In Mario Strikers: Battle League, all characters can have their starting attributes significantly adjusted through the use of gear customization.
And all characters in the game start with the same purchasable gear.
You’ll be able to purchase equipment to attach to your character’s head, arms, body and legs. With this, you can adjust a character’s speed, strength, shooting, passing and technique. However, everything comes at a cost.
Credit to Nintendo – everything is perfectly balanced in this game, meaning there’s no pay-to-win aspect of winning more games. If you want to boost an attribute, you have to sacrifice something else. This means gear merely reassigns your statistics rather than increasing them.
In this guide, I’ll show you how to unlock gear in Mario Strikers: Battle League.
How to Edit Gear
First things first, if you don’t know how to edit your gear, it’s extremely easy.
Simply navigate to the main menu and select ‘Gear Settings’. Here, you’ll have the option to customize every character and buy new equipment for each of them.
The standard pieces of gear cost 100 coins each and you will need to buy them for every character should you want them (e.g. you can’t buy one piece of gear and use the same piece across all characters, even though all characters have access to the same equipment).
Once gear has been purchased and added to a character, you can choose to use them with this gear the next time you select them within your squad.
You also get the option to choose them with no gear, if you’re not a fan of the build you put together or you want a character’s regular attributes in the next game.
How to Unlock New Gear
At the time of writing, there is only one way to unlock new gear in Mario Strikers. This is via the Cup Battles game mode (accessible in the main menu).
In Cup Battles, you’ll play through double elimination tournaments and try to become the champion in each.
There are six tournaments in total – you can play through the first five in any order, but you’ll need to win all five before unlocking the Championship Cup.
When you win the Championship Cup on Normal difficulty, you’ll get access to new gear.
The unlockable ‘Bushido’ gear, of which you’ll get one additional piece within head, arms, body and legs, works differently to the other gear.
Costing 300 coins, Bushido gear will raise one stat by +4 and will reduce all other stats by -1. Standard gear gives a +2 boost to a stat and a -2 reduction to one other attribute.
There is no +4 boost to shooting available with Bushido gear.
After unlocking this new gear in Mario Strikers, sadly there isn’t a way to unlock other new equipment at this stage. That includes beating Cup Battles on the ‘Galactic’ difficulty.
Winning all of the Galactic Mode cups is a great way to earn coins quickly in Mario Strikers but sadly that’s all it’s useful for.
That said, it is an extremely fun challenge to beat the AI on its hardest difficulty.