Paper Mario means so much to so many different
people. It practically defined my experience with
an entire generation on the N64, and I know it was the same for many others on the Gamecube
with an unforgettable sequel. We’ve already talked at length about its
charm, memorable characters and satisfying gameplay, but we have one more era to discuss
to wrap up our series on the paper franchise: What happened after the first two games in
Super Paper Mario and Color Splash. One is divisive to say the least, and the
other is essentially panned across the board, but I wanted to talk about my experience since
I basically played both of them fresh for this video. Do they hold a candle to the originals? Well, let’s talk about it. First off, I know a lot of people are gonna
ask about Sticker Star, but I’m not covering this one for a couple reasons - 1) I don’t
have a way to record 3DS footage, and 2) from what I’ve seen, it has a very similar structure
to Color Splash, so any criticisms I make would probably be the same for both games
here - we’ll basically kill two paper birds with one paper...rock paper scissors. But first we have to talk about Super Paper
Mario, the black sheep of the family. Remember, Thousand Year Door was a nearly
flawless sequel that expanded the original in unprecedented ways, so it already was going
to be a tough act to follow. But you also have to keep in mind that Nintendo
likes to switch things up with their new installments - rarely do you see a follow-up that doesn’t
change the gameplay in any significant way. So the key difference they decided to run
with this time was Mario’s ability to change dimensions and go from a 2D perspective to
3D. Now on it’s own this is by no means a bad
addition, in fact it looks pretty cool from a marketing standpoint and the potential was
pretty high for where they could take it, but they removed a lot of the fundamental
elements that the Paper Mario series had become known for along the way. The biggest turn off for me, and the most
obvious shift was from a turn based battle system to real time combat. Things resemble Mario’s older games a lot
more this time around, jumping on enemies’ heads and throwing objects to cause damage,
but the physics aren’t nearly as crisp as the italian wonder’s other platformers. There’s no more experience points or picking
which stat you’d like to upgrade, instead you level up based on your total score and
it picks a predetermined stat to boost, taking away any agency you have on customizing your
build. Badges are gone, upgraded equipment is nowhere
to be found, and forget about party members while you’re at it - everything is streamlined
toward jumping through obstacles and completing stages in this adventure. In fact, the 2nd thing that rubbed me the
wrong way at first was the four-act structure of each chapter. The fact that each level wraps up with a star
block to hit feels anticlimactic and much more linear than the exploration and traveling
to different interconnected worlds of the first two games. Each setpiece is accessed from the same location
in the hub and plays out like a level-based platformer. Sure there’s rising action and climax in
each one, and of course more occurs than simply running to the right, but this new presentation
style and massive gameplay shift was very jarring coming off the heels of Thousand Year
Door and the improvements it had made to the formula. When each chapter used to wrap up with a story
summary of where Mario should head next, it was endearing and driving, but now since it
shows up after every section, it slows the pace way down and feels like we didn’t even
accomplish anything in between each activity. So my first hour or so with the game was spent
more or less grumbling about how it was way too different from past Paper Mario games
and how annoyed I was at this new adaptation, but I gotta admit, after awhile I got used
to it and the strengths really started to shine through. This game is fantastically written, just like
the originals. Some of the new scenarios you face are amazing,
like knocking over a priceless vase and having to pay back the cost through hard manual labor,
or taking a pit stop in the middle of space because your alien buddy really has to go,
or my absolute favorite - infiltrating a nerd-castle of an anime loving, dating sim playing, chameleon
fanboy who steals your butterfly companion to take pictures of it. It’s unbelievably wacky, catches you by
surprise with some of the switch ups, and feels like a good next step as far as the
overall story of Paper Mario goes. The main villain is fascinating, and while
there is certainly more dialogue this time around, I think it’s just as creative as
before and kept me intrigued to see what happened next. Luigi becoming a brainwashed villain is a
perfect twist that we haven’t really seen before - there’s a reason many claim Super
has the best narrative of the entire series. But the coolest thing to me was the addition
of new controllable characters. Like I said, Nintendo likes to try new things
with its sequels and this seemed like the logical progression for the series - instead
of just flipping dimensions with Mario, now you can float across gaps with Peach’s umbrella
and even take control of King Koopa himself to pulverize baddies and destroy obstacles
with your flame breath - harkening back to the Super Mario RPG days. Having Bowser on your side is always a good
call in my book. Utilizing your arsenal of abilities combined
with the powers of your various pixls is where Super Paper Mario shines best. It takes a little bit to take off, but around
chapter 3, the gameplay gains a very satisfying sense of flow where you switch back and forth
between all of your maneuvers to climb this massive tree. Hitting blocks, blowing up walls, reaching
far ledges and burning up roots all while checking different perspectives to make sure
you didn’t miss anything was just exhilarating. It’s a little hit and miss with how often
it will require your assortment of moves, but when it’s at its best, I really enjoyed
it. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t reach that
full potential because of the other elements it scaled back so heavily. Having Pixls you recover from chests is definitely
a downgrade from party members with unique personalities and backstories. These guys only speak like once and then they’re
just defined by the new gimmick it allows you to do. Using Peach and Bowser is great but the menu
is much more clunky this time around, mainly due to the limitations of the sideways Wii
Remote - having to open the full menu to swap pixls, characters or use an item got old pretty
quickly. And honestly the whole game felt a lot more
slow and cumbersome - entering doors means you have to sit through this long spiral transition,
guess I just gotta sit here and wait while it draws my mega-powerup, and why in the world
can you skip the elevator cutscene everywhere else, but with this particular one you can’t. And maybe this is just a personal thing, but
I really didn’t like the design of the Flipside residents, they’re rather odd and all look
the same, plus they’re the only race of people here - you know how past games would
have visitors from other realms, making a more cohesive environment? Well, everyone is segregated into their own
worlds now. This caused Flipside in general to be uninteresting
to explore since there wasn’t any distinguished features to set it apart, and condensing a
massive town into a 2D viewpoint made it more annoying to navigate. As I said, the 3D perspective changes were
a good concept, but the puzzles feel either really basic or so obtuse that you just get
mad at the solution. Half the time you’re holding right as an
invincible 8-bit madman, running down empty corridors to collect keys, or simply turning
the screen sideways to find the hidden door, and the other half you have to talk to a random
NPC to know the arbitrary solution to a puzzle, or jump around looking for the way out until
you remember that sometimes things are just invisible until you point at the screen with
your controller. Some things are creative, but for the most
part it feels like a dumbed-down Mario adventure, I personally believe because of the level-based
structure and unwieldy execution of the controls and mechanics. I’ll tell you what, here’s what I would
have done if I were to recreate Super Paper Mario to be a proper sequel to Thousand Year
Door. First and foremost: ditch the 4-part installments
of chapters, and make the stages accessible from different parts of the hub like the old
games - no more of this 8 doors atop the tower nonsense. A huge reason the first two games are admired
so heavily for their integrated worlds was because of how you uncovered the next hidden
chapter. Flipside has a lot of potential - you can
still run around swapping dimensions and using new abilities, but hide the next locale behind
some of these secret pathways. Keep the 3D perspective shift, I like this
- but can we make the scenery a bit more appealing than just a lengthy barren hallway? Make these trees pop out, put other obstacles
in my way. I would get rid of the time limit on this
ability, and make it just as interactive as the regular view, instead of simply changing
to it for a quick solution now and again. The Pixl maneuvers are cool, but they really
need to be full blown characters - you already have all these new species and villages, they
don’t even have to be Mario-specific dudes, make them aliens, cavemen, maybe even little
chameleon henchmen that switch sides, I don’t know. The Pixls feel lazy and more like an item
than a party member. And finally, but most important: the turn-based
combat has got to come back. Now this was hard for me because Thousand
Year Door amplified the original in so many cool ways, it would be really hard for Super
to keep the train rolling. I wracked my brain trying to think of how
it could continue to innovate while still keeping the structure the same - and then
it hit me: use the 3D dimension swapping in the combat. Throughout the game, there’s all of these
pillars that have hidden notes on the side of them that you can only see from a certain
angle. What if battles had that too - like a boss
who has his weakness written on his hand but you can only read it if you turn sideways. There’s already this annoying blooper fight
where you can only damage it by attacking the red tentacle, what if you could see all
of them at once, but identified the right one by seeing it from another direction. You could hide weak spots behind other objects,
utilize different parts of the stage as a reward for looking around, here’s a crazy
thought: what if Mario didn’t have to be in a battle at all times - what if he was
just one of the characters you can switch out, so you could have any combination of
Bowser, Peach, Luigi, your cool party members, and they all had useful abilities that would
help you take down specific threats. Maybe Peach can reach attack points that no
one else can, Bowser can be the tank that soaks up hits and deals out heavy damage but
is slow and only attacks once every other turn, maybe even have enemies that adapt to
how they can be damaged based on your attacks, like how others did back in the first games. If Mario is the only one who can change perspectives,
perhaps they could award bonus experience for taking down baddies in a unique way instead
of brute forcing your way through. Look, I’m no game design expert, but the
boss fights were easily the weakest part of the game for me, and I think making everything
happen in real-time turned it into a snoozefest. Each battle is super easy and normally has
one way to kill them that either requires waiting for an open period to attack or can
be cheesed without using any brainpower. They have all these special items to help
in battle, but there’s basically no point because you can just stomp through any situation,
and the lack of experience or customization leaves you wondering why you’re bothering
fighting nonessential enemies at all. I don’t think you’d have to carry over
all the different mechanics from the originals like stylish points or audience members affecting
the battle, and I certainly don’t believe that it would have to be more of the same
to be good either. Some people have said they just want another
Thousand Year Door adventure and they would be happy - but I really do empathize with
the desire of wanting to stretch the genre and see what new heights they can reach. Flipping the perspective and having different
playable characters was the right direction to go, I just think they strayed too far from
what worked to be considered a classic. The foundation of a great Paper Mario game
is there, but unfortunately it’s buried under the muck of other design decisions. Color Splash on the other hand - hoo boy,
I think it’s beyond saving. Which really sucks because, I mean just look
at it! This is exactly what I would picture a Paper
Mario game in HD to look like in today’s day and age, it really is beautiful. If this latest entry on the Wii U has anything
going for it, it’s strong visuals and great writing. Jokes are top-notch, it definitely has the
humor that the series has become known for, and the different paper-aesthetic changes
the environment goes through are clever, reminding me of Kirby’s Epic Yarn or Yoshi’s Woolly
World. And...eh, I guess smacking stuff with color
was pretty alright too. Look, I’m sorry guys, I really tried to
come up with more good things to say about it, but that’s about all there is. I think there’s two major problems that
rob the rest of the experience from truly being enjoyable, and the first is probably
the most common complaint people cite about this game - they took away any originality
from the characters and instead replaced them with generic toads. Toads everywhere! This is the most peculiar change I can think
of for a Paper Mario game, the unique and interesting people you meet along your journey
is exactly what set the series apart from other titles. 64 had a town full of toads, but at least
each one had a different look, name and personality. The only thing separating these characters
from one another is their color and the occasional...scarf. They sort of use the fact that they all look
the same as a joke here and there in the gameplay, but it’s more than just toads - all the
enemies you face are equally boring and cookie-cutter in their appearance. Sucking the life out of paper beings seems
like a Shy-guy thing to do, but where are all the other types of Shy guys that we’ve
seen before? They aren’t even different colors. Goombas, Koopas, Cheep-cheeps, they’re all
based off of the most common version of what you’ll find if you google image search their
names. But the stripping didn’t stop there. Mario no longer has any form of party members,
and the combat is scaled back to the most basic form I can think of. No experience, no badges, no leveling up and
choosing your stat upgrades. Instead, now you have disposable ca-huurr. Sorry I almost threw up there, disposable
ca-huuuur. CARDS. What were they thinking?! It’s like they heard feedback from Super
Paper Mario and said, “hey the kids prefer turn based combat instead of this real-time
stuff, let’s do that but nothing else, take away anything appealing or worthwhile about
it. They just want to take their turns now”. There’s so many problems with this system,
the most blatant being that there’s no good reason to even want to do these battles anymore. Without experience, the only real benefit
you get from winning are these little hammer icons that increase your maximum paint storage,
but that isn’t exactly helpful since you hardly run out of paint anyway and you can
just smack stuff in the environment to get more. So all that happens when you fight random
baddies is you waste the one-time use cards in your deck that you potentially will want
to save until you need them on the required battles down the road. The cards themselves are mostly uninteresting
but the fact that they go away after putting them into play presents a bunch of new issues
the games never had before. There are these special Thing cards that show
off insane cutscenes and take out foes in funny ways, which I guess are kind of like
the Power Star abilities from previous games, but instead of recharging over time, once
you use them they’re gone, and the only way to get them back is to travel all the
way to the docks of Port Prisma and buy them again, one at a time mind you. Now this is a bit more of a personal preference,
but I also hate that you can’t tell exactly how much health an enemy has. As you smack or jump on them you can see their
color start to fade away, but you also can’t tell how much damage YOUR attacks do either,
so it’s basically a big guessing game. One time I might use more cards than needed
to finish off a crowd of baddies, which sucks because you lose any card you’ve played
even if it’s not employed, but then the next time I’ll be more conservative with
the cards I use and for some reason that enemy won’t take nearly the same amount of damage
so I’ll have to wait a whole extra round to finish the job. Knowing your adversary’s stamina and the
output you’re capable of dealing is what made the originals so strategy-intensive. Planning 3 steps ahead or adjusting your actions
based on how a boss reacts was thrilling - I’ve already talked about how the overall lower
numbers and exact science made everything more manageable compared to other RPG’s. Here, you start with 50 health and I never
really got below 30. It’s way too easy and forgiving with health
drops, and it feels like a crap-shoot of whether your attacks will be enough to kill a particular
guy or not. But this is all compounded by the worst aspect
of the entire game, the fact that everything is so SLOOOOW. Combat is just one of the many components
plagued by snail-like pacing. To attack you have to select your cards from
a big ol’ list of them, and sorting doesn’t help because it puts your items on top for
some reason? Instead of, I don’t know your best abilities
first. Then you have to paint them to power them
up, then swipe up to wait a few more seconds...and finally begin your turn. Yes there’s action commands but they’re
one of like 3 categories and only involve pressing the A button at the right time. Combined with the fact that there’s no reward,
it just makes the prospect of any optional battle a huge hassle and very annoying when
you accidentally bump an enemy or get jumped by an unavoidable goon. But it gets worse - Color Splash continues
with the level-based stage layout, removing any semblance of a connected world, and after
gathering a paint star it boots you out of the area. This wouldn’t be bad if there was only one
collectible to find, but several times I found multiple stars that I wanted to grab but nope
instead you have to go back into the level and traverse the annoying hallways of enemies
again until you find the next start that’s just sitting there ready to be taken. There’s these bonus temples where you play
rock paper scissors in a tournament bracket. You know, like the fastest game in existence? Nah, here you have to place your cards and
watch it play out in slow motion apparently. And since it’s mostly random, I guess you’d
better get used to playing it over and over again if you want to conquer them. On their own, some of these decisions are
excusable, but they combine together to make a story that drags way longer than it needs
to. There’s all these roadblocks that make even
getting the first major paint star a pain to reach. Unlike previous games where you can find the
first main collectible in an hour or two, this game goes out of its way to extend your
playtime to agonizingly boring lengths. Forget minibosses or unique locations, it’ll
take hours to go through bland fields and the same waves of enemies before you have
to then find the special key toads to unlock this gate, and then get stomped by the first
major boss because you didn’t have the one particular item required to beat him so you
have to go through the entire castle again after getting the right powerup. And THEN you get the first star. Whoo. Maybe it’s because I played all of these
Paper Mario games back to back, but I could not be bothered to keep playing, I’m sorry
y’all but I just couldn’t. I would love to come up with some sort of
way to rescue this game, cite my own version that would have fixed it and made it a worthy
successor, but it’s too far gone; they would have to scale back every single element except
the core maneuver of painting the environment. Start from there, keep the wacky arts and
crafts spectacles, but change everything else. There’s a lot of speculation about why this
happened - conversations behind closed doors with Shigeru Miyamoto and the development
team being forced to use more basic characters, blah blah blah, but one thing is surely clear:
this is not Paper Mario, at least not what I’ve come to know the series to be. This is a totally different game, and one
that may have actually done okay if it didn’t have such a prestigious title attached to
it. It’s funny, there’s a lot of things I
don’t like about Super Paper Mario but its strengths really become apparent when you
see a version where they’re all missing. At least it was unique in story, locations,
characters - they couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a new paint monster as the
main villain, it’s just back to basic Bowser. Without a doubt, nostalgia is a powerful thing. Even after hearing all the negativity concerning
Color Splash, I still got excited when I ordered a copy for this video, thinking there would
still be some semblance of what I loved in there somewhere. The series means a lot to me, and I fear that
it will only be in memory if the recent titles are anything to go off of, but who knows. We’ve seen some crazy spiritual successors
fill a void that fans have been yearning for. In fact, in the process of writing this script,
an indie game called Underhero came onto my radar which cited Paper Mario as one of its
major inspirations. It has a lot of cleverness and charm in its
story since you play as a bad guy instead of the typical hero, but the best part is
its twist on battle mechanics - you dodge and attack very similar to the action command
system, but everything happens in real time. You have a stamina meter that refills as you
successfully avoid incoming damage, so while you CAN just spam the attack button, you have
to balance it with being winded and vulnerable. It even deals a critical hit if you pull off
a “groovy” shot, but since it’s not turn-based, this occurs when you swing to
the beat of the background music. You learn different enemy patterns as you
progress, but you can also bribe them to avoid battle altogether or talk to them before you
duke it out to gain information. And I don’t know, there’s just something
super satisfying about seeing that beautiful Level Up screen again. While it’s not exactly like Paper Mario’s
system, it IS similar to the series just in how engaging and unique it is. I highly recommend checking it out if you’ve
been craving a fix like the classics. Now certainly, there is a dedicated fanbase
that swears by Super Paper Mario’s quality, and hey, maybe there was some stuff I didn’t
get to in Color Splash that picks up the pace. I want to hear from you: what are some of
your favorite things about either of these games, what do they have that the other entries
were lacking? Or if you think they weren’t as good, tell
me your own versions of how you would improve them. Get creative with it, write ‘em out in the
comments below and let’s talk about it. Thanks for watching another episode of Bad
Game Design, remember that the goal here is not to bash a title that some people hold
dear - it’s to talk about how they could be better so that hopefully we’ll see even
more innovation from games yet to come. I’ll see you guys next time. Stay frosty my friends. Wow, people have been asking for another Bad
Game Design for a long time. I’m glad the Donkey Kong 64 video had been
so well received, but I always tell people that I HAVE been making more of them, they
just are under different names, so I made a playlist of other “Bad Game Design”
related videos that you can check out if your hankering for more of my rare negative side
on the endslate. As always huge thanks to this month’s patrons,
your support means the world to me and helps keep the show running. Special shoutout to Indigo Fenix who I liked
even better in the Vertigo Remix. If you enjoy my channel, feel free to chip
in a few bucks and get some frosty rewards in the process at patreon.com/snomangaming.
