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The hack does come straight out and say that its purpose is to highlight new animations and attacks, and so long as that's all one is looking to get out of the hack, it does deliver.

The format of the hack is very simple, with there being some battle rooms available to you in Booster Tower. Two provide you with two different enemies to grind EXP and Coins from, while the others contain 3 bosses to take on once you've leveled up significantly (around Lv 25 - 30). There are some items and equipment to buy with the coins you grind and there are some "extra" specials that Mario gains in the final couple of Lvs. Once you've beaten the 3 bosses, you can challenge the final boss and complete the game.

Honestly, the simple format is fine, but my main gripe is that the gameplay is a bit of a mess. Balance is all over the place; the only enemies you can beat at Lv 1 are just barely beatable, but once you Lv up once, the rest of the game is just grinding with little to no threat. You have basically no chance of beating the bosses until you've grinded well into the 20s, so you just end up fighting the same 2 enemies over and over again. They drop decent EXP, but it's still not very fun. It's hard to tell when you actually should challenge the bosses so that they provide a decent challenge, but by the time I fought them, it was pretty trivial. The final special move you have also is bugged so that despite costing 30 FP, it only takes 3 when used. Given how strong it is, the winning strategy is just spam that move and heal when needed.

In the end, I don't know how much depth one can expect when you're limited to 1 character in an RPG, but the entire experience is pretty tedious

The hack sets you up at level 1, in an area with 3 rooms with impossible fights, and 1 room with the "easiest" fight. These "easy" fights set you up against 3 enemies, which have an unavoidable sleep attack, and 2 blockable attacks. The blockable attacks do 12 damage and 8 damage unblocked, or half or 0 if blocked. The thing is, basically you have to block perfectly (I assume the 0 block is based on timing that I can't do every time) every time or you die. The enemies take more than 3 hits to die (I died after attacking one 3 times). This is an exercise in futility without cheating.