Color Splash Three Years Later...

it's been three years [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] sudden tone shift sorry I couldn't keep that up the whole video it wouldn't worked but it probably gotten pretty annoying but seriously though it has indeed been three whole years since the release of Paper Mario Color Splash and it's been on my mind a lot it felt like a very big event in the Wii U's life and obviously for all the wrong reasons newer viewers might not even know that covering the unpleasantness surrounding the game was where I got my start Nintendo's had some controversies over the years but I tell ya this was a particularly heated one but the further we get from that controversy the more I wonder if I treated the game fairly I'll never deny that making a sequel the sticker star wasn't objectively wrong and at the very least extremely tone-deaf decision on Nintendo's part but did it deserve quite as much hate as it got did I myself give the game the credit it deserved go watch my review for my full thoughts but I did indeed say that it had a lot of good stuff going for it it just also had a lot of bad elements dragging it down but were they really that bad was it even possible for me to look at the game even somewhat objectively separate from all that controversy I asked myself these questions for years and the time has finally come to answer them so let's open up this old wound and take a look back at what some consider the Wii U's swan song and others consider the Wii U's swan song but in a more literal sense of what a swan song actually is which is a gross series of honks and hisses the first thing I'll say is that looking back on the whole Color Splash thing it's very surreal before the game was revealed I was doing all right I had maybe two thousand subscribers 2500 thanks to a couple collaborations I did with noggin so my foot was in the door and I was just sort of making whatever kind of stuff I felt like then one day Nintendo announced a direct and it's weird it's really weird because up until that point I had never recorded myself watching a Nintendo Direct for some reason I just got the idea in my head that I wanted to finally do it I wasn't even sure if I was gonna post the commentary on the channel or what and that was the very direct where Bill Trenton came on and gave us a casual little announcement of a silly new little paper mark game and wouldn't you know it it looked like a direct sequel to sticker star instead of well I mean you know what it could have been instead I've made a few opinion pieces by that point but no Nintendo news had hit me harder than that reveal so naturally I wasted no time I poured my thoughts onto the page shot the video put it together and got it out in pretty good time I was one of the first on the scene and immediately my video resonated with people I don't know exactly why some people tell me I just had some good points or that they appreciated it for being one of the few videos on the subject that wasn't just ranting and angry honestly I was just sharing how I felt I'd spent plenty of time being angry about Paper Mario in the past but I was done being angry I was just sad I felt defeated the flame of hope had finally been extinguished and I was just done whatever it was about my video I was surprised to find the new subscribers pouring in by the thousands it wasn't long before I found myself at 15k or so the noggin co.labs were my first tiny bump then after Color Splash I had a series of successful videos which gave me their own series of boosts and of course the rest is history but I think when it comes to my channel no single event will ever be as important as the problem with Paper Mario and that's why the memories of the reveal and the eventual release are so surreal the disappointment I felt about the game was juxtaposed against the fact that my youtube career was finally taking off in large part my channel exists because Paper Mario did what it did that controversy gave me the giant boost I needed to really get my channel going and that's just so strange to me it's like writing a bunch of books that go nowhere then writing a book about how sad you are and that's the one that sells a bunch and makes you a famous author speaking of that controversy though it's certainly worth reflecting on I've frequently looked back and asked myself if people overreacted where our knees to jerky where our takes too hot was it right to judge a game so far ahead of release and even if we were upset was it okay to make that big of a stink about it because the stink was big I know I always bring out these downvote ratios whenever I'm talking about this but even today they stand as good visual evidence of just how mad we all were I'm not gonna go too far into it because I've already talked about it in my previous Paper Mario videos but man every time I think about it every time I reach the same conclusion lots of folks are very sensitive to the idea of overreaction they don't like it when people jump on the hate bandwagon or whatever and there are plenty of situations where people do take it way too far and start you know harassing people and all that kind of stuff but personally all I saw surrounding Color Splash was just a bunch of upset people angry videos and down votes were pretty much the extent of it and in a case like that honestly I can't say that's such a bad thing because what would have happened if instead of all the outrage everyone had just made you know one or two quiet little comments and tweets and whatnot and then pipe down about it do you think Nintendo would have even noticed the disappointment because they've got a history of just not paying attention to what fans are feeling and saying but there is a way better chance that they saw this crazy outrage someone at Nintendo has to have seen how all their Color Splash videos we're getting down voted into oblivion at least someone did it end up getting through to the right people or making any sort of real difference well again I've talked about all that before but I feel like at the very least this backlash had a chance of doing something so yes my friends call me a fool if you will but even three years later I don't think the initial outrage was unreasonable people had a feeling and they communicated that feeling the outrage was large because there just happened to be that many people who shared that feeling do games sometimes get a lot of hate when they're revealed but then go on to be better than people expected sure but I've said it before and I'll say it again there is at least some merit to most fan backlashes like that at least when it comes to the creative and design aspects of games when that happens it means that something was not in place the company did something that didn't resonate with its customers and frankly I'd rather hear about it than have ever and shush up their feelings because they don't want to be too rash if you're mad at a company tell them they are lucky I mean it they are lucky that they have the ability to witness this kind of stuff now whereas before all they could do was wait for a game to flop financially then scratch their heads wondering what went wrong now they don't have to wonder the reasons for color splashes horrible financial failure are clearly outlined and documented edged into YouTube for all to see forevermore ah but now we come to the crux of this whole discussion when revisiting Color Splash for the first time in three years my real goal wasn't to figure out if we were right to yell about it on the internet but to figure out if my disappointment colored my perception of the game in my review I gave the game a middle-of-the-road 4 out of 7 saying that it had a lot of humor and charm and marked a dramatic improvement over sticker star but was bogged down by an unpleasant convoluted battle system and absurdly low difficulty and if anything has haunted me these three years it hasn't been the game per se but the niggling little voice in the back of my head constantly asking me if I was as impartial as I believed maybe I went into the game with the wrong attitude after all maybe I didn't give it enough credit maybe it was better than I was willing to admit which is why finally in preparation for this video I gave the game another go I figured it was the only way to get to the bottom of this and I must tell you dear viewers that I came away thoroughly surprised I can officially say that my first experience with the game was not a 100% accurate reflection of its quality its unpleasant elements are not as unpleasant as I originally thought they're worse record scratch sound before we get into that though I want to start with the good stuff because I had plenty of good things to say about the game in my review but this time in the same way the bad stuff disappointed me more than ever the good stuff impressed me more than ever and I got a say returning to the world has given me a new appreciation for just how gorgeous it all is I mean it's positively stunning the colors are exceptionally vibrant and the whole papercraft aesthetic is so spot-on every single thing has been made to look like paper ever and the game often employs these fun folding and unfolding animations that give it a real liveliness it's clear that a very clever team of designers spent a lot of time making sure that not only did the visuals look true-to-life but they were cleverly implemented in such a way that you can't go two steps without muttering oh that's cute here's the thing about the paper aesthetic though I've heard a lot of people make the argument that the game focuses so much on papery realism that it's actually distracting and removes them from the fantasy of the world indeed Paper Mario didn't use to be about paper as much as it was about characters that just happened to be flat like paper and you know what I can certainly see this viewpoint and when I first played the game I even felt the same way to a degree but this time when I was exposed to the world for the first time in years I no longer felt it was a problem I'm not trying to invalidate anyone's opinion here if you say you hate the paper thing I trust you completely but I wouldn't be surprised if there were at least a good number of people out there who are like me where if instead of Color Splash we had been given a quote-unquote real Paper Mario game with these same exact visuals we wouldn't have found much of a reason to complain you know what I mean I found myself scrutinizing the visuals to a certain degree because of my displeasure with the game but even if there was some merit to that scrutiny I can't help but feel like I might not have had the same feelings in the context of a fantastic new adventure like even if it was a fair criticism I might not have even thought of it or at least not thought it was a big deal at all because it's not just about the paper aesthetic that's not the only thing that makes the game look so good it's also about art style and atmosphere one of my biggest complaints about sticker star was that it was incredibly basic and almost entirely devoid of any real personality someone unfamiliar with the series could easily be convinced that it was Mario's first turn-based game ever and that was why all the areas were direct adaptations of Mario's basic biomes normal place ice plays desert place etc not Color Splash though even its opening areas are vibrant and interesting even the more standard types of Mario locations like the underground are rendered with so much more care in artistic and there are unique areas that are just so Moody and interesting you've got a poison filled park with beautiful landscapes in the background you've got a circus tent out in the woods you've got a luxury train riding through sunset vistas you've got a spooky Pirate Island housing a parallel world these locations are evocative they make me feel things they have artistic depth a lot of thought went into their design and there's even more good stuff here beyond the pretty visuals initially I was very much aware of the fact that the standard Paper Mario humor and charm were present in Color Splash but my second playthrough has made me all the more aware of how far they took it I didn't fully appreciate the first time how constantly the humor is thrown at you the silly quips are non-stop nary a character can open its mouth without the writers sticking some little gag in there every single sentence is a joke it's almost a little too much sometimes but seeing as the game isn't trying to be an epic story it fits the experience well and speaking of characters this is another area that has been vastly improved over sticker star I will say I did find the game's outright refusal to have real characters with real names a little annoying there are unique toads with unique jobs and personalities and roles in the story and yet they just can't have their own names and they can't even look that unique most of the time the fact that peach has a helper toad that's just a regular toad instead of toads worth says it all well if we use toadsworth then people are gonna wonder what the names of the other toads are though we can't have that but despite that annoyance as I said the game does give us some characters and even the sort of half step in that direction goes a long way compared to sticker stars legion of completely identical toads and on top of the visuals and the humor and the charm and the more unique characters the game is often a joy design-wise there are a ton of really clever sequences and you never really know what kind of interesting or funny situation you're going to get yourself into one moment you're helping ghosts in a hotel stuck in a Groundhog Day style time loop the next year in a gameshow run by snippets in a high-tech secret base the next year battling against a stake to cook it the right way there's so much there to surprise and delight around every twisty corner I originally thought Color Splash was something like a middle step between sticker star and the kind of proper Paper Mario game we've all been hoping for but I was wrong in certain ways it's more than that it might even be like three-quarters of the way there and that my friends is the real problem here Color Splash does so much right that it's all the more painful to realize that they squander the opportunity to make a game that was truly great despite not having a super in-depth story or a ton of original characters or RPG elements it could have still stood as a really solid entry in the series it could have still been a game that I wanted to return to from time to time just like the first few games but the developers took that opportunity and chucked it right in the toilet by introducing too many aggravating elements and ignoring basic game design philosophies when I first played Skyward Sword I recognized that it had some flaws but I was also enamoured by its innovations I loved all the new stuff it did with the Zelda formula and while I was disappointed with its plot the rest of the game was fantastic on my second playthrough however the novelty of its innovations had worn off and its issues were more glaring than ever I hated the extremely limited and linear world design and I spent half the game screaming at fight - just shut up already I know the Wii Remote batteries are low I'm an adult let me let my life Paper Mario Color Splash was a similar experience I did appreciate the good stuff more than ever so it's different from Skyward Sword in that way but the second time I was able to see the bad stuff more clearly despite the good stuff if anything that higher appreciation was what made its flaws stand out even more going in I told myself maybe the combat wasn't as slow and sluggish as I initially thought but nope it is just as much so if not more jumping back in and returning to the battle system I felt this weird mixture of annoyance and dread like oh no I've got to do all this again it's as I said in my review there's no good way to sort your cards so it just takes so so many inputs to find the ones you want stick them in the slot color them hit ready then flick the screen to play them even one simple jump attack can take a dozen or more screen presses and the cute little flicking thing you know where you flick the card and it goes up to the TV I got so tired of doing it so often that I would find myself trying to do it quickly or casually and of course half the time I did that it just didn't work and I'd have to try two or three times before taking my finger and doing a super deliberate upward swipe the whole thing is just so incredibly unintuitive and convoluted it feels like it exists purely to make us use the gamepad as much as possible and before a lot of you say it I know there's the pro option or whatever it is but that's what I've been describing all that does is gets rid of one single press when preparing your cards also no button controls don't help either you've still got to dig through your cards and place them and color them and everything then of course it goes beyond mere inconvenience you can't target specific opponents so you've got to just guess what will happen and hope for the best and if one guy dies one move too early or too late your whole strategy is borked and you waste a bunch of cards and speaking of wasting cards the simultaneous abundance of cards and annoyance and lost cards is just baffling I can't wrap my head around it I don't understand how it works like if you use a thin card somewhere wrong you lose it if you select more cards than you need to win a fight you lose the extras but then the game throws cards at you all the time it just floods your pockets with cards so much so that you'll never in a million years run out and you'll rarely need to buy anything that should mean I don't mind losing cards right no somehow it's still incredibly annoying it's like the worst of both worlds I honestly don't get it the real problem with all this is that it undermines the system that the game pretends to utilize and that could have actually made the game kind of interesting let me ask you why does a game limiter resource now let me answer you to:add challenge and strategy shooters force you to scavenge ammo so you have to be more careful about where and when you shoot RPGs make you use MP and such to cast more powerful spells so you're not overpowered by introducing breakable weapons breath of the wild made the early areas of the game particularly challenging like sticker star color splash uses a system where instead of being able to perform simple actions like jumping and hammering in battle literally everything is tied to a disposable item and to add to the system / sticker star it even brings in the paint mechanic you can choose to make cards more powerful by painting them and it's even up to you to decide how much paint to use but you got to watch out because your paint supply is limited these are the building blocks for a battling system that's a decently unique and has the potential to be quite challenging and engaging you can no longer take your simple moves for granted you've got to ration out everything and choose exactly when to use your precious paint sounds like an intriguing experience doesn't it no forever this just completely throws the whole system out the window it makes the limited card and paint thing entirely worthless there's no longer any strategy or conservation involved even with the abundance of cards and paint outside of battle the system could have been salvaged if individual battles were difficult enough but laughs difficult they are not paper mario games have never been difficult per se but i made the following analogy in the game explain discussion I took part in after the game's release playing the first few paper Mario's is like driving a car it's not hard but you do have to learn how to do it and pay attention and stay alert the whole time and every once in a while you might even take a wrong turn or get lost entirely or even run into a stop sign or something on a very bad day but playing color splash is like sitting in the passenger seat with the directions when the driver already has a pretty okay idea of where they're going you can give them directions but even if you kind of just don't do anything or say stuff randomly do probably be fun you might take a wrong turn every once in a while but it's never a problem for the driver to just turn around lots of Nintendo games are really easy but they can still be engaging and require some strategy or feature harder levels and modes for more experienced players but there's none of that here yeah if they've got a spike on their head you shouldn't jump on them yeah if they're flying you should jump on them there are basic elements of strategy but take a regular jump card and paint it all the way up and it can kill almost anything in the game by a bunch of fire flowers from the store and you will incinerate entire armies with little effort just throw whatever you got at the screen and in almost all cases things will work out just fine you want proof sometimes kamek pops up and plays some sneaky trick on you like turning all your cards into worn-out hammers or flipping them all over so you can't tell what you're picking teehee what a devious challenge oh wait no it's not just pick cards randomly who cares you'll still obliterate everything I'm used to Nintendo games being a little too easy believe me but every once in a while they take it so far that it actually ruins the game and if it's not bad enough that battling is unpleasant to do and way too easy how about you add almost entirely unnecessary to that list this is an area where my opinion actually differs significantly from my original review sticker star gave no xp for battles meaning that those battles basically accomplish nothing Color Splash then introduced paint scraps and if you collect enough of these you increase your max paint supply this was obviously a way of addressing sticker stars XP issue the first time I played Color Splash I actually thought paint scraps helped a little I felt that I had at least a little motivation to get into battles but alas there is a novelty that wore off by the second round you've got plenty of paint even at the beginning having more is it's okay I guess but it's just not a problem again because the game is so easy anyway therefore there is once again just about no reason to battle battling waste your cards and your time so in almost all cases it's better to just avoid everybody and flee from battle whenever you accidentally hit one and older games when you ran from battle you'd lose some coins and the enemy would stick around so if you swung back around later you'd have to face them again but in color splash they disappear as though you've beaten them running from battle is literally the most effective way to beat most enemies it's faster and it uses no resources every once in a while you'll fail to run a few times and decide to fight anyway but most of the time you just pop right on out of there and you're done this is a serious fundamental game design flaw I mean don't get me wrong I'm glad I'm not forced to battle a bunch when I don't like doing it but I have to wonder what the devs were thinking here they populated the game with tons of battles that accomplished next to nothing and then they were so blase about those battles that they decided we could just run from them if we wanted to it feels like they were going strictly for style over substance and didn't even stop to ask themselves basic questions about how their game should be designed how it should all fit together the experience the player would ultimately have with it I'm talking stage one design stuff because it's one thing to design an enemy that gives you nothing when you beat it in a regular Mario game it's an obstacle if you can get over it without it hurting you then you're good if you decide to take the extra couple seconds to stop on it because you feel like it or you want a couple coins that it gives you then fine either way it's over very quickly but long convoluted battles that ultimately accomplish nothing what were they thinking it was bad enough in one game but too they used the same system again and speaking of coins yeah I'll admit that is one thing you do get from these battles yeah you want to know why they don't help the game showers you with coins positively drowns you with them at all times you can farm like 1800 coins from Rochambeau temples any number of times and without actively trying to pick up coins in my recent playthrough like without farming them or anything I was maxed out after a couple hours no joke out in the first few hours without even trying and with that money what do you know you can just buy all the cards you want unlimited fire flowers forever kill an entire screen of enemies any time unlimited life shrooms make yourself effectively immortal you'll never run out of money so don't even worry about it the thing that's so frustrating about Color Splash is that it could have been vastly improved with only minor changes to the gameplay they could have made battling a more integral part of the experience if they just brought back the leveling system paint scraps act like star points you get a hundred you gain a level instead of getting HP ops after each grand paint star and max cards ups whenever every time you gain a level you get to choose between HP up max cards up and max paint up boom you've done it with a very simple change you've given more power to the player and even given them a reason to engage with your games mechanics or even if they weren't gonna change the core stuff like that they could have seen the feedback and improve the game even slightly with a patch or two adding in a difficulty mode that ramps down the card and coin drops and raises enemy HP or giving us a better way to sort and select cards when in battle no joke these tiny changes would have made the game twice as good I'm not exaggerating it would have taken an extremely small amount of effort to increase the game's enjoyment factor drastically I wouldn't even be making this video if they've done that they would actually have a decent game on their hands probably a six out of seven from me a whole two points higher than in my original review but they didn't do any of that no patches no improvements no nothing the fact that they would create such a broken system and then hardly even attempt to improve upon it makes it seem like they never really cared if the game succeeded or not let me next to nobody like for the worthless battling and sticker systems and sticker star so I don't even know what to say to a person or group of persons who decide to do it all over again in a sequel they were obviously going to make the exact game they wanted to make without caring about functionality or accessibility or any of that and in the end I guess that was their decision to make but from my perspective the missed opportunity is an absolute sin Nintendo is all about making fun games first and foremost so then being so blind to what would actually make the game fun in this case is extremely baffling and I know the games got some fans out there and you guys have probably been just fuming this whole time hearing me talk about how bad it is and hey if you love it I will respect that completely and I will certainly not say that you're wrong if you think the design is actually great wonderful extremely clever whatever however if you only played the game once around launch and you thought it was good or okay or whatever I have to very least encourage you to play it again and see if anything has changed as it did with me there is at least a chance that you'll see things differently or you won't and you'll keep loving the game forever that'd be fine too for me though Paper Mario Color Splash was and still is a massive disappointment but there's this idea that it was only disappointing because it wasn't identical to the first two games and I want to lay that idea to rest right now because more than ever I can see this game's merits more than ever I am able to appreciate the good things that this game brings to the table even without being a true Paper Mario 3 or having an epic story like Super Paper Mario Color Splash could have stood as a truly unique and still incredibly enjoyable entry in the series its downgraded elements would have still been a bit of a bummer but I would be too busy enjoying the rest of it to think about that too much but no just no I'm sure they weren't literally trying to make their game bad but they messed up the whole thing for from my perspective no good reason they doubled down on mechanics that were widely panned because that's just what they wanted to do they further convoluted an already unwieldy combat system because I don't know they broke rules of basic game design because mm-hmm so there you have it I have finally faced this ghost of my past and now I can move on it may never stop haunting me entirely but perhaps thus is the nature of ghosts I know this is just a gigantic can of worms to open up all over again but if you want to keep it respectful I'd love to hear your thoughts down in the comment have you played Color Splash since launch have your thoughts changed it all overtime or do you love it or hate it just as much as ever let me know and hopefully if we're lucky we won't have to deal with any more ghosts from the past for a while maybe we can just move on and end [Music]

Channel: Arlo

Views: 610,524

Keywords: puppet, blue, monster, nintendo, paper mario, color splash, review, revisited, wrong about color splash, bad, worse, bad game, good game, discussion, cards, battle system, too easy, better

Id: cU-nBmofZG0

Length: 30min 8sec (1808 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/rendumguy]

I don't really feel like being sad about this series. I'm just waiting to see if my prediction of a proper PM game is correct.

[u/[deleted]]

I agree with Arlo 100%