A 27-year-old JRPG bug is now a feature in the Super Mario RPG remake

The Super Mario RPG Remake keeps one of the original game's most infamous exploits fully intact, effectively canonizing a 27-year-old glitch.

One of your party members in Super Mario RPG, Geno, has an attack called Geno Whirl, where he flings a spinning blade at a single enemy. If you perfectly time your strike, it deals 9999 damage, enough to kill pretty much any enemy in the game. However, bosses are meant to be immune to that critical damage.

There's just one exception: Exor. The giant sword creature that pierces Bowser's castle in the game's iconic title screen has a unique fight gimmick where you have to damage his eyes in order to make his body vulnerable. Normally, you'd take the opportunity to chip away at his health pool before the eye restores itself, but his vulnerability extends to Geno Whirl's critical damage - the only boss in the game where this is the case.

Technically Exor's vulnerability to Geno Whirl could have been intended as an Easter egg, but fans have long suspected that it was a glitch or programming oversight. Nonetheless, it's become pretty iconic among the game's fandom, even as everyone suspects the exploit would probably be ironed out for the remake.

But, as Polygon notes, you can still instakill Exor with Geno Whirl in the Super Mario RPG remake. Playing through the new game for our Super Mario RPG review, I was constantly astounded by just how faithful it was to the original - even to the point of hanging onto the original's dirty jokes. I'm not a hardcore enough fan of the old game to have remembered the Exor exploit and tried it for myself, but it's good to see the devs' attention to detail goes so far down.

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