You can get limitless "+ attack power badges while Mario is in danger" from the casino/game place. Then you use the BP/HP/FP switch person to give Mario only 5 HP. Now you start every battle in Danger mode and get all those +'s to attack. You just need to equip enough defense and lucky stuff to survive which really isn't too hard.  Even the the final boss only hits once every like 8 attacks if you have all the Lucky stuff on and with the defense/regen stuff... you take 1 damage and regen/leech it back almost immediately.  In the worst case scenario, you have life-shrooms to bring you back in case the enemy gets amazingly lucky.  I never needed the shrooms for Mario but my partner went through them like water in the last fight.

Ah I see, I haven't spent much time at the casino.  I think I'll finish pit of 100 trials first to build up a ton of money then hit up the casino.  I got to lvl 50 probably when I was on either chapter 2 or 3 then I quit out once I got the bigger 20 item sack.   I didn't know if you died while doing that if you lost all your items and I didn't have Yoshi at the time so some of the enemies were pretty hard to defeat (the rock things especially and the flying blue turtles with spikes on their head, since I ran out of items).  I had the electricfy badge on Mario so I would just do the Sweet Treat star power to regen health and let the enemy kill themselves eventually.  Now that I have all the people (Yoshi is a bad ass, I even go Ms. Mowz) and I am a bunch of levels leveled it should be piece of cake.   Yea, those life shrooms are nice.  I get upset if my partner dies and uses one though so I usually care 3-4 on me.  I wish the difficulty was a little harder.  It seems I had a little harder time with Super Mario RPG than this but I enjoyed playing both.  I also think Super Mario RPG made me laugh more.  I loved it when Mario was about to hit that kid when they were playing with the dolls, and Bowser had a lot more funny text in Super Mario RPG. 

It's funny. Mario to me is about running and jumping - Galaxy played with the very mechanic of jumping by manipulating gravity. THat was so profound I'm not sure how I could top it without a lot of thought. Is there a way to change the mechanic of running without it being boring and slow? Can friction matter? Can anything at all, after gravity?

Do we break genre boundaries? Can an RPG concept hold as much weight as that simple manipulation? An action game? An adventure?

What could be more fun than running and jumping?

I'll post again when I've thought some more.

I did the Danger stuff before finishing the Pit of 100 Trials so it was a snap for me.

As for Super Mario RPG, that game was pretty easy too.  There was a trick to maxing out your levels in Johnny's sea area.  Always thought it ironic that the fastest spot to level in the whole game was in the middle.

"Leisure Suit Mario"

Peach is at home, baking a cake.

The door bell rings. She answers it.

A short, plump man in coveralls stands in the doorway, sweat glistening on his brow. A scintillating smile shines beneath his manly mustache

"It's a me. Mario. Did you call for a ... plumber?"

The princess flushes. "Oh, no, but... I really do want to have my... pipes checked..."

"Can my brother join us?"

^ That last line is pretty classic.

Running , jumping, and shooting.

Like someone posted earlier- making a 3rd person Mario paintball game

Mario RTS???

A Mario RTS would be nice however I think they could do a better turned based strategy Mario game developed by Intelligent Systems.