Topic: The Final Quest for Mushrooms: The Mario RPG Retrospective

[NWR_Josh]

From giant swords to Bowser's innards, the NWR crew reminisce about Mario's adventures in role play.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/feature/25391

Mario is a character that needs no introduction. The plucky plumber has become synonymous not just with Nintendo, but gaming in general thanks to starring in some of the most memorable, creative, and polished games ever created. But, would you believe that Mario is just as popular in the RPG world as he is in the platforming world? As surreal as that sounds, Mario and friends crossed over to the realm of RPGs, giving us some of their most surreal adventures yet. From fighting evil robots to traveling down Bowser's guts, we look back at these marvelous adventures, highlighting each of three Mario RPG series along the way.

[mustbeburt]

what a great feature!  i love this game.  i purchased my copy (which i still have in mint condition) from toys'r'us when they were getting rid of all of their snes games for like $5-$8.  i think i got mario rpg for $8.  anyways, i had never hear of it, but decided to grab it since it was "mario".  i was hooked!  it was my first rpg experience and i loved it.

[NWR_pap64]

Question: Have you guys seen the Mario RPG page?

[mustbeburt]

yes.  you can see it on the webpage.  it's the one you wrote, right, pedro?  however, something weird is happening with this feature.  the "add to the discussion" link on the webpage just brings you right back to the nwr homepage.  you have to go to the forums to add to the discussion.


oh, and look at my avatar!  i just realized i had geno up!

[SilverQuilava]

Well, Paper Mario for the N64 is my favorite game in the world. I'm serious, there is no game in existence that I love more than Paper Mario. That and the series. Super Mario RPG was great, but Paper Mario is much better to me.

[SilverQuilava]

I really wish I could review Paper Mario or something. Just so I can explain why It is the greatest game in the world to me. I just wish more people knew about Paper Mario. Maybe the 3DS will do that. I really hope so.

[TJ Spyke]

Go ahead and review Silver, there is a forum here for reader reviews of games. Some of them are pretty good.

[Ian Sane]

It's hard to rank one's favourite games.  You're in a different mood one day and things hop all over the place.  But whenever I think about that Super Mario RPG is consistently in the top two with Link's Awakening being its only competitor.

It's interesting to think of what a dream game this was.  Square and Nintendo were the two biggest fish in the SNES pond.  It would be like if today Nintendo announced a Zelda RTS made by Blizzard.  It was just a huge "holy ****" kind of project.  And in the end it was Square's swan song on a Nintendo console before they went to the Playstation and were briefly probably the biggest company in videogames.

What I find frustrating is that I rarely like RPGs.  I WANT to like them.  It seems like I should but something always feels slightly off and it's Super Mario RPG's fault.  Mario RPG does it exactly like how I want and no other game does.  It has no random battles and tons of real-time world interaction.  I hate random battles and a lot of RPGs don't play like you're playing.  They're stiff when you walk around the world.  In Mario RPG the overworld is like a platformer.  You're just moving and jumping around with ease.  Then you enter a battle, which you see coming and can avoid 99% of the time and it becomes very straightforward and intuitive.  It's simple turn-based battles without any frustrating and broken attempts to screw with it.

Now doesn't Paper Mario have this same stuff?  Well it does have the real-time world interaction but its RPG elements seem dumbed down and juvenile.  The story is too simple and the game seems to be scared of offering the proper RPG bells and whistles.  It feels like an anti-RPG with its sidekick approach to a party and the low levels.  It feels like an RPG for people who hate RPGs.  I like the numbers and the stats of an RPG.  I like having a party to customize and I like using different weapons and spells and such.  I don't want THAT portion dumbed-down or streamlined.  The only things I don't like with RPGs are user-unfriendliness and disjointed real-time gameplay.

What I really want is the sort of RPG brilliance and understanding Square had in its peak mixed with Nintendo's knack for having tight controls (or the knack they USED to have anyway), user-friendly interfaces and real-time exploration (Nintendo did make A Link to the Past and Super Metroid after all).  And that's Super Mario RPG in a nutshell.

I play Paper Mario, which is still a good game, and I'm like "where's the RPG?"  And then I play most RPGs and think "where's the gameplay?"  Super Mario RPG just got it down perfect and made the most of both Square's and Nintendo's individual strengths.  It was very much a collaboration and not just Nintendo farming off Mario to someone else or Nintendo using another dev and then dictating exactly how everything goes.  It feels like both a Square game and a Nintendo game.

I remember when the first Mario & Luigi came out I thought it was kind of cool that the Mario RPG series was following a convention of using a different dev and having different gameplay each time.  That would have been a neat way to do it.  But that was obviously just a coincedence as Nintendo turned both Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi into their own series.  And yet Super Mario RPG remains a one-off game.  That's very disappointing.

Of course Super Mario RPG 2 would probably not turn out very good because the companies involved are so different.  Square is now Square Enix and Iwata-era Nintendo would insist on some bullshit waggle or casual-friendly design or something stupid like that.  Hell when Mario RPG came out Mario didn't even have a voice and him "wha hooing" the whole time would have seriously cramped its style.  One thing that is nice is that the VC release is the only other version of Mario RPG out there.  Nintendo has never tinkered with it like they have with other re-releases so anyone can now play it exactly as it was intended.

I do wish that future RPG developers would look towards Mario RPG as inspiration on how to really design a tight and playable RPG.

[SilverQuilava]

[/quote

Go ahead and review Silver, there is a forum here for reader reviews of games. Some of them are pretty good.

Cool Spyke, I'll see about doing my own review. Thanks for telling!

[KDR_11k]

Super Paper Mario made me stop playing when I was in the desert level and first had to type in "Please" three times to get the block sequence from that one guy and then he dumped several pages worth of instructions that I was supposed to write down. What I did instead was tell the game to **** off and put it back on the shelf, never to play it again. SPM has too much bullshit getting in the way of the game.

[LittleIrves]

@KDR
But that's what was so funny about Super Paper Mario...  the sheer audacity to mess with the player.  (Pit of 100 Trials, hmm?) I'd never played the Paper Mario/RPG games before (though this feature is making me want to) but the whole 2D/3D flip feature of the Wii game intrigued me.  I ended up liking it a lot...   but it didn't blow me away as I'd hoped.  Still: A very funny, weird, totally Nintendo experience (with new characters!).  People always gripe about how the Big N doesn't have any new IPs anymore, but they populate their franchises with enough bizarre new characters to almost make up for it.  And their humor is not mentioned nearly enough.  Games take themselves too seriously.  Nintendo still realizes this should be a light-hearted experience.  Maybe that is a central shift between the Japanese and American markets, though...  I'm not sure.

[ThomasO]

SPM parodies the design of older games that depended too much on weird codes and password systems, or games that relied heavily on extremely repetitive tasks. But I do agree, Chapter 5 was my least favorite part of the game due to the joke starting to get old.

[Ian Sane]

The problem with a videogame parody is that the player still has to play it so essentially the joke is on him.

[Killer_Man_Jaro]

An enjoyable read so far. I personally prefer The Thousand Year Door out of the three, and in fact, that used to be my favourite of the Mario RPGs until Bowser's Inside Story arrived in grand style.

My views on Super Paper Mario mostly fall in line with what others have said. The signature mechanic is a cool premise, and is executed fairly well, but I do feel it is undermined by pacing issues (primarily, the hunt for the next Pure Heart monument in Flipside between every chapter) and specific moments that are simply not fun. Is it Chapter 2 when you're in the mansion and you have run in the hamster wheel for AGES in order to collect money? Stuff like that is, quite frankly, unacceptable.

I'll be keeping one eye on Paper Mario 3D though. That's returning to the classic battle system, from what I hear, and there's the new sticker book thing that was shown briefly, which I reckon has a lot of potential.

[NWR_Neal]

Writing the Paper Mario stuff makes me want to replay each entry. I really loved all three of those games, warts and all. I have extremely fond memories of playing Super Paper Mario in college. My roommate, Lauren, and I each had our own file going at the same time and we basically competed to see who could finish first. It might have gotten bloody, but it was one of these really fun group discovery moments, because it'd usually end up with all three of us hanging out while one person played.

I'm extremely tempted to pick up Paper Mario on VC. So tempted...

Also, can't wait until Paper Mario 3DS.

[Kytim89]

Writing the Paper Mario stuff makes me want to replay each entry. I really loved all three of those games, warts and all. I have extremely fond memories of playing Super Paper Mario in college. My roommate, Lauren, and I each had our own file going at the same time and we basically competed to see who could finish first. It might have gotten bloody, but it was one of these really fun group discovery moments, because it'd usually end up with all three of us hanging out while one person played.

I'm extremely tempted to pick up Paper Mario on VC. So tempted...

Also, can't wait until Paper Mario 3DS.

Neal, I recommend that you pick up Paper Mario and Legend of the Seven Stars while you are at it.

[NWR_Neal]

Kytim, SMRPG is my favorite game ever. I'll buy that whenever Nintendo decides to re-release it over and over again.

[Kytim89]

Kytim, SMRPG is my favorite game ever. I'll buy that whenever Nintendo decides to re-release it over and over again.

How about a sequel for the 3DS? I would buy that in a hot minute since SMRPG is my favorite of all Mario's RPGs.

[KDR_11k]

@KDR
But that's what was so funny about Super Paper Mario...  the sheer audacity to mess with the player.

That's nice but I didn't buy it to be a comedy routine, I bought it to be a game.

[NWR_insanolord]

@KDR
But that's what was so funny about Super Paper Mario...  the sheer audacity to mess with the player.

That's nice but I didn't buy it to be a comedy routine, I bought it to be a game.

The half of it I played before giving up out of frustration was very well-written.

[NWR_Neal]

Kytim, SMRPG is my favorite game ever. I'll buy that whenever Nintendo decides to re-release it over and over again.

How about a sequel for the 3DS? I would buy that in a hot minute since SMRPG is my favorite of all Mario's RPGs.

In all honesty, no. That sounds like a terrible idea. Super Mario RPG is an amazing game, but it came out 15 years ago. The teams that worked on that game have moved on, and I'd rather see Nintendo continue making M&L and Paper Mario games than retread SMRPG. I could stand for some cameos from characters in the game, but I have negative feelings towards any potential SMRPG sequel.

[MagicCow64]

I'm all about Super Paper Mario's parodic elements. The joke is on the player, because the joke is always on the player as far as games are concerned. I read something about how videogames are ultimately limited as an art form, because the finger always just ends up pointing blankly back at the player. SPM is the first game I've played that acknowledges and incorporates this. No More Heroes might count as well, but that's more of an El Topo to Super Paper Mario's Satyricon.

[Ian Sane]

I read something about how videogames are ultimately limited as an art form, because the finger always just ends up pointing blankly back at the player. SPM is the first game I've played that acknowledges and incorporates this.

The thing is a lot of people that criticize videogames for either not being art or being limited as an art form are usually old fuddy-duddies who don't play videogames.
 
I look at a game as a piece of art like I would look at a classic car as a piece of art.  Maybe I'm just admiring the craftsmanship.  This is a fun game to play, it has good art design, good music, balanced difficulty, good pacing, good level design, good story, etc.  When I say I want a game to be a work of art I mean it like I want it to be a golden standard of videogame design.

[TGM]

I'm taking the "I've played them all and I love them all equally" route.

[NWR_pap64]

Alright, I've been reading a lot of the comments, including Ian's detailed rants, and this is my opinion on the overall franchise...


As I already said in the SMRPG entry, that game is a masterpiece of gameplay design, visuals, music and even story. When Square and Nintendo finished the game they broke the mold they use to create this title, making sure that no other game would be quite like it ever again. They shot themselves in the foot with this, however, as now any Mario RPG that is released is directly compared to SMRPG rather than just judging the games based on their own merits. In other words, SMRPG was such an amazing masterpiece that people can't help but expect any Mario RPG to look, sound and play EXACTLY like it. I admit I was under the same spell when the first Paper Mario was released. SMRPG played such a big role in my enjoyment of video games that I couldn't help but see Paper Mario as a very weak follow up. Up until recently, however, I realized that trying to expect an experience that will be exactly like the one I enjoyed in my childhood days is very foolish and should just have fun and enjoy the ride.


Now I am able to appreciate the series as a whole. To me, the Paper Mario series is indeed a very simple RPG designed for younger gamers and non RPG fans in mind, but I really like the aesthetic of a world made entirely out of paper, and on the whole, it is adorable. I love the Mario and Luigi series because it gives the characters a lot of personality and sometimes that is enough to make the game really enjoyable. I mean, people have called "Partners in Time" the weakest in the series, but even then I had a ton of fun with that.


Regarding Super Paper Mario, I liked that game, but gameplay wise the overall designed is flawed. The idea of 2D and 3D gameplay is ingenious, but the developers didn't know how to create a more streamlined menu system, meaning that constantly changing characters, switching between planes and changing fairy characters was a chore, and one you did often. The main reason I kept up with it was because the story was really, really good. Like I mentioned sometimes a story and character is enough to keep pushing forward. I really loved how the story poked fun at itself as well as other Nintendo conventions, and was considerably more edgier than past Paper Mario titles. I like it just for that alone.