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Picture a desolate wasteland, with not a single ray of sunshine in sight. Its pleasure-seeking citizens all gather eagerly to view sights of spectacle and pure violence, a show in which its participants armor up, and battle barbaric opponents. If the game itself will not harm these combatants, then the dangerous environments or the surrounding electric fence surely will.

What is being described is not some sort of Mad Max pastiche, another remake of Rollerball, or some sort of Hunger Games ripoff — this is a Mario soccer game.

Just from the opening moments of the intro video, the game presents a grim and ominous feeling otherwise unseen in the Mario universe. Credit to YouTube user Red9378

It is a fair assumption to say that anyone who owns a gaming console has memories of playing Mario sports games all the way since their childhood, but the Mario Strikers games stand out from the rest, even just purely from a tonal perspective. The second game on the Wii, Mario Strikers Charged, isn’t even close to dethroning the likes of FIFA as one of the best soccer games, and few would even believe that it holds a candle to the Mario Tennis and Mario Golf titles.

Though Mario Strikers Charged is often forgotten in the sea of Mario spin-offs, it may be the most fascinating out of all of these purely from a worldbuilding aspect, especially in a franchise where worldbuilding is not a priority. Gone are the luscious, green hills from familiar interpretations of the Mushroom Kingdom. As Nintendo’s mascot, Mario is a character whose image is surely heavily protected, rendering the vicious nature of developer Next Level Games’ Mario Strikers titles all the more anomalous for the franchise.

Mario Strikers Charged is an easy game to play, with enough nuance to master the controls — the game rewards players for passing and charging, giving shots on goal a curve.

When discussing the gameplay of Mario Strikers Charged, it could best be described as average and responsive — nothing too much to rave about. But what can be extrapolated from the gameplay is the aggressive feel of the controls — the game feels as brutal to play as it looks.

This Mario Strikers sequel switches a traditional soccer ball with one made entirely out of metal, which itself represents one of the many extremities presented in the game. True to the title, this ball can be “charged” by constantly passing the ball to teammates, or holding the B button while passing. Its charge is indicated by both sound and color, with the ball glowing from purple to orange to white, and the pitch of the metallic noise rising as it charges. The higher the charge, the more significant the curve of the ball when making shots on goal.

Charged offers a few movement options on both offense and defense: using the D-pad of the Wii remote, the player can make their character perform a “deke” on offense — basically, a type of dodge while controlling the ball, each character having their own unique one. On defense, the D-pad instead performs a slide tackle, a typical and expected move from soccer.

With various stage hazards and environmental elements such as lava in this volcano stadium, the stakes of the game are constantly changing.

But the standout defensive move here comes from shaking the Wii remote, and it defines the ferocity of the gameplay. Upon shaking the controller, depending on the character and their size, the player will hit, tackle, or straight up punch opponents. The Wii entry of Strikers feels particularly more violent than in its Gamecube predecessor, due to the physical nature of Wii motion controls.

It is a key part of both the game’s controls and aesthetics — this contact between player characters is usually presented in slow-motion, and the player is almost meant to revel in the brutality of the action. Couple that with the stadiums’ surrounding of an electric fence that players can knock others into, and you have the primary defensive strategy of the game — it is quite a radical element coming from a Mario game.

With a metal soccer ball, body armor, and constant danger looming over players, this variation of soccer feels like something straight out of dystopian fiction.

The gameplay alone is only one part of what we might call the “mise-en-scene” of Mario Strikers Charged. While mise-en-scene is often reserved solely for film criticism, it is one that I’d like to play around with when discussing the visual artistic elements that work in tangent with each other in building the world of Mario Strikers Charged. Mise-en-scene is all about how these elements come together to express a certain mood and vision.

The mood and world created in Charged are defined by the concept of desperation. Think back to those cases previously cited: Mad Max, Rollerball, and The Hunger Games, where desperation and the need to survive are crucial in how those pieces of fiction depict their own societies. Applied to the Mario Strikers games, we see a twisted and sinister version of the aesthetic that Mario fans have since become accustomed to. Elements like lightning, dark clouds, dust, dirt, and fire, all usually reserved for post-apocalyptic fiction, are present here.

We revisit the usual stock environments of Mario titles, such as fields, forests, ice worlds, and volcanic domains. Previous Mario games would personify these environmental elements, usually with cartoon eyeballs, to add a sense of whimsy and innocence, and sports spin-offs would use these conditions either as colorful backdrops or fun obstacles. Here, in Mario Strikers Charged, the environments were de-personified, and their weather conditions were extreme and intensely dangerous. Wind, rain, lightning, lava, and more would be prominent in what appeared to be Mother Nature’s attempts to harm the players as much as possible.

This piece of artwork for Mario Strikers Charged really goes to show just how unusually edgy this game is compared to other Mario sports titles.

While outside of the game itself, even the box art of the Mario Strikers games carry the intense, extreme, and dangerous imagery of the gameplay. The artwork utilizes the elements of lightning and fire, indicating the type of fierce action that the game contains. The Mario Strikers logo is jagged, and the art of Mario in his soccer digs has a rough, imperfect look to it. The character has a determined look, and all together, these elements create a feeling of confrontation and kineticism.

With that sense of confrontation and intensity is the trademark violence of the game. We are looking at a version of the Mushroom Kingdom where savagery is a casual part of the world. It is so ingrained into this depiction of Mario’s society that not one person bats an eye when Luigi brutally decks Daisy into an electric fence — in fact, this type of action, like in our familiar dystopian pieces of fiction almost seems to be encouraged by this society.

The Mario characters have never been this expressive and funny in any other of their games.

The game of soccer has these Mario characters riled up and aggressive, but all of their individual traits, even through the lens of this dark world, come across through the game’s animations. Next Level Games, in particular, expresses devotion to adding personality to characters, primarily through exaggerated and over-the-top animations — the studio continued on this trajectory with their follow-up titles, the Punch-Out remake on Wii and Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon on Nintendo 3DS.

It is near-ridiculous the commitment that Next Level Games demonstrates with each individual character’s animations, with a variety of celebration and losing animations, each complete with their own musical theme. Mario remains optimistic, Peach energetic, and Wario as scummy as ever, just to name a few. But the stand-out character here is Waluigi, the infamous, lanky lackey of Wario, who in the Mario Strikers games was redefined as a crude and vulgar man — look no further than his infamous “crotch chop” celebration. Say goodbye to that usual, standard Mario innocence.

Waluigi, in particular, appeared to be a favorite canvas for Next Level’s animators.

The loss of innocence and the looming feeling of desperation can be evident by the Mario Strikers Charged uniform of body armor — these characters understand the nature of the game, and fully expect to both enact and defend themselves from encouraged destructive behavior. The environments that they play in look and feel dirty, used, and unsafe. For just being a game of soccer, these players act as if though their lives depended on it — perhaps a stretch, but it could very well be an explanation on why these characters are so intensely aggressive against each other. Just the sudden death music alone, with a constant siren in the background, characterizes this desperate feeling that this game must be won.

While music isn’t a visual element and therefore, isn’t necessarily a part of the mise-en-scene, audio is always essential in enhancing the visuals in art. Music has always been an important component of the Mario series, and while this is no different in the Strikers games, the implementation is a far cry from what we are used to. The soundtrack is more rock-infused than other Mario games, with that sudden death piece being an example. In my personal opinion, it is one of perhaps the most overlooked and underrated soundtracks in not only the Mario franchise, but from all Nintendo titles, containing pieces representing a variety of music genres, such as disco and pop. There is a pure “epicness” expressed in the live soundtrack and despite the array of genres, each stadium song has a similar structure, with an escalation all the way to the end — the music for desert-themed stadium Sand Tomb is one of the better examples of this structure.

Armed with talons and sharper spikes, Bowser is more feral than ever in this game. Credit to YouTube user Zephiel810

While Mario Strikers Charged is not even close to one of the first Mario games I’ve ever played, it perhaps may be the first one to make me contemplate the nature of Mario lore. When it comes to first-party Nintendo games, the concept of lore is quite loose; it takes a backseat to the company’s main priority of gameplay. We have the controversial and debatable split timeline of The Legend of Zelda, and the inconsistent timeline of Metroid, but the larger franchise of Mario, with its eclectic software library that predates the aforementioned series, doesn’t have any semblance of strict lore.

That being said, this has not stopped theorists from pursuing the most popular idea about the Mario universe: this cast of colorful characters is literally a cast of a theater troupe, and each Mario game is a different “performance” of sorts. While Nintendo is not a company to make definitive statements of speculative theories, the idea is supported by interview comments from franchise creator Shigeru Miyamoto, who likened the cast of Mario like a “troupe of actors,” not unlike Popeye or various old comics and children’s cartoons where characters would play different roles. That isn’t even mentioning overt visual clues like the title screen of Super Mario Bros. 3, which takes place on a stage and is unveiled behind a red curtain.

It’s difficult to tell whether Mario and Bowser are co-cast members or bitter rivals—regardless, neither of them pull any punches in this game. Credit to YouTube user Red9378

If we were to take Mario Strikers Charged and all Nintendo-published Mario titles as canon (sorry, Hotel Mario), and if we buy into the “theater troupe” interpretation, then what can the Strikers games tell us about the Mario universe as a whole? In what scenario would Mario and pals actively choose to completely change the tone for these “performances” in their role-playing?

Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but the anomalous nature of Mario Strikers and its bleak nature, tied in with this idea of the Mario games as performance and role-playing, leads me to believe that Mario Strikers depicts the true Mushroom Kingdom.

In between all of the fun and games, these cartoony characters appear as if though they’re in a desperate struggle for their lives.

Players are so used to a bright, bouncy, and colorful depiction of Mario’s world, but this could all be a theatrical facade. I am willing to subscribe to the idea that the other games in this franchise are a form of escapism for these miserable characters, with something like Super Mario Sunshine being a literal vacation from the usual dystopian and anarchic rituals of the real world. The truth has to either be this or the complete inverse, with the Strikers games perhaps being conceptualized when the “actors” of this Mario theater trope were in a bad headspace — Strikers is too incompatible with the rest of the franchise for neither to be true. Here in the world of Strikers, the characters are unrestrained from the script of their usual performances and free to be themselves to a more extreme degree — you won’t see Waluigi’s obscene gestures when he’s forced to perform in Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix. Perhaps the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie, with its dark, grimy, Blade Runner-inspired poverty-stricken underground city, wasn’t too far off.

Unfortunately, Mario Strikers Charged in the extensive library of Mario games, is generally disregarded, and forgotten as yet “another Mario sports game.” It’s a bit of a diamond in the rough — with a larger emphasis on the word “rough” over “diamond.” But whatever the game’s implications on the Mario universe are, it deserves its place in the conversation when considering what Mario’s world truly is. Plus, there is a bit of novelty in watching your favorite Mario characters behave in this unusual fashion, where they act like truly bloodthirsty degenerates; the game is gleefully exploitative in that way. But a bulk of the game’s strange brand of charm comes from just how exaggerated and charged (pun not completely intended) the familiar characters, elements, and imagery of the Mario universe are.

Mario Strikers Charged doesn’t reinvent soccer games, and to be quite honest, it probably doesn’t even reinvent the character of Mario — but the game adds some texture and character to the ambiguous world of the Mushroom Kingdom, in unexpected and totally entertaining ways.