If you’ve read our 100% completion guide for Super Mario RPG, you probably know that obtaining a gold medal on the Beetle Mania mini-game is a requirement for full game completion. Beetle Mania is actually a completely separate mini-game than the one you play on Booster Hill, and it’s a little out of the way. There’s a Toad in the Mushroom Kingdom inn playing a video game. If you speak with him a certain number of times, he’ll earn a high score and then give you the game to keep. From there, you can open up your menu and go to the “Play Game” section to play a brand-new mini-game called Beetle Mania.
Today, we’re going over a brief strategy to get the 5 million points you need to earn that gold medal.
How to get a high score on Beetle Mania
In Super Mario RPG’s Beetle Mania, you play as a beetle who can shoot stars forward. The object of the game is to score as many points as possible, and to do this you have to shoot the Koopa Shells that drop from the top of the screen. Each one is worth a minuscule number of points individually. Instead, the real way to rack up points is to have a Koopa Shell you shot bump into a bunch of others – the score increases for each consecutive hit. Basically, you’ll want to steer your beetle off to the side and wait – don’t shoot anything. Let a ton of Koopa Shells fall to the ground, and when enough have accumulated, shoot once and watch the score counter increase a ton! The shells you destroyed will eventually drop hearts, so try to pick up as many of those as you can.
If your beetle is hit by a Koopa Shell, it will die and you’ll have to mash the button to revive it. Each time you die, you will need to press the button one more time to successfully revive it. When you collect hearts, that number goes down. At full health, it takes five button presses to revive a beetle. You’ll no doubt die a few times as you let Koopa Shells rack up, but that’s okay. Keep track of the number of button presses you need to make and then collect the hearts when the time is right. Using this strategy, you should be able to pass the five million points you need to obtain a gold medal for Beetle Mania in Super Mario RPG. Nice!
Though the Beetle Mania guide was a fairly simple one, we have a whole collection of other Super Mario RPG guides that are much less simple. There’s the boss rematch guide, which goes in-depth with strategies for each one. Then there’s the Frog Coin farming guide, which comes in handy to complete several of this game’s completion tasks. You can also check out the 3 Musty Fears guide, the 100 Super Jumps guide, and the level-up guide.
Super Mario RPG is available now for Switch, and you can visit the official website right here if you’re interested in giving it a try.
