Although Masashi Kishimoto is known all over the world for his masterpiece Naruto, he has worked on a bunch of other stories and one-shot mangas that might not be as popular as Naruto but do have a compelling narrative. One of them was called Mario, and it even featured in the Seinen genre.
The story of Mario follows the adventures of a mafia contract killer who is half-Japanese and half-Italian and is working in New York. He is forced to work together with a female colleague called Saori, who does not talk to men. The story offers mysterious and thriller elements and focuses on the underground mafia rule of the largest city in the world.
Kishimoto was so excited about the series that he even mentioned it in the comments of the Naruto manga, hyping up the story. However, the story did not grab much attention from the readers. This led to Kishimoto believing that he had made a mistake and regretting the overconfidence that he had shown while promoting the series through Naruto.
Masashi Kishimoto’s Regret with Mario
In 2015, Kishimoto was interviewed by Viz Media, where he revealed that he created the story of Mario before he started working on Naruto. However, he was confident in the story of Mario, and while he was working on Naruto, he continuously mentioned the project in the Naruto manga. But later on, when he published Mario, it got shrunk down to a one-shot manga.
Kishimoto stated:
I kept getting pulled into the past. I should have just started from scratch as if it was a brand new work, but I just couldn’t get rid of the image I had of it when I originally wrote it. So trimming it down was really tough. I had a lot of momentum when I did the original version, so the original draft was quite rough. That made it difficult to figure out what to cut.
According to the mangaka, when he started Mario, he wrote about 130 pages of the narrative. This is one of the reasons why he was so hyped up for the story, as it gave him the artistic freedom to include whatever he wanted. However, when he decided to publish it, he had to cut down the story, which was really tough for him, and as a result, Mario did not do well commercially.
Masashi Kishimoto Didn’t Spend Much Time on Mario’s One-Shot
While talking about Mario, Masashi Kishimoto revealed that he initially did not know that he would actually release the story. However, he had already bragged about it in the Naruto manga and had to change the structure of the story, which ultimately resulted in its downfall. He had to cut down a lot of the story and reduce it from 130 pages to 49 pages.
Kishimoto stated:
I changed the structure of the story quite a bit, but it still feels a little amateurish. But since I bragged about how awesome it was in the past, that excuse is hard to make now, isn’t it?
Talking about the time he spent on Mario, the Naruto mangaka revealed:
I didn’t actually spend that much time on it. I was asked to do it a while ago, but I just kept putting it off until there wasn’t much time left. Then the deadline was approaching and I had to scramble to get it done.
Kishimoto believed that if he had the chance to release the entire story that he initially wrote, the manga could have become a big name.
But the circumstances and his busy schedule forced him to make the changes and make it less interesting. Thus, he could not complain about the failure of Mario and had to live with regret.
You can read Mario on Viz Media.
