You know when you’re browsing through YouTube late at night, and the recommendations for your algorithm get really weird? There are so many bizarre things one can find surfing videos endlessly — especially if YouTube knows you play both Pokémon games and Mario games.

And wouldn’t you know it: I found the following at the top of my “for you,” and immediately watched.

It’s incredible to me that the most popular people on the internet, namely Twitch streamers and YouTube content creators with tens of millions of followers, are in my old man blind spot. Culture has fractured to the point where something like this could fly under the radar to me and my friends for months. I’m the target demographic for this exact type of game!

Alpharad and a small crew put together this “Pokémon Emerald” ROM hack, but “Super Mariomon” is much more than a fun reskin. This is a full game filled with Mario music, enemies, and levels. Best of all, the gym leaders are replaced with the likes of Daisy, Peach, Waluigi, and Wario.

But to call this a slight imitation or a simple love letter is dismissing the massive amount of work done to really flesh out the traditional turn-based RPG battles and collecting into something that lives and breathes Mario. At its core, it plays like a GBA Pokémon adventure. The structure is the same, there are marts and Poké centers, but not an inch of the art design or writing has anything to do with Pokémon.

This is for the Mario super fans like me. If you are not a freak for the Italian plumber and his Mushroom Kingdom buddies, you need not apply to this one.

As the official announcement states, there are 151 captures to get using Cappy, customizable UI for the menus (I liked the green warp pipe look myself), and enough reused content from the original platformers and “Mario & Luigi” games to make you think that Nintendo should just steal this idea and do it themselves.

While I can’t reach through the computer screen and compel you to try this, I can at least do some light begging because Too Many Productions and YouTuber Alpharad have something quite special on their hands.

Their documentary videos covering the game’s creation and release prove that they had to balance test this a ton, choose the right types for all of the captures, and engineer this mod into something that can stand on its own two feet.

It would have been so easy to just copy paste the routes, the battles, the scripts, and the story from “Pokémon Emerald,” but with a fresh coat of paint. Instead, they really made a great little game here. Well, I shouldn’t say “little” — it’s just as long as the other Pokémon games of the era. A full eight gyms to clear in here, and lots of creatures to catch. Hell, I had to level grind to get my party up to snuff — some of these later fights are no joke.

Now, we here at Video Game Town do not condone piracy, copyright infringement, or anything that can get us sued. You might have to look around for places to actually play this game, but all credit to the team behind “Super Mariomon” as it’s one of my favorites of the year thus far.

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Image Credit: Alpharad on YouTube