Chihiro Fujioka, the director of Super Mario RPG, has said that he would like to make a sequel to the SNES classic as the final game of his career. Fujioka is a veteran of the Japanese video game industry. He started out on Earthbound in 1983, made Tomato Adventure in 2002, and has been working on the Mario & Luigi series for the majority of the last two decades. In a recent interview with YouTuber MinnMax, Fujioka stated his desire to create a follow-up to 1996’s Super Mario RPG.
“In my career I’ve been involved with a lot of games, and I would really like my final one to be another Mario RPG game if possible.
I think Mario & Luigi is cool, but I would like to go back and create a Mario RPG where you’re only controlling Mario.”
Chihiro Fujioka
Super Mario RPG was made by Square (before the company became Square Enix) and the possibility of a follow-up game was killed when Square famously ditched Nintendo in favor of Sony for Final Fantasy 7. It took years to repair the damage done to the relationship between Nintendo and Square from that decision. In the meantime, Nintendo took the RPG Mario games in a different direction with Paper Mario. Meaning fans never got a true continuation of the SNES classic, Super Mario RPG.
Chihiro Fujioka has worked closely with Nintendo on the Mario & Luigi series so it isn’t impossible that he could get his wish to make Super Mario RPG 2 his final game. Fujioka maintained his close relationship with Nintendo after forming his own company, AlphaDream, with other former Square employees in 2000. Although AlphaDream went bankrupt in 2019. Perhaps Fujioka sees himself working directly with Nintendo on a Super Mario RPG sequel. At 62 years old, Fujioka is presumably thinking about when he’d like to release the last game of his career.