PAPER MARIO: The Dark Side of Nostalgia | GEEK CRITIQUE

you remember how exciting it was when you were a kid when you'd find out that a new game that you were really looking forward to was coming out i don't think i could ever forget how hyped i was the day that i saw this the year was 1997. nintendo had just brought out the most powerful game console the industry had ever seen and i just found out that one of my favorite super nes games the game that had made me a mario fan was getting a direct sequel on the nintendo 64. it seemed like such a no-brainer super mario rpg2 and then i looked past the title and saw what this game actually looked like huh that didn't seem like what i was expecting in fact it didn't look like what anybody expected out of an n64 game after so many decades of games being locked to two dimensions true 3d was finally possible and it was just taken as given that this was what games were gonna look like from now on anything else would be anachronistic it took a generation or two for the industry to realize that a game like this still had value the three dimensions didn't make for inherently better games than two dimensions but in 1997 a cartoony 2d mario sprite wasn't retro it was just old and i don't think game critics of the time really knew what to make of it mostly they seemed to take the game's visuals as being indicative of its target audience this looks like a silly cartoon because it's for kids and hey that's fair miyamoto said as much i was a kid at the time and while i do remember being a bit let down that it looked so different i was open-minded about it i mean come on who cares what it looks like it's still a sequel to one of my favorite games oh i couldn't wait to play it but i would have to wait i would have to wait for what seemed like a very very long time show do you have anything you'd like to add to that canon i like to be on the movie by the time this game that i've been looking forward to since i was nine years old was actually finished was actually in my hands my voice had changed i said get out of here what's wrong with you paper mario a game that by all appearances was targeted at kids was released right when i was on the cusp of no longer being one right as i hit that awkward age where you're a little too desperate to prove that you're not a kid anymore these colorful cartoon graphics these corny character designs this irreverent infantile tone this wasn't the world i knew these weren't the characters i'd loved this was not the game i had been looking forward to for all those years nintendo had lied to me this was not super mario rpg2 when i was 13 i didn't judge paper mario for what it was i dismissed it for what it wasn't but when i was 13 i was an idiot and it's time to find out just how big of an idiot was i right to overlook this game for failing to live up to my personal childhood memories of an entirely different game or was i just being a hard-headed nostalgia-blind juvenile jackass it's time to take off the rose tinted glasses forgive the lack of dino and finally finally see paper mario for what it is instead of what i wanted it to be and the reason i have this opportunity is because this episode of the geek is sponsored by you guys back tgc at patreon.com geekcritique to get early access to videos hang out with me in an exclusive discord chat and get behind the scenes content thank you to all my supporters i literally couldn't do any of this without you alright let's get critiquing [Music] the sega saturn sony playstation and nintendo 64 represented a paradigm shift more than any era i've yet experienced the advent of polygonal 3d visuals fundamentally changed what video games were and it took a while for the industry to figure out how things could work in this new paradigm view through a modern lens the aesthetic of early 3d titles may look awfully barren something like this lacks a lot of the visual identity of its previous gen counterpart but that's because three-dimensional was its visual identity nobody had ever seen a game look like this and given how radically the third dimension changed how they played you didn't really need much more with a handful of exceptions the visual styles available to this era could be defined almost entirely as either cartoony or uh realistic that's why paper mario looking like it did cause such a stir in 97. the first thing we knew about paper mario is appropriately the first thing you notice a visual style so unique they named the game after it but this is anything but a throwback paper mario evokes the style of a pop-up book come to life n64 games would often use 2d sprites for objects collectibles or decoration it's why these trees always face the camera but paper mario flips the script rendering the environment in 3d but building all of its characters out of super expressive 2d sprites despite the critics of the time and me at 13 who were all up our own butts about this game looking too cutesy for our very mature tastes paper mario's stylized vigils have helped to stand the test of time a whole lot better than most of its contemporaries i mean how many sequels in 64 games are still trying to evoke such a similar style despite the visuals though the structure of individual areas tends to be very much in the same vein as mario rpg blocky 3d geometry that looks like it was carved straight out of the ground floating on a 2d background and if there is one thing that team josh got completely wrong about this game that might be it there is so much more mario rpg in here than i ever gave it credit for the overarching story is the same in broad strokes the game opens with a one-on-one fight against bowser mario gets flung out of the castle we see a long fall from a wide shot cue the logo mario learns that his rival has broken the ability for wikis to come true and seeks the power of seven stars to restore it in japan the connection's even more obvious as paper mario's shooting star summit keeps its original name star hill not that the connection wasn't obvious anyway look at those stars getting out of the ground i haven't even scratched the surface a karate dojo a toad composer a forest maze a lone rodent in the middle of a desert it's so close at times it gave me a strange sense of nostalgia for a game i'd never actually played much of before the aesthetic might be different but this absolutely is a spiritual successor to super mario rpg i might even go so far as to call it a spiritual remake but don't get it twisted it's only in spirit because as fun and surprising as these homages are there's a very good reason they changed the name team kash might have been an idiot but he was right about one thing paper mario is not super mario rpg2 while square's taken a mario rpg might have been a little more streamlined a little more accessible a little more mario than their usual fare it was still cast from the same mold the same principles the same standards it was a squaresoft rpg why wouldn't it be but of course well let's just say that by 97 square and nintendo weren't exactly on speaking terms the sequel would have to be developed by someone else the prospect of following up a square game without square must have been daunting if you can't be better than you're gonna be less than by default unless you do something to be different if the previous game was trying to marry mario's platforming roots with the conventions of an rpg then paper mario is a game determined to break from convention most traditional jrpgs have their roots in tabletop games where complex mathematical values get fed through random dice rolls to dictate what a character can do and how effective they are of course you don't need to know what these numbers mean to have a good time with pokemon but it's still the backbone of the game's systems but paper mario is a game where this is your stat screen defeating enemies gets you star points collect 100 star points the counter resets and mario and only mario levels up but you gain points on a curve strong enemies relative to you will get you more weaker enemies eventually stop being worth the effort and if you're too far ahead they're not worth anything since there are no random encounters this effectively eliminates even the pretense of grinding when mario levels up you can choose to increase one of these three numbers hp is your health fp powers your attacks and bp bp is something else entirely let's put a pin in it but leveling up makes absolutely no difference in how much damage you can dish out are how hard enemies hit attack and defense stats do still exist but instead of scaling with your level they get buffed by your equipment and when i say equipment i just mean mario's shoes and mario's hammer that's it that's all there is no polka dresses or work shirts or lazy shells or boo boo boo boo boo boo tub tub rings what i'm saying is that equipment isn't something you can customize you won't get to a new area and need to swap out your old gear for better stuff that's one of those conventions we've left behind mario just finds better upgrades at specific points over the course of the adventure and they apply automatically and while mario might amass a sizable squad of allies these don't work anything like traditional rpg party members instead the game calls them partners only one of them can fight alongside mario at a time but they can be swapped during battle they don't have hit points but they can still be hit and will have to set out a few turns if they are they don't level up with mario instead they're powered up by super blocks that you find by exploring the overworld and each partner has distinct abilities and attacks unique to them unique both in terms of abilities and as it turns out in terms of controls the timed hits battle system that i loved so much has been renovated and improved to the point that honestly the original game kind of looks basic in comparison what used to be timed hits are now known as action commands and that distinction is important different moves now rely on unique control methods jumps are still all about timing the a button but the hammer has you pull back and charge your swing on the control stick defense timing is still present too and it feels completely different than the super nintendo game man 24 years of muscle memory is awfully hard to unlearn all of this makes paper mario an aggressively non-traditional example of its genre it's not a square rpg in the shape of a mario game it's a mario game in the shape of an rpg okay let me explain a classic mario game builds its challenges around specific stage hazards these are always introduced fairly safely but once a player has a chance to understand how they work they're iterated on made more dangerous or numerous mixed and matched with other hazards and platforms and challenges and that challenge builds and builds and builds until you overcome some sort of an ultimate crescendo and then the game moves on to something else this is critical to mario's progression to the momentum of the adventure once the level designers have mined the best challenges they can from the concept and a player has proved their mettle we don't linger mario never lets a good idea over say its welcome it keeps moving forward paper mario might not be a platformer but it's built from that same blueprint let's use bub bombs as an example they're only capable of hitting you with this dinky little attack but as soon as you attack them the fuse is lit and now if you hit him again they explode and if you don't hit him again then as soon as it's their turn they're gonna explode anyway so the optimal strategy the game teaches you with the bombs is to not hit them until you're in a position to take them out on the same turn then you can light them up with any attack but you've got to deal the last blow with a ranged attack or just make goombario blow himself up i mean what's he gonna do the babon concept is introduced iterated upon mixed and matched with all the other enemy types which of course also all have their own unique properties then before any of this can overstay its welcome it's all discarded and the game moves on to something new koopa troopas have high defense until you knock him over with a jump flying enemies can't be hammered spiked enemies can only be hammered powerful hyper attacks need to be dodged and it just keeps going learning the ins and outs of what your foes can do and the quickest most efficient way of overcoming them is the name of the game experience points don't dictate how effective you are your literal experience does this strategy effectively translates the formula of a traditional mario platformer into a turn-based combat system it's built around unique mechanics and obstacles it teaches you through gameplay it's simple to understand but it's got a surprising amount of hidden depth and uncovering that depth is something that happens naturally through the game design which is not to say that it's always easy the most pleasant surprise i had with this game was how like unabashedly challenging it is paper mario features unabashed unapologetic game overs and when you get one there's no option to continue from a checkpoint there's no way to continue at all you're just booted all the way back to the title screen and you have to restart from wherever you happen to last save the game while i do understand why some would call this outdated at this point i think it's refreshing it seems like more and more failure in games comes with no real consequences so afraid are developers of alienating a player and if that's what the developer is going for i'm totally fine with it not every game needs this sort of thing but real game overs are becoming a lost art and paper mario makes for a compelling argument for what we might be losing take the situation i'm in right here i'm on the ropes if i knew i could just restart from a checkpoint i might not care so much because if i fail or even throw the fight i could just respawn like nothing happened use a few healing items and walk right through this but here i have to focus i have to plan my tactics well i have to try if i fail this action command fail to defend if i fail i've lost a lot more than just one fight i've lost all the progress i've made through this dungeon this completely changes the tension of the game how invested i am in it and what i'm willing to risk to stay in the fight a pretty common issue in a lot of games is that players will stockpile good items trying to save them for when they need them and wind up just never using them but in paper mario i was incentivized to use these incredibly powerful incredibly useful items because of scenarios like this pushing that further is yet another break from your usual rpgs you can only hold 10 items at once and duplicates don't stack but you can only pull that tension for so long like its predecessor paper mario is an rpg where a great deal of actual gameplay happens outside the boundaries of turn-based combat overworld movement is right in line with what you'd expect from a first party n64 game that is to say it's nice and responsive but mario moves a step or two slower than you'd really prefer fortunately the z button causes him to with a burst of speed this move is called mario's spin dash okay who do you think you're fooling but unlike a real spin dash your momentum doesn't carry into a jump so you wind up moving around like this most of the time like i said standard n64 era stuff here you're a little too slow but you can tap a button to get a burst of speed this is a notable break from one of my favorite things about mario rpg that game's overworld movement was replicating the speedy precision of a platformer now paper mario is the one that's basic in comparison it works perfectly well for what it is but i would have appreciated if paper mario could move more like mario mario dead in 64. i'm not saying i think the game should have been more focused on platforming challenges by any means just that i'd have preferred if gameplay in the overworld had felt more like a platformer but how about that overworld where the previous game split its locales into a map screen paper mario's world is interconnected in less capable hands this could make progression a chore when the game expected me to hike all the way back to toad town after the second chapter i was worried it might but unlike mario rpg paper mario's progression isn't linear toad town encompasses the bulk of the game's shops and side quests every area of the game branches off from here and that's fantastic it means toad town winds up serving the same branching hub function that peach's castle did i think one reason i have trouble sticking with rpgs stems from the fact that if i go a few days or a few weeks or a few months without playing one it's easy to come back and have no idea where i was but toadtown features a fortune teller complete with an industry standard disco ball who will give you a hint about what to do next this carries the dual benefit of ensuring you don't lose your place and pointing lost players in the right direction it's nice hi future josh here i'm editing the episode now and i'm kind of realizing that like people are gonna wonder why the footage quality keeps changing uh it's because i was trying out different ways to play early on i started out emulating the game on dolphin but i was worried i'd have to edit out too much stuttering so then i switched to the n64 version for a bit but ultimately decided it was just too low resolution and muddy so i finally decided to go with the wii virtual console version which does have a handful of small issues but it was sort of the best trade-off between consistency and quality so yeah alright now you know it doesn't take long for a loop to emerge the story is split into eight chapters and they're surprisingly episodic mario learns where a star spirit might be held sets off from toad town in that direction overcomes obstacles meets new characters adds new partners fights new enemies and finds new abilities he ultimately uncovers a dungeon of some kind engages in a stronghold showdown against the captor's boss rescues a star spirit and hits the end of chapter then it's time to backtrack to toad town and figure out where to go next it's a testament to how well designed the game is and how much variety it has that this does not feel repetitive just like the battle system each chapter is built on a steady stream of fresh fun gameplay ideas that are introduced explored and discarded never well rarely letting anything overstay its welcome and while the way forward may always be fairly clear progression is structured not rigid there are quite a few optional side quests and areas that can be targeted at your leisure in fact one memorable play section saw me set off in one direction get a game over and lose that progress then choose a completely different direction and find a bunch of totally different stuff to do paper mario is generally a much slower game than its predecessor movement is slower battles are slower the world is much larger and the time you spend in any one area is much higher but calling it slower makes it sound like a negative maybe it's more accurate to say it takes its time more its pacing is slower but it does more with it more variety in areas more strategy in battles more puzzles more enemies and most impressively more cohesion in the last game you remember this i jumped on an enemy and went what overworld traversal was entirely walled off it was a separate system from turn-based combat but in paper mario if you jump on an enemy [Music] how you enter battles actually matters this is genius in its simplicity integrating mario's platforming roots into rpg combat oh and enemies can also get the first strike look if this was as deep as the game got i still think paper mario would be a perfectly charming enjoyable and unique experience but it would run the risk of being perhaps too streamlined every battle would be predicated on the same relatively small pool of actions which would get stronger through upgrades and which would expand through partners but the player wouldn't have a whole lot of choice paper mario would have little in the way of variability customization or replayability and these are areas where traditional rpgs tend to thrive but how do you do that without over complicating the system or overwhelming the player for the answer let's unpin this and see it was a badge it was a badge i'm very clever bp stands for badge points the more bp you have the more badges you can equip and individual badges cost different amounts to equip depending on how powerful or useful they are the game itself makes no distinction between different types of badges but for the sake of the critique i will active badges give mario additional special moves for instance your hammer can normally only hit the frontline enemy on the ground but the hammer throw badge lets you slam him down from anywhere give your jump status effects hit every enemy on screen with a quake use multiple items in one turn time your hits to jump on enemies in sequence you don't learn new moves from level ups in this game you equip them through badges and because of that the scope of what you can do in battle is always increasing passive badges affect mario's stats or otherwise change his attributes this is where smart customization comes into play i got wiped against this fiery piranha plant but with a fire shield and ice power badge i turn things around normally if you want to switch partners mid-battle that takes up a turn but there's a borderline op badge that lets you do it for free you can make enemies drop more items on defeat ease up the timing on action commands or even make it so attacks will sometimes just miss completely if mario's at low health and as much as i love timed hits the all or nothing badge was one of my favorites if you time the action command right you do more damage but if you miss it you do no damage it's high reward high risk field badges affect gameplay outside of battle the first attack badge makes it so that if you stomp a weak enemy in the field you'll just skip combat entirely this only works on enemies that wouldn't give you any star points anyway but the level curve scales fast enough that for all intents and purposes it'll work most of the time when you need to backtrack but if there's one badge that really impressed upon me how brilliant this system was it's speedy spin mario spin dash goes faster and further and by combining this with first attack boom traversal is more fun the overworld movement doesn't bother me half as much and backtracking isn't a cure because you can move faster yeah i know bottoms up there's a bad shop in toad town that rotates out a small selection of badges but most of them are found in the overworld given how useful they are you have a real incentive to search out every nook and cranny and invest in the world because the things you find are actually worth it it's just perfect how this system operates you don't need to know math it's so freaking simple that a seven-year-old could understand it and i know that because my friend who sold me this card was seven when he played it yet despite the simplicity badges had so much depth so much strategy so much variety and so much fun the badge system really just makes paper mario creative cohesion is all over the game design the star pieces that mario needs to restore people's witches aren't just colorful mcguffins to collect they're characters in their own right and every time you rescue one you gain access to new in-battle abilities driven by more star power partners meanwhile aren't just party members they aren't just useful in battle each one also comes with a gameplay function in the overworld but while they may be more integral to gameplay the story itself isn't really character driven not even to the same degree that mario rpg was like nobody really has an arc the way that mallow did partners do come with plenty of flavor bombette is a ditzy hothead bow is a pushy trickster lika lester starts out as an enemy and even gets his own battle theme but they wind up having very little plot significance outside of their initial introductions only gumbario really continues to get much in the way of dialogue and that's purely because of his utterly brilliant tattle ability in battle it gives you well-written and often hilarious information about enemy weaknesses and lets you permanently see how much hp that enemy type has left it's a big improvement on malo's psychopath outside of battle they wrote unique dialogue for like every room in the game it's crazy but partners don't interact with each other they almost never appear on screen together and so they end up feeling more like game mechanics than characters in a story but i don't say that to disparage paper mario it's a different kind of game and it works for what it's going for it's just a little less character driven and a lot more situation driven in fact it occasionally goes upwards of half an hour with no battles whatsoever there are intermissions between each chapter where the story cuts to the castle and you actually play as peak the goal here is usually reconnaissance pete needs to figure out where a star spirit is held so that she can relay that information to mario as a story concept i love this peach might have gone back to spinning the whole game kidnapped but playing as her allows her to retain the agency she had in mario rpg gameplay-wise the whole system is turned on its head pete has no combat no access to items no equipment but it was always a sequence i looked forward to because it was always different enough to be refreshing sometimes you'll be sneaking among guards in light stealth sections or even disguising yourself as enemies to evade them but other intermissions seem to baking a cake for a giant shy guy or answering trivia questions on a game show at one point paper mario subverts your expectations entirely as she just walks in on a conversation that tells her exactly what she needs to know after about 10 seconds of gameplay as with mario rpg bowser is one of the biggest highlights here managing to come across as both a threat to be taken seriously and a really endearing blowhard i laughed out loud when i found his diary luigi at least goes up before the credits this time but he spends the whole game holding the fort and his frustration at being left out of yet another adventure was hilarious it's an interesting take on the character later that year luigi's mansion would codify him as more of a shuddering scaredy-cat than a passive-aggressive misfit in an era when a lot of games still struggled with localization the dialogue throughout paper mario is charming well-written witty and genuine and genuine is a good word in its tone paper mario is earnest it's cozy and familiar it still carries that sense of whimsy but like a lot of fairy tales there's always just something a little bit off about it a little warped a little demented you'll be exploring around this sweet little penguin village watching the snowfall and enjoying the jolly music and then a cartoon penguin with x's in his eyes shouldn't be unnerving but it hits that way because of how unexpected it is and how well the game sets up the context this turns into a whodunit story where mario has to prove he wasn't the one who did it and don't worry mayor penguin wasn't really dead a bit later i'm exploring the snowy mountain area huh look at that the first mario game on this platform had a mirror room and so too will the last it all comes around shut up that doesn't count ooh and the mirror effect persists inside the palace too and in this room and in this room and just when you're starting to think it's overstaying its welcome what you can walk behind it you can go back you can even go outside the entire palace is split into two dimensions almost what you do on one side of the mirror affects things on the other side meaning that what was just a cool effect is now the central gimmick of the entire palace another sequence sees mario exploring a haunted mansion with absolutely nothing to fight it's pure puzzle solving backed by strong thematic elements and it works so well and oh my god you guys that's that's the old mario design in a game that's not as old well you know the rules i've gotta go talk about power rangers and ninja turtles and pro wrestling for some reason yet another enormous conversational tangent brought to you by the geek critique there's a reason i named it that often a new area will give you some kind of tooth sequence where it's not entirely clear exactly what you're supposed to do and yet it's not frustrating you get to spend a bunch of time exploring the world talking to the characters enjoying the themes and getting invested it manages to be a ton of fun to just kind of hang out in this game and if i replay it that obtuseness won't get in the way because i'll come in knowing what to do while you can't skip story scenes entirely you can fast forward dialogue by holding down the b button man i wish more rpgs did stuff like that it's gonna make this thing so much more replayable and i just want to cut in one more time here editing this episode actually made me miss the game and i've actually started replaying it again so there you go but my favorite chapter in the whole game and a slice of everything that makes paper mario great it's chapter 5 hot hot times on lava lava island the chapter starts with mario and pals making the acquaintance of a professor named colorado who serves as a story companion throughout the chapter he's a brilliant archaeologist a daring explorer and a seeker of lost artifacts or so he says you also meet a whale named whale he'd love to ferry you to lovalova island but he's got a stomachache so you huh yeah the n64 sure did feature some bizarre recurring elements across its library on the ride over i remember thinking huh those birds look familiar where have i seen those before what the whole chapter is a love letter to yoshi's island and how perfect is that that game's hand-drawn aesthetic translates perfectly to paper mario's pop-up book come to life come to think of it i think paper mario was seating this from the beginning there are little elements of every mario game sprinkled in here but it's got yoshi's island down to the core by the power of one of those intentionally obtuse hanging out in the village getting to know the people sequences we learn three things number one they're teasing raphael the raven he is probably going to be in this chapter so that's exciting number two there's no way to get into the volcano and the star spirit is in the volcano so that's gonna be a problem number three when mario was a baby the yochis rescued him now the baby yochis are lost in the jungle and mario has to return the favor incredible history often rhymes so you make your way through the wilds pushing through the underbrush to save those kids their babysitter even joins the party you fight those squibs save those kids and discover a statue of raphael the raven with a space for some sort of artifact no past josh that's not gonna work you dumbass the village elder repays you for your act of kindness by giving you a jade raven and i wonder where that could go this opens the way to the man himself and you know it says a lot about how incredibly strong the boss design was in yoshi's island that i'm even this excited about it like i recognize this is an excellent game but it never really gelled with me the way that it did with some players i haven't even played all the way through it probably since the 90s but i still remember how creative and awesome this boss was raphael lists his ravens to help you get into the volcano he also gives you something called the ultra stone like available for your home in 1995 only on nintendo 64. man that name was awesome i wish they'd stuck with it throughout the game you've been able to upgrade one of your partners whenever you found a super block giving them more abilities and once again giving you great incentive to think outside the box and explore well with the power of the ultrastone you can upgrade them all a second time complete with an expanded set of abilities like i had no idea i was even gonna get to do this that's so cool the volcano is just this long grueling challenge this is a showcase for character lighting another subtle thing the game evokes to strike a mood even with its cartoony paper-thin aesthetic colorado accompanies you throughout the volcano and by now you've learned his bravery is more recklessness his drive for treasure is a dangerous obsession and his brilliance is only in his vocabulary he starts out looking like an homage to indiana jones but turns out to be more of a parody yet no matter how many times he gets into trouble his dialogue and personality are so much fun and the game is so well written he never wears out his welcome at the heart of the volcano you find the chapter boss the lava piranha it's no mega smilex but it'll do it put up a fight but with the bad brilliance i mentioned earlier i took him down this led into a volcanic escape sequence you know how much i love those ah maybe the stakes aren't as high as the game wants me to think they are chapter 5 is paper mario at its most creative its most reverential its wittiest its funniest its very best its a slice of everything great about this game and it's for reasons like this that i spent the majority of my time with paper mario kind of kicking myself for being too headstrong and hard-headed to appreciate it 20 years ago but hold on i just said i spent the majority of my time feeling that way but 75 is a majority for that other quarter of its run time paper mario feels markedly different anime fans will be familiar with the concept of filler you see an anime series can not overtake the manga it's adapting so it has to slow things down way down while the good filler art can be fun it often comes across more like it's wasting time rather than just filling it poorly executed filler kills tension it's why five minutes on planet namic lasts seven episodes filler is often a necessity in the medium but it's an unfortunate one i bring all this up to draw contrast capture five took me from toadtown across the sea into a yoshi village through a jungle and into a volcano it was overflowing with unique set pieces fun challenges interesting characters and some of the best music in the game so let's contrast that with chapter four it's made up of four identical areas numerous repetitive easy enemy encounters and the most grating song in the game [Music] you don't even leave toadtown to get there you just find a toy box and hop in but man if you want to talk about spinning your wheels i hate to do this to you paper mario i really do but you go into the toy box fight a bunch of shy guys get a storeroom key go back to toe town go to the top use the key get a toy train throw it into the toy box take the train fight a bunch of shy guys get a frying pan go back to town give the chef to make a cake go back to the toy box find a bunch of thai guys give this cake to gourmet guy for a sequence that's actually really funny but oh my god come on and with him gun you take the train again fight a bunch of kai guys find a dictionary take it back to tow town to learn the order you've got to hit these boxes in or consider yourself and get lucky take the train one more time find a bunch of fat guys meet a new partner fight a bunch of thai guys then finally you find a boss and the boss is great but at this point i've gone back and forth and back and forth so many times and i'm just so sick of fighting so many die guys video games don't need filler i wish the modern aaa industry would learn that that's not even the only offender a few chapters later we get flower fields now this one starts out kind of cool throughout the whole game i had been finding these magical seeds from the bulbs in the overworld a gardener in toad town will plant them and so i spent the whole game assuming this was an optional side quest but in fact planting them all opens a secret door to the fields and like that's really neat something that looks like a side quest turning out to be something a lot more important once mario's in there a giant talking tree tells him he needs to grow a giant beanstalk and to do that he'll need beans soil and water the theming here is unnerving full of these odd sad plant people who lament their own inability to move the area is sort of like final fantasy 7's wall market an objective driven dungeon where you talk to the right people to get what you need but it's just not structured very well the central hub branches off in six directions each one leads to one particular character and none of them are signposted well enough that you can really keep them straight i guess it's more interesting than shy guy's toy box but it feels even more tedious especially because for some reason this part of the game where you have to do so much criss-crossing and backtracking is also the one time in the whole game where enemies respawn every time you leave the screen they're on again at least the boss of the area was a blast and actually he really turned the battle system on its head nonetheless i think it's telling that my aforementioned buddy who played this when he was a kid put 27 hours into paper mario but never made it out of filler fields for the most part paper mario manages to be either better than or more often different than mario rpg but if there's one area where paper mario just can't compare to its spiritual predecessor [Music] it's the music and like this was inevitable i don't even like most rpgs and even i know it's almost impossible to beat square at music now there are some really great compositions in here several songs seem to be built on motifs from earlier in the n64's life [Music] i especially love the shooting star summit theme [Music] when the music is good it's really good but a lot of the time it's just a little i don't know understated repetitive i like the music just fine it gets the job done but a little too often it just gets the job done then again i've never worked for ik in so maybe my imagination just isn't good enough man like i have as much reverence for miyamoto as the next guy but nes kids were next level about it whoo as long as i'm making comparisons to mario rpg most of the minigames in paper mario also tend to be a little basic even the best stuff like that cooking game and the quiz show get their charm from dialogue and flavor text not so much gameplay that's how a lot of paper mario's non-battle elements compare to its predecessor as with the overworld movement as with the music the minigames here are perfectly serviceable but there's nothing on the level of the midas river course or the moleville minecart ride but let's not overstate things whether i hold it up to mario rpg or not whether i consider a few characters to be a little fillery or not paper mario is still a fantastic game i can forgive myself for being a dumb edu teen and holding it against my nostalgia when i first played it but even when i got it on virtual console in 2007 i still only made it to koopa village i mean damn that was the same time i got into super metroid so you'd think i'd have seen the light by then but maybe it's not just my own dumb fault i'm gonna do something i've never done before and just quote my own notes here here's what i jotted down right after i finished the prologue i can see why some would consider this to be an awfully slow start but i think it's one of those games that eases you in and there's a lot of depth to be found by taking your time and enjoying it although would i really be incentivized to dig so deep and find things to enjoy about it if i wasn't thinking about all the cool things i could say in a video or would the slow start actually be a problem then the slow start would be a problem then yes paper mario is a game that waits for it it takes its time it demands your investment and attention the story beats in the prologue are fine the dialogue is as charming as ever but where mario rpg kept its conflict a mystery while you learned its mechanics paper mario front loads every detail of its plot before you even get out of the prologue and that really slows things down it's probably a necessary evil in light of the episodic structure of the game but paper mario tries to ease you in so carefully than it always lost me even worse the gameplay at the beginning is so rote and basic and boring not at all representative of what it's gonna be i'm sure mario rpg tossed you into the deep end but even as an eight-year-old entirely unaccustomed to turn-based combat i could get my head around it it still had optional tutorials it just trusted you to figure out the basics paper mario is skewed way too far in the other direction you don't even have action commands at first this is by no means a game breaker the gameplay is exceptional once you get past the prologue and it's only an hour or two of a 25 plus hour game after that point paper mario takes off the water wings and dunks you in that deep end and that's appreciated like i said last time mario rpgs would not always live up to these ideals but that's early in the game late in the game i found that even the venerated battle system was feeling a little rickety for one thing as much as i'll praise the action command system there isn't always enough variety with them i kept getting new partners and finding out oh okay it's yet another one of those moves where you pull back on the control stick it's still great it just starts feeling a little repetitive early on the usefulness of star power is balanced by how limited it is how little you can do with it and how slowly it charges but every time mario rescues another spirit that meter increases there are even badges that'll let you charge it faster and late game abilities give you access to incredibly powerful moves that were formerly locked behind rare or expensive single-use items and that's when the battles start feeling unbalanced in mario's favor the game gets kind of easy even to the detriment of its creativity the guardian of the final star spirit the crystal king is an incredible boss with a super fun gimmick that gets foreshadowed and built up throughout his palace at first i use my partners to buff mario's attack buff his defense power him up but i was still struggling it was still a fight and i was having a blast then i noticed i could use a star power to just just lock the crystal king out of moving for three turns and that kind of took the wind out of my sails but with all seven star spirits rescued i'd have to climb shooting star summit one more time to open the way forward paper mario does a really exceptional job setting up ideas hours ahead of paying them off from the beginning in fact the first thing you do when you take control is walk around the palace meeting the citizens of the kingdom teasing all the places you'll go and the people you'll meet much later in one intermission i had very nearly climbed to the top of the tower's peak only for bowser to anticlimactically tear her away stoking my determination to get mario up there and if you want to talk payoff right before i climbed the summit i decided to go back to mario's house one more time and discovered that the people i'd helped throughout the game had been sending letters thanking mario letting him know how things were going hoping he'd visit again and wishing him luck wishing me luck man this game is so cozy let's do it for them up into star haven a town whose design makes it clear that you've moved beyond mario's world and closer to sanctuary and speaking of which when i made it onto this scene i froze this is the sanctuary from the intro every single time i've started the game up i'd heard this song in the intro i'd seen this place and now i was finally here paper mario sets it up and pays it off the star spirits give mario a holy celestial baby carriage starship thing and he docks at bowser's castle for some reason i guess through the repetition of seeing it so much i'd kind of taken the fact that peach's castle was being suspended by bowsers is just like a cool visual but nope mario has to fight his way up through the keep to even get there bowser's castle is a gauntlet climbing higher and higher pushing through creative puzzles relying on all your partners and fighting through hordes of the toughest enemies in the game some of it kind of reminds me of a place i've been before and right when i thought i'd hit the top paper mario sets it up as the bosses of the very first capture make a comeback the koopa brothers see mario rpg had the axem rankers but paper mario reaches back before my time with these teenage mutant ninja turtle parodies oh these guys are so much fun and i guess they were talking to go say because they've got new powers i can't wait to see what they paper mario pays it off this is junior troopa he's been a recurring boss fight throughout the game he's the personification of a try hard and yeah you're okay he's also hilarious but like come on i wanted to fight the koopa brothers and the game had the confidence to know i'd want that and now i'm gonna wipe the floor with this guy paper mario began at peach's castle and after everything i've been through i'm finally back it's time to climb this tower and save pete once and for all once and for all yeah bowser claims he's got a way to multiply his power hold on this seems familiar oh man there's been so much yorkies island in here and they wouldn't do that would they they wouldn't [Music] nope they wouldn't i'm gonna be honest this last boss is quite an empty climax every few turns he uses the star rod to make himself invincible so you'll use the power of the stars to strip him of that power then just keep hammering away trying to invoke a status effect didn't work no particular strategy did anything so i just kept attacking he also heals a lot and four a lot which only serves to stretch it out even longer and although by the end i was so low on items that i had to start getting a little clever i still spent almost 20 minutes just wailing on him after an entire game of interesting creative strategic boss designs it's quite a letdown that the final one mostly just comes down to well spamming your numbers against his but as good as the rest of the game has been i guess it's not the biggest letdown especially when at least the narrative aspect of it works and maybe that was more the point there's a brief side battle where you play as peak and her partner twink which cements pizza's active role in the narrative it's been established that the stars get their power from people's wishes and nobody's had more time to hope than she has her conviction ultra charges the star's power which is what makes it possible to take down bowser there's some mumbo jumbo about how bowser's lost power is creating a feedback loop into his castle and with that we cut to a few days later paper mario really is ending where it began with a party at peach's castle except this time i know these characters i know this world and i am so happy i finally got to experience it [Music] the end of the last episode focused on the positive aspects of nostalgia but there's a very dark side to it too love without maturity yields passion without perspective fandoms turn toxic when too many people wield their preferences as a weapon to tear down everything that doesn't match it and everyone who doesn't agree with it and preferences especially if it's property where most fans become fans at a young age tend to be heavily tied to what you grew up with in the worst cases this can create an echo chamber as a subsect of fans reinforce the idea that whatever a series was when they were kids was correct and wonderful in the way it should be and anything that moves away from that ideal is wrong and insulting and offensive to what the original creators intended how dare something i loved as a child continue to appeal to children after i've stopped being one when i first played paper mario back in 2001 that's exactly what i did i was all passion no perspective i saw it only through the lens of what i wanted it to be and i dismissed it for failing to live up to the impossible standard of my own childhood memories i had a lot of growing up to do and i'm glad i did looking at this game through that very same lens that once led me to dismiss it now makes me realize just how much i've been missing out on in an almost bittersweet ethereal way i still feel that same spirit in paper mario it'll never mean to me what super mario rpg did but if i could have played it instead when i was eight i can see that it absolutely would have but paper mario is not super mario rpg and that's exactly what makes it so special it doesn't have to worry about getting out from under that game's shadow because it is in a whole different dimension paper mario is a break from tradition a break from the formula a break from expectations and in 2001 there had never been a game like it i was just a little too old and a little too young to see it that way [Music] you

Channel: The Geek Critique

Views: 184,731

Keywords: The Geek Critique, TGC, Geek Critique, Josh Wallen

Id: BCfvEITOz18

Length: 48min 18sec (2898 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020