find enough nostalgic enjoyment here to spend a few hours on this trip down memory lane. There’s fun to be had and the witty story will see you through to the end, but some tedious and repetitive combat mechanics keep it from greatness.

Rating: 3/5