Jeremy Parish

December bonus #1: Square Soft 1996 Marketing Reel (feat. Super Mario RPG) (Patreon)

Published:

2024-12-01 14:49:11

Imported:

2026-06

Tags:

bahamut lagoon bonus front mission squaresoft super mario rpg super nes vhs

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Content

A new month, a new count on the bonus material. Numbers, am I right?

This one is a lot less obscure than the other videos I've posted this weekend, but I figure it never hurts to go with a crowd-pleaser from time to time. This tape shows off a bunch of Square's impressive late 16-bit era titles and was positioned as a visual showstopper to wow shoppers at Japanese retail who might otherwise stray into buying a Saturn or PlayStation. What better way to seduce those with a yen for cool graphics than with a tape of the coolest graphics on Super NE—err, Famicom?

Another Japanese-language tape... you know the drill with captions by this point, yeah?

Files

Previews only

Square Soft 1996 Promo Reel: Super Mario RPG / Bahamut Lagoon / Front Mission: Gun Hazard

A marketing tape sent to (one assumes) Japanese retailers to showcase a few games in Square's final Super Famicom push before making the leap to PlayStation exclusivity for a few years. This demo reel features Super Mario RPG, Bahamut Lagoon, and Front Mission: Gun Hazard, all presented within the visual metaphor of making menu selections in a Final Fantasy game. The overall package really helps you appreciate how Square had come to be such a big at this point, at least in Japan, and why their defection to Sony's camp was a Top 10 Anime Betrayal. This is a Japanese-language tape. For best results, please turn on YouTube captions and set the language to auto-translate from Japanese. Recorded from a JVC deck via S-video and upscaled via RetroTink 4K. Please feel free to use clips from this video in your own retrospectives (source credit greatly appreciated).