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RPGs

Mario has been the protagonist of various role-playing video games (RPGs), beginning with Square 's Super Mario RPG on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). According to Yoshio Hongo of Nintendo, the game came out of Shigeru Miyamoto's desire to develop a Mario role-playing game while Square wanted a role-playing video game that sold well overseas. The game was notable at the time for having a unique blend of action and role-playing game elements, and was a critical and commercial success, and led to two other spinoff RPG series starring the character, Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi.

A sequel to Super Mario RPG was planned for the Nintendo 64. The original developer, Square, had signed a deal with Sony to release Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation, so Nintendo passed on development responsibilities to Intelligent Systems. The new art designer, Naohiko Aoyama, changed every character to two-dimensional to bring out "cuter" graphics compared to low-polygon three-dimensional graphics on the console. In the Paper Mario games, Mario is often aided by numerous allies who progress the story while Mario remains silent.

Unlike Paper Mario, both Mario and Luigi have voices in the Mario & Luigi series and are voiced by Charles Martinet. According to the developers, the early games used character sprites; the developers were generally inexperienced and did not know much about hardware at the time. Once the Nintendo 3DS was released, the developers had the chance to switch to 3-dimensional graphics. They decided to change the background and world design but chose to keep the characters as 2D renderings of 3D characters as they believed it made it easier to convey comedic expressions. In 2013, they believed Mario took too much of the spotlight in the Mario franchise, and they made Luigi the more story-focused character in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team.