Super Mario RPG: A look back at Valentina, the false queen of Nimbus Land

As far as bosses in Super Mario RPG go, Valentina stands out.

That’s quite the accomplishment, considering the bosses in the 1996 Squaresoft/Nintendo mega-collaboration for the Super NES – which range from a sewer-dwelling, four-eyed dog monster who can swallow you whole to a googily-eyed machine-monster that can use its own body as a bow and arrow to a giant, evil, sentient Excalibur sword that has crash landed in Bowser’s Keep – are among the most quirky and memorable in Mario history.

How does Valentina stand out in the face of such a crazy, diverse cast of villains?

At the risk of sounding shallow, a big part of it is her looks – namely, the fact that she looks unlike any other character in the game or in Mario lore for that matter.

She’s a pink-skinned, white designer dress wearing, heavy eyeshadow and lipstick-adorned anthropomorphic something – axolotol, a salamander, or an amalgam of Arnold Shortman from Hey Arnold!, Betty Boop and a frog – what exactly isn’t made clear.

She listlessly holds a martini glass in her hand. She wears a parrot for a hat, something which the game’s monster designer, Kazuyuki Kurashima has revealed is an homage to Squawks from Donkey Kong Country (Valentina would’ve made an interesting Donkey Kong Country boss too, come to think of it).

And, we might as well get this out of the way – she’s built with the overexaggerated proportions of Jessica Rabbit. If you were a middle schooler or teenager back in the ‘90s, you might remember (with a sophomoric titter) Valentina for being the first-ever Mario villain with boob jiggle physics (yes, that’s really a thing). Whenever you hit Valentina with an attack her… well, maybe we should just show you.

Looking back, even though the ‘90s were the emergence of breast physics in video games (starting with Mai Shiranui in 1992’s Fatal Fury 2) and more games were starting to include them because, well, it was the ‘90s and video games were still catering to specific target audiences, it’s surprising that Valentina’s pixelated party pillows made it into a Mario game — the quintessential family video game — of all things.

Valentina kind of gets a pass when it comes to this because she’s probably not human and even though time, effort and coding was devoted to her animated assets by the game’s developers, it’s for comedic effect.

So, it isn’t just the superficial absurdity and taxonomical incongruity of Valentina being amphibious yet for some reason needing quavering mammary glands that makes her stand out in Super Mario RPG; it’s the fact that beneath the surface she’s a complex character who’s vain, scheming, shrewd and insecure. And extremely entertaining to boot.

It’s this vanity and insecurity in particular which drive Valentina to pull off what might be the biggest act of deception in Mario game history, a hoax so beguiling it’d make Anna Delvey from Inventing Anna and Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones insanely envious: she swindles her way into becoming the false queen of Nimbus Land.

To do this, she lies to the people of Nimbus Land, telling them that the rightful king and queen are sick and she’s been appointed as their replacement in their absence. Why the people of Nimbus Land put such blind trust into Valentina – who is clearly not a cloud person like the rest of them – isn’t made entirely clear.

Maybe she was some sort of trusted advisor to the king and queen before the events of the game took place. Maybe, as her avian-themed army of Birdys, Bluebirds, Birdo and Dodo suggest, she has an inherent talent for amassing followers and blind devotees. Or maybe the fact that she’s constantly sipping alcohol from her martini glass made the people of Nimbus Land adherents to the Latin phrase “In vino veritas,” which translates to “In wine there is truth.”

Whatever the case, Valentina’s beguilement works and works so well that she’s able to usurp Nimbus Castle and fortify it into her own personal stronghold with relative ease.

Valentina tricking the people of Nimbus Land/Nintendo

Dodo is Valentina’s most important associate as he’s both Valentina’s personal bodyguard and who Valentina deceives the people of Nimbus Land into thinking is Prince Mallow (as we know, the real Mallow has been adventuring with Mario up until this point in the game).

Dodo, in addition to being some of the best comedic relief in Super Mario RPG, also provides some of the best insight into Valentina’s cruel, egotistical demeanor. He’s also her foster son. According to Dodo’s Monster List profile:

“He resents Valentina, who’s not his real parent. But ultimately, he can’t ignore his debt to her for raising him”

He imprinted on Valentina when he hatched and thought she was his mother.

This explains Dodo’s unyielding loyalty to Valentina despite the fact that she’s cruel and despite the fact that she’s wearing a dead bird on her head – he sees her as his mother.

Getting back to Dodo as comedic relief, we learn that one of his daily tasks is being forced to polish Valentina’s statue collection “to a fine luster and make them a tribute to her beauty.”

These statues, golden replicas of Valentina made by the famous Nimbus sculptor Gallo (Valentina, upon seeing them says, Oh! Now THIS is lovely! My beauty simply shines forth like the sun!”) and glaring indications of her extreme vanity, end up being Valentina’s downfall. Gallo ends up disguising Mario as a statue, which is how he sneaks into Nimbus Castle and eventually overthrows Valentina with the rest of the group, restoring the true King and Queen Nimbus to power and revealing Mario’s traveling companion Mallow as the true prince to the throne instead of Dodo.

While Valentina isn’t the most difficult boss fight, she still manages to be an annoying one because Dodo will interfere at times, dragging the middle character from Mario’s group out of the party to fight them one-on-one. Her boss music however is perfectly on point, a baroque-sounding harp-centric piece punctuated by Valentina laughing in a haughty manner.

Valentina and Dodo/Art by @Checomal on Twitter

Valentina’s deception of the people of Nimbus Land and Dodo aren’t her only ruses. What else has she done to pull the parrot feathers over people’s eyes?

For that, we turn to the translation of her name in the Japanese version of Super Mario RPG, which is “マルガリータ” or Marugarīta. That’s not a martini glass that Valentina is holding after all, but a margarita glass, another factoid seemingly confirmed by Kazuyuki Kurashima, who explained that the martini glass in the original Super NES version – which was signified as a martini because of the little olive (or cherry) garnishing the drink – had been replaced in the Switch remake by what is more clearly representative of a margarita, with the olive garnish replaced by a lime and the glass now containing a green-colored liquid, indicative of the tequila and lime juice mixture.

Valentina’s name also takes on another meaning in the Japanese translation, or more specifically her full name: Marugari Marugarīta. Marugari roughly translates to “buzzcut” in Japanese and according to designer Jiro Mifune that’s Valentina’s full name because underneath the dead parrot hat she’s completely bald — which adds another layer of ironic intrigue to the character’s extreme vanity.

To reiterate, even though Super Mario RPG boasts a bevy of diverse, iconic bosses, Valentina still stands out because her appearance, demeanor and motivation are some of the most intriguing in all of Mario lore.

What did you think of Valentina, the false queen of Nimbus Land when you faced off against her in Super Mario RPG? Would you like to see both her and Dodo reappear as a villain a future Mario game as much as we want to see the return of the Shroob or Captain Syrup? Let us know in the comments.