I wouldn't consider that to be the "Square weirdness" from the Square of the 90s... For today, maybe. What I mean moreso by that is that FF games up until 9 mo

I wouldn't consider that to be the "Square weirdness" from the Square of the 90s... For today, maybe. What I mean moreso by that is that FF games up until 9 more or less had this shared tone of "stories with gravity interspliced with extremely goofy moments and oneliners". SMRPG fits that tightrope almost as well as the more well known games it shares a platform with (Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6); there's multiple gags but the game also still treats this idea of "Bowser just got upstaged by this army of metal guys" with a completely straight face. The stuff surrounding the core story of the Seven Stars isn't undercut by anything but it's still followed up by the running gags of Mario doing impressions of the various NPCs he's met because he's a silent protagonist and they wanted to animate an explanation. Later Mario RPGs would largely ditch that gravity in favor of just going all-in on the goofiness as the RPGs went on (Mario & Luigi got a really bad case of that). Square on the other hand bled creatives during the merger with Enix until Nomura was the only one left and he got super up in his own ass about storytelling... which led to Kingdom Hearts becoming what it is.