Topic: Paper Mario for Wii U: Time for Evan_B to RAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE

[Evan_B]

Oh, hey. You may remember this topic being about how I hate that Paper Mario has no personality anymore. But now that there's a new game being announced, maybe Intelligent Systems can figure their **** out and make a proper successor to The Thousand Year Door! You can discuss that here, or read up on the original discussion:

With the recent news of Paper Mario being a guest character in the latest AlphaDream title, I'm just about fed up with how Nintendo has been treating this franchise. I guess I'm in the minority of people who think that, when this series actually WAS an RPG, it was superior to the Mario and Luigi series in just about every way. Overworld traversal is easier and not convoluted, the battle mechanics were more streamlined and engaging, and the dialogue was more charming and not deliberately trying to make you laugh. It was just funny.

What's worse, though, is that from what is being featured in Paper Jam and as evidenced by Super Paper Mario and Sticker Star, it's clear Nintendo doesn't know what to do with the character anymore. His gimmick is obviously being made of paper, but each title since The Thousand Year Door has focused less on the simple mechanics of a decent RPG and more on paper shenanigans. While I would say that Sticker Star's aesthetics were by far one of its best qualities, the over-reliance on Stickers was not a good turn for the series. Paper Jam is supposed to incorporate elements "from the Paper Mario series", but let's be honest- Paper Mario never had ridiculous paper mechs and few of his special moves had to do with what was shown off in the demo. Nintendo seems to think that Mario and Luigi makes Paper Mario defunct as an RPG series when a fan of that series couldn't disagree more.

Some might argue- "hey, at least they're still MAKING Paper Mario games." But I think a franchise that has continued iterations that suck or miss the point of the original are still being neglected. Why stop at Paper Mario? I'm sure people have a list of franchises they would like to list grievances about! Sometimes, it's better to just let it all out. I could say a whole bunch of stuff abou Intelligent Systems and AlphaDream, but what are some of your thoughts on franchises?

[ShyGuy]

Never Played the first one. I know, I know

TTYD may be my favorite RPG of all time.

Super Paper Mario was fun, but the new character's appearance seemed uninspired and the ending drug on way to long.

Never played Sticker Star.

[Adrock]

I loved the first Paper Mario on N64. I scored a non-best seller version of The Thousand Year Door, but I haven't played it yet. I didn't like Sticker Star. I didn't get far enough in Super Paper Mario to have any lasting thoughts on it. I remember there being a ton of dialog in the beginning.

I only completed Superstar Saga. I started Bowser's Inside Story last year. It's hard to compare the two series. If Nintendo ever does make another Paper Mario, I'd rather it be made with HD sprites because I think there's a ton of potential there.

[Evan_B]

Something I've found is that if you play the second first, you enjoy it more than the original. It maybe goes the opposite way.

I will stand by the things I have said for a longtime about Sticker Star- it is a decent adventure game, where you're solving puzzles and overcoming obstacles with a battle here or there, more like Zelda II in its structure. But it's not an RPG, and Intelligent Systems flat-out stated that in the Iwata Asks for the game. They called it a "Sticker Battle Adventure" which is exactly how I'd put it. In terms of presentation and music, it's worth a (heavily discounted) look, but the battle mechanics are disappointing (though not without depth) and the puzzles are infuriating at times.

[MagicCow64]

Eh, I don't really think there needs to be two distinct Mario RPG series, especially now that the handheld/console distinction is basically gone. Traditional Paper Mario and Mario and Luigi (and Mario RPG for that matter) have very similar fundamental battle gameplay, and a similar approach to solving light puzzles in the overworld using abilities you discover, and similar light/comedic approaches to story. I'd much rather they keep trying different things with Paper Mario (Super was brilliant), given that Alpha Dream looks set to keep pumping out M&L games. And Bowser's Inside Story is the best of the seven Mario RPG games released thus far.

[Evan_B]

This is the exact mindset I have issue with.

[UncleBob]

I really enjoyed Super Paper Mario.

[Ian Sane]

Paper Mario also seemed like the anti-RPG.  I liked the first two games a lot but they weren't scratching my FF/DQ kind of RPG itch.  Since Nintendo's N64 propaganda was so anti-RPG, Paper Mario felt almost like Nintendo making an RPG to appeal to the fanboys that had bought into the anti-RPG attitude.  I think the anti-RPG element has just escalated so the series has seemingly abandoned the genre altogether.

Though the conspiracy theorist in me is wondering if Super Paper Mario took the series away from the RPG genre because Nintendo felt that the genre isn't accessible and on the Wii Nintendo was all about accessibility.

When Mario & Luigi first came out I thought the routine was going to be that every Mario RPG would be made by a different team and play differently since at that point Paper Mario was still just a one-off game.  THAT would have been a cool tradition.

[ThePerm]

I kinda don't like RPGs. Paper Mario was great. It was an RPG, but it wasn't a boring ass jrpg with the most annoying grinding/passive lazy gameplay and a stupid story.

[Fatty The Hutt]

I liked Paper Mario and what little I have played of Super Paper Mario. Never played TTYD. I really enjoyed Sticker Star. The obtuse puzzles never bothered me (I just looked them up, who has time for anything else?) and the sticker mechanic and overall aesthetics of that game are really top notch.
I liked Bowser's Inside Story and am about 2/3 of the way through Dream Team. It's good. I have played a little bit of Superstar Saga and am looking forward to more. All the games have their flaws (mostly they get quite repetitive) but they are all good games.
I'd like to see a standalone Paper Mario game over another Mario and Luigi game. I just think they're better. But it looks like we are getting a Mario and Luigi game with "special guest star" Paper Mario. Oh well. I'll buy it and I'm sure it will be fine, probably quite good.

[Evan_B]

I guess my club still has only one member.

Speaking of under-appreciated franchises, how about Chibi Robo? F-Zero? Custom Robo?

[Khushrenada]

I'm with you on preferring Paper Mario over Mario & Luigi. So far I've played Paper Mario 64 and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga and Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time.

I really should play Super Paper Mario and have wanted to play it a few times but put it off. Then when I gifted my Wii to my brother, he asked for that as one of the games to play so I let him borrow it last year and he still hasn't gotten around to playing it either. It was a GameCube game originially too and I love the Cube so I have high hopes for it. I think I should take it back from him.

Sticker Star I've owned for a couple years and want to play it despite the criticisms of it but New Leaf sucked up a lot of my gaming time so I kept sticking with shorter games I could play in between sessions of that or as a break like Pushmo or Crashmo. I didn't want to get into a longer game. Sticker Star was one of the things that motivated me to buy a 3DS early on and even with the mediocre reception, I still have a strong desire to play it and have twice told myself I'm going to start playing it and then put it off.

On the other hand, the Mario and Luigi have been competent but they don't compel me like Paper Mario. I was meh on Fawful in Superstar Saga. It seemed to hew a bit closer to the SNES Mario RPG game in some aspects yet I found it a slog at times and especially at the end when having to go through Bowser's Castle and all the Koopalings. I think I also miss the ability to have other people join your party. In M&L, you only have the Bros. as your party with them just learning new abilities along the way. Ultimately, it just makes battles a bit more static unlike Paper Mario when you may be switching through party members.

Partners in Time was an interesting experience. I think it was rushed at the time if I recall correctly. After awhile, the game follows a set pattern of 3 landscapes and a boss so you can predict a bit of when you need to be ready. As well, it has a lot of forward momentum and there is very little reason to go back to any world or level after beating. Yet, as long as you beat all the enemies you encounter on a map before moving to the next, you'll keep getting enough experience points to level up to where you need to be as you encounter tougher enemies and bosses. Only Peach's castle requires the most backtracking. The Shroobs were an interesting enemy and I think more could have been done with them and they might be worth revisiting. Same with the whole time travel aspect. I disliked Stuffwell and his "humorous" speak or his "Back to Adventure!" rally cry. He was probably meant to replace the Fawful dialogue a bit for this game but it didn't work. Also, E. Gadd really is one of the worst characters in the Mario universe. There's a reason people go crazy for someone like Waluigi but no one seems to care a lick about E. Gadd even though he's more original. He's just boring and sucks.

Even though TTYD may have followed a lot of the same conventions and material as the original Paper Mario, it was presented so well and with a few tweaks on the original source material that it still came off as a more polished and almost superior follow-up. Partners in Time likewise has a lot of the same conventions as Superstar Saga yet it feels lacking in depth and content. The lack of backtracking though was rather enjoyable.

I hear Bowser's Inside Story is supposed to be really good and maybe I'll get around to it in a year or two. Likewise, I actually like the look and graphics of Dream Team and am curious to play it as it seems it may do some new things by means of the dream world and multiple Luigi's. Yet I'd rather play the Paper Mario offerings before these as even though they may not be as close to an RPG as the first two games, they do look to offer some new experiences whereas I feel I know what I'm getting at this point with Mario and Luigi and don't see a lot of growth there.

I posted in a Talkback thread before E3 that I was hoping there would be a Wii U Paper Mario RPG as a surprise reveal. If that happened, it would instantly be my number one most wanted Wii U game. When I first saw the Paper Jam footage, my brain was processing the reveal like: Gasp! Paper Mario! I can't believe it! Aw, it's on the 3DS. But that's ok! People didn't like Sticker Star so a chance for redemption. Plus, they probably had a lot of the models and graphics ready from Sticker Star that they could copy over. Makes sense. But what's with Mario and Luigi? Huh. A crossover?! Ok. That's different. I wonder how this will work... And by the end, I realized this is going to be mainly a Mario and Luigi game with Paper Mario as a special mechanic for the game. Nuts. I thought it was a new Paper Mario. Sigh.

As for the other series, I hope F-Zero returns someday but I don't want it to change too much from the template F-Zero GX laid out. These days Mario Kart is pretty static in its formula so why can't F-Zero be as well? If a new release comes out that plays weird or offers less content, then I'm not sure how excited I'd be for it. Chibi-Robo GameCube has sold me on this franchise for life. I still keep hoping that with the virtual console, a release of Chibi-Robo 3 DS may finally be made available to North America. (Same with Ace Attorney Investigations 2.) I even got Chibi-Robo Photo Finder for my 3DS. At least the latest Chibi-Robo game is getting released here. Not sure how the change to a side-scroller will turn out (and cue the Ian Sane protest of there being too many side-scrollers from Nintendo) as the Chibi-Robo formula has been quite different up to this point but it is still my most anticipated 3DS game of all upcoming 3DS game releases and I'm glad this character hasn't been given up on yet. As for Custom Robo, never played any of the games. Can not comment on it.

[Khushrenada]

Hooray! Another Khushrenada Wall of Text post! Just what this forum needs to get things jump started in user activity again.

[UncleBob]

As for F-Zero, It'd be sweet if Nintendo took my direction on making every single Nintendo title ever available as a Virtual Console/eShop download for Wii U.  Could you imagine if you could download F-Zero GX, AX and the F-Zero X Expansion?  Considering two of those are stuff most folks haven't played, it would totally scratch that F-Zero itch.

[Luigi Dude]

People have already forgotten that Sticker Star was originally going to be a traditional Paper Mario RPG until Miyamoto decided to **** everything up.

http://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/papermario/0/1

Iwata: In some ways, I think that meant a return to Paper Mario's origins, but was there a reason for that renewal?

Tanabe: The biggest reason was that Miyamoto-san said he wanted us to make a big change in the atmosphere for Paper Mario this time. I heard that Miyamoto-san was really thinking for a while about how to handle the Super Mario series and pondered over a number of things.

Iwata: We imagined rather early on that Paper Mario would be a good match for the Nintendo 3DS, and the papercraft atmosphere of the actual prototype was good.

Tanabe: That was about three years ago, at the end of 2009.

Aoyama: At the beginning of development, we were simply incorporating an idea making use of the stereoscopic display function. Then at the 2010 E3²¹, before release of the Nintendo 3DS, we revealed several images.

Iwata: So why did it drag on until now?

Aoyama: After E3, Miyamoto-san played the prototype and said it was just a port of the GC version.

Tanabe: I had heard that at first Miyamoto-san said that something like an RPG would be fine, so for a while I thought that something like the previous one would be fine.

Iwata: That must have meant that you hadn't done much that was new.

Tanabe Right. So we wondered what to do. Then the idea of using stickers came up. Originally, the plan was to use stickers here and there for solving puzzles on the overall map and so forth, but then we thought, "If we're gonna do that, then we might as well use stickers for the whole thing, including battles," and we decided to begin rethinking the game mechanics.

Iwata: That's when the policy of going all out with stickers came to the forefront.

Tanabe: Yeah. But at first I couldn't really dig into development and couldn't easily resolve that.

Tanabe: It was somewhat fateful. About the beginning of February, Kudo-san came to Kyoto to discuss a different project and said in front of me during a casual conversation about how he was so busy being a president that he never got to get involved with development.

Iwata: Oh, same here! (laughs) Everyone (laughs)

Tanabe: Just about that time, I wanted someone who could write good text, and I couldn't always be on site, so I was looking for someone who could be present to make calls on detailed matters. Kudo-san was perfect for that, and we had a past connection through IS, so I asked him if he could take a spot in development. I thought it was going too far to ask another company's president to come in as a staff member on a project I was in charge of, but Kudo-san consented. Then about spring of 2011, we had Miyamoto-san look at a prototype.

Iwata: Uh-huh. How was it?

Tanabe: Personally, I thought it was better than before, but it turned out to be no good.

Aoyama: He said it was boring. I remember that clearly.

Iwata: Listening to you talk, it sounds like Miyamoto-san was a scary presence for the team.

Aoyama Yeah, he was! (laughs)

So instead of giving the fans the traditional Paper Mario game they wanted, we got Sticker Star because the dev team had no balls to stand up to Miyamoto who's shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near this game.  Seriously, Miyamoto doesn't know **** about stories and RPG, and they actually took his criticism seriously? 

See this is the kind of stuff Miyamoto really deserves to be called out on.  It's one thing for him to be involved with Mario Platformers, Zelda and Star Fox since he actually was involved in development of these games in his career, but the man never once worked on an actual RPG.  It's complete bullshit that he was allowed to have anything to do with the development of Sticker Star.  That would be like a football team making calls based on Michael Jordan's advice.

So hopefully the next time Intelligent Systems works on a Paper Mario, the criticism Sticker Star received makes the team realize not to listen to someone like Miyamoto who has no idea what he's talking about with something that's suppose to be a fucking RPG and finally make a real RPG this time.

[Stratos]

It may be "old fashioned", but I would still like to see a true sequel to the original Mario RPG.

[NWR_insanolord]

I don't see why Miyamoto shouldn't be allowed to have input on a game just because he hasn't made it before. He's shown over his career that he has great range and a knack for finding what's fun. It may not have worked out in that specific instance, but I think it's crazy discount his abilities at game design.

[Luigi Dude]

It's one thing for Miyamoto to give his opinion but it's another when they based the entire game around it when RPG's are the entire opposite of what Miyamoto spent his entire career making.  Miyamoto might be a legendary designer, but RPG's and story driven games were never part of that resume.  Plus this isn't the 90's, Miyamoto has shown for the last decade his decision making skills aren't flawless anymore.

The Paper Mario team should have grown a spine and fought for what they wanted to make, instead of folding like paper to a man who's opinion on this type of game especially these days should not have this much weight.

[NWR_insanolord]

His skills were never flawless, they're just a lot more out in the open than they were back then. And this is an internal Nintendo game; it doesn't matter how much of a spine those guys had, if Miyamoto wanted it changed, it was going to change.

[Evan_B]

I just wanted to say I enjoyed Khush's post and I agree, a Paper Mario game on Wii U would be my most highly desired title on the system.

While I think it's unfortunate that Miyamoto has that much sway over Intelligent Systems and the direction of the Paper Mario series, I think they could have improved on the mechanics of the RPG without altering the format completely. I also think that Miyamoto does not always know what is good for every type of franchise.

[MagicCow64]

"After E3, Miyamoto-san played the prototype and said it was just a port of the GC version."

I am more and more sympathetic to this sort of critique. Based on that interview, it sounds like Miyamoto didn't see the point in producing another Paper Mario game with nearly the same mechanics. And you know what? Good! The Mario and Luigi series has very similar gameplay. Keep trying different stuff with Paper Mario. If you're dying for a story, books are really the best place to go for that.

[Evan_B]

The problem with that thought process is that Paper Mario games have better gameplay than Mario and Luigi.

[Khushrenada]

"After E3, Miyamoto-san played the prototype and said it was just a port of the GC version."

I am more and more sympathetic to this sort of critique. Based on that interview, it sounds like Miyamoto didn't see the point in producing another Paper Mario game with nearly the same mechanics. And you know what? Good! The Mario and Luigi series has very similar gameplay. Keep trying different stuff with Paper Mario. If you're dying for a story, books are really the best place to go for that.

And does Miyamoto review/critique/check up on the Mario & Luigi series? If so, what does he think those games are doing so differently each time compared to Paper Mario? Why can that series have less change but Paper Mario needs to be so different each time now?

[Evan_B]

Because paper is neat and Mario and Luigi are not.

It does sound pretty hypocritical.

[MagicCow64]

"After E3, Miyamoto-san played the prototype and said it was just a port of the GC version."

I am more and more sympathetic to this sort of critique. Based on that interview, it sounds like Miyamoto didn't see the point in producing another Paper Mario game with nearly the same mechanics. And you know what? Good! The Mario and Luigi series has very similar gameplay. Keep trying different stuff with Paper Mario. If you're dying for a story, books are really the best place to go for that.

And does Miyamoto review/critique/check up on the Mario & Luigi series? If so, what does he think those games are doing so differently each time compared to Paper Mario? Why can that series have less change but Paper Mario needs to be so different each time now?

Man can't be everywhere at once. More seriously, it's not a contradiction, it would be kinda silly to have more games based on the Mario RPG formula after four similar M&L games and another in the queue. And I will insist one more time that Bowser's Inside Story is better than the traditional Paper Mario games, as is Super Paper Mario. People sure seem to hate Sticker Star (I haven't played it but I don't doubt it's bad), but that's one data point.