Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (GBA) – Part 09 – Oho Ocean Seabed

-Oho Ocean Seabed-

I’ll admit that I never really considered how terrifying it must be for the Mario Brothers to constantly be jumping down those pipes. You would think they’d be used to it by now, but those scared expressions would say otherwise. In any case, the yellow pipe ends up leading us straight down to the ocean floor where needing to breath is apparently not required. (Take that Sonic!)

Also of note down here on the Seabed is the fact that Mario and Luigi can freely swim around the area. This is to be expected since they’re completely submerged in water, but it will make traveling rather interesting in its own way.

To make things even weirder, it would seem water has little to no effect on fire’s ability to burn. This can be seen right away as we encounter our first obstacle which requires Mario’s Firebrand to pass. Once both of the fires are lit, one of the corals simply shrinks away into nothingness, allowing us to continue on. You would think we’d have been able to swim over it, but we’re already well past logical expectations at this point.

Speaking of logical expectations, since we’re underwater you would expect underwater enemies like Cheep Cheeps or Bloopers. Nope. Not in this game. The first enemy we end up encountering is a Goomdiver, your standard Goomba shoved into a diving helmet. Admittedly it’s a funny and somewhat cute variant of the Goomba with its little legs just sticking out the bottom of the helmet. It’s just not what we expected.

It isn’t long before we find a map of the area, and thankfully the seabed is not a very large section. That’s especially good since most of the seabed seems to be covered in very sharp spikes. We’ll have to swim over them and be sure not to allow ourselves to drift too low.

Eventually we do encounter some bloopers like we had expected, and they happen to be quite annoying. Not because they’re difficult enemies or anything, but because we run into them while swimming over the spikes. As soon as the battle is over, we need to remember to start swimming again right away or we’ll end of landing right on top of them and being sent back to the room entrance.

One last bit of questionable logic that I simply can’t ignore is the fact that even though we are swimming, we are limited with how high we can swim to basically as high as we would be able to jump. Because of this, there are a few high ledges that are currently inaccessible despite the obvious solution of just swimming higher. Even performing a high jump can’t get us up there at the moment due to the angle between the two platforms.

Moving on from the large spike pits, we come across basically the only puzzle of this area, if you can even really call it a puzzle. In this room there is a button on the wall and 5 areas that can hold a flame. Pressing the button will light the flames one by one in a rather simple pattern (1, 4, 3, 5, 2). All we have to do is light the flames with Mario’s Firebrand in that same order to solve the puzzle. Doing this will cause one of the yellow corals to shirk and allow us to continue on our way.

From here it’s just a short trek before we find another yellow warp pipe to bring us back to the surface. Much like with going down the pipe, I’ve never really considered the mechanics involved with traveling by pipe. As you can see, Mario and Luigi are forced to press themselves back to back and help each other walk up the side of the pipe. I can’t imagine how difficult this must be if they were alone.