I remember being drawn to the first Paper Mario like a magnet.
It was in a video rental store, and I saw the N64 cartridge sitting on the bottom shelf. I didn’t know why Mario was paper, or why it was turn-based, but I immediately brought it home.
Of course, an RPG like Paper Mario can’t really be explored and beaten during a rental period, so I ended up buying it. I had to! The story, the characters, and the gameplay were so compelling that I had to see the adventure through to the end.
The Thousand Year Door was a beautiful follow-up on GameCube, which I first laid eyes upon at a WalMart. It was one of those demo kiosks where you had to stare up at the ceiling and snap your head backward to see. It continued the wonderful characterizations, thickened the plot, and introduced exciting new transformations for Mario that shook up the gameplay.
Super Paper Mario was memorable. Although stripping out the beloved traditional RPG elements, the game introduced a compelling tale of love and tragedy, alongside an interesting 2D-to-3D mechanic.
And then it all went downhill.
Unique, lovable, captivating characters were replaced with gimmicks of stickers and paint.
The modern entries have their own merit, and bring some amount of charm. But along the way, the franchise lost focus. Paper Mario became more about churning out a quick win for sales and marketing than it was about world-building.
It might have been when the father of Mario gave the Sticker Star team these directions:
There were two main things that Miyamoto-san said from the start of the project—”It’s fine without a story, so do we really need one?” and “As much as possible, complete it with only characters from the Super Mario world.” –Iwata Asks
Miyamoto was wrong.
Scott
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Sticker Star isn’t a great game, but I still think it gets too much hate. It’s certainly not terrible, just average.
Color Splash, on the other hand, is a good game. Sure, it too falls flat in some places, but I think the game’s writing is worth it. Really, I think the problem is that people want to judge it as an RPG, when in actuality it’s become more akin to an adventure game in the same vein as Secret of Monkey Island or Maniac Mansion. If I’m being honest (and you know I always am), the biggest thing holding the game back is the vestigial RPG mechanics.
I miss the old style, and would gladly welcome a return to form, but I can’t help but grit my teeth when I hear the same old copy-pasted arguments as to why these games deserve nothing but vitriol without any sort of deep, critical analysis. Sorry, sorry, I know I’m coming across as pedantic; poor rhetoric is just a pet-peeve of mine…
Probably should just write an article on this myself some time.