This must be a Paper Mario game more than a Mario & Luigi game...Because it do be kinda mid.

It's a great idea, and having a third party member that grants Mario and Luigi crazy paper attacks is cool...But it's just more of the same...

I feel like up until Dream Team, each one of these games were trying different things, each idea better than the last, just to mix things up. But Dream Team was kinda just Bowser's Inside Story again but with Luigi instead of Bowser and not nearly as interesting.

Because of that, this one just feels like another Mario & Luigi game...Except Paper Mario is a party member now. The enemies are generic Mario enemies, same with the toads, locations, the story is as basic as it can get with Mario. It's almost like I'm playing one of the platformers.

They do try to mix things up with the giant paper character fights...I guess? But like...That's just the giant fights from BiS and DT but way worse and not even fun.

It just feels like modern Paper Mario levels of random bullshit they add that isn't even fun. Just because they want to make the game anything but a good traditional RPG.

It's not terrible, it's not even bad, it's just serviceable. There were parts I enjoyed about it...But I probably will never play it again, which is a shame considering this was the last original Mario & Luigi game we ever got.

Eu ainda planejo voltar a este jogo um dia mas depois de 4 horas de jogos simplesmente horríveis eu tinha de falar algo sobre o jogo
Parece que as pessoas que fizeram o Bowser Inside Story e o Dream Team simplesmente se esqueceram do que fizeram nos outros jogos e fizeram o Paper Jam ser uma bosta! Umas das piores coisas do jogo e não sendo a PIOR das coisas do jogo é a cena de Salvar os toads, de papel ou normais....mano..eu estava literalmente a jogar o jogo normalmente quando o jogo me diz que eu tenho de salvar toads e me dá um total de 20 MINUTOS para salvar 7 TOADS!! Foi neste momento que eu vi que a Alphadream andou a usar alguma na criação deste jogo porque meu deus do céu..
Como eu disse, eu ainda quero voltar a jogar este jogo em algum momento mas eu vou ter de respirar muitas vezes para não ficar louco de uma vez

Finally, I've finished replaying all the original games in the Mario and Luigi series since becoming an adult. I remember not being a fan of this game when I played it as a child, and this game definitely does have some significant flaws, but I was very surprised by how fun a lot of the gameplay was!

To start off with the positives, Paper Jam has the best combat in the whole Mario and Luigi series! This is what kept me motivated to continue playing the game, despite its low points. There are frequent boss fights all throughout the game, which were a BLAST to play. The main reason why the boss fights in this game are so good is because they have more creative and diverse attacks and counter opportunities. One of my favorite examples of this is the paper airplane attack that the Bowser Juniors' have. In this attack, you are basically playing chicken against Paper Bowser Jr. to see who can let their paper airplane get closest to the ground without landing. This attack is extremely unique, fun to play, and doesn't overstay its welcome. Several boss attacks in Paper Jam are also challenging to consistently counterattack, which I really liked! A common problem I had with the older games (especially Partners in Time) was that figuring out how to consistently counter all of a boss' attacks was too simple, and the fights would quickly become dull as you slowly chip away at the very large HP pool of the boss, with almost no risk of taking damage; at that point you already know that you've won but you just have to sit through the rest of the fight repeating the same action commands until the boss runs out of HP. Paper Jam keeps things exciting by including more counterattack options than just jumping and hammering and opting to make bosses more difficult by making countering tighter and more complex, rather than simply increasing the amount of health that each boss has.

The flashiest innovation that Paper Jam includes is the addition of Battle Cards. Serving as the replacement for Badges from Bowser's Inside Story and Dream Team, Battle Cards are abilities that you can activate, without consuming your turn in battle, at the cost of Star Points which you earn for performing successful attacks. The fun thing about Battle Cards is that you draw one each turn out of your custom deck of 10 cards! This inclusion of deckbuilding mechanics did a lot to make Paper Jam feel mechanically very different from all of the other Mario and Luigi games. Improving my deck by buying new cards from the shop and getting holographic cards drops from enemies added moments of excitement to the game that I am very appreciative of. I am pleasantly surprised by how well Battle Cards fit into the already established formula of a Mario and Luigi game, and I am sad that we didn't get the opportunity to see this concept iterated upon further in a future Mario and Luigi game!

The last big shakeup in this game is the addition of a third party member, Paper Mario. Other games in the Mario and Luigi series have added additional party members before, but Partners in Time did a very poor job executing this concept, as you can effectively only have 2 party members active at one time and the babies are entirely redunant characters anyways, and while Bowser's Inside Story did literally have three party members, the majority of that game was spent exploring the world as two separate parties (Mario and Luigi as one party and Bowser on his own). Paper Jam makes the simple change of adding Paper Mario to the Mario brothers' team, and this addition subtly makes the Mario and Luigi gameplay so much better. A problem shared among every Mario and Luigi game is that counterattacks are often easily cheesable. You are encouraged to counter enemies by closely looking at their behavior immediately before they attack to determine what bro they are targeting and then press the appropriate button (A for Mario, B for Luigi) to help the corresponding character avoid danger. But what is much easier to do is to simply press A and B at the same time so that regardless of who an enemy is attacking, you can preform the appropriate dodge without even needing to engage with the enemy's specific telegraphs. The addition of a third concurrent party member greatly alleviates this problem thanks to simple fact that it is very difficult to press A, B, and Y simultaneously. The specific implementation of Paper Mario goes even further to solve this issue, by also making him stand a significant distance behind Mario and Luigi. The reason why this is relevant, is because Paper Mario's distance from the enemies makes their attacks take longer to reach him, making his timing for many counterattacks offset from those for Mario and Luigi. This effectively makes it impossible to cover multiple bases at once by trying to counterattack with Paper Mario and another character at the same time. I consider the cheesability of the other games in the series to be a significant design flaw, and it is very nice to see that problem finally addressed in this game.

While Paper Jam made some incredible improvements to the standard Mario and Luigi experience, it does introduce some serious flaws as well. My biggest issue with the game is that there is a large amount of mandatory gameplay that just isn't fun. In the early game especially, there are many required quests you must complete to advance the story that are a completely different style of gameplay from the standard turn based battles and overworld exploration. The worst offenders, in my opinion, are the quests that make you play hide and seek to find hidden Paper Toads and the quests that make you chase and tackle Paper Toads in the overworld. There are many other types of quests in this game, many of which I actually did enjoy playing--like the quiz and Yoshi racing ones, but strangely most of the fun quests were optional.

The biggest waste of time though, is without a doubt, the papercraft battles. This is an evolution of the giant battles from Bowser's Inside Story and Dream Team, but instead of participating in cinematic turn based battles, you destroy other papercrafts in a 3D free-moment environment. These sections suck for multiple reasons. For one, the controls are very awkward and feel pretty terrible. You use tank controls, movement is pretty slow, there isn't much to actually interact with in any of these sections, and the combat is absolutely horrific. You are meant to bait attacks from enemies and then counterattack them after they miss. This already isn't great, since moving around your papercraft doesn't feel good, but it gets even worse because the enemies sometimes take a long time to get aggressive and try to attack. This leaves A LOT of awkward pauses in between each attack and counterattack combo. This gameplay loop made me very impatient, leading me to another major source of frustration: the lack of expression. The jump attack you use to destroy the enemies has a significant amount of windup, making it implausible to attack enemies before they make themselves vulnerable with a miss. It ended up not being worth the effort and time to try and play offensively due to the extremely railroaded design of this gameplay. There is also a stamina system in papercraft battles, which serves no purpose other than to be annoying. Stamina does not refill automatically and you must go to recharge stations to refill. This ends up being a total time waster because it takes several seconds to recharge and there is absolutely no risk while recharging, as enemies will not follow you to recharge stations. I honestly have no idea how this mode ended up in such a sorry state, the game would have been much much better without the inclusion of papercraft battles.

Something missing form Paper Jam is the imagination and humor that was present in the previous titles. This game is not creative. All of the enemies here are bog standard. There are no weird NPC races like the bean folk or the block people, there are no new enemy concepts like the cavity pokies or the shroobs, the theming of this game is extremely sterile. The most creative part of this game's theming is the addition of the Sticker Star rendition of Paper Mario, and if you know anything about Sticker Star you should know that paints a grim picture. The areas are also just as bland, sporting the all too common plains, desert, forest, ice, beach, and lava themes that the Mario fanbase has long since grown tired of. The world is also really small in this game, you get to the opposite end of the map very early on and you backtrack to every area of the game 1-2 times over the course of the game. One of the biggest falls from grace that this series has suffered in this game is the quality of the writing. Nothing interesting happens in this plot; Bowser kidnaps Peach and you rescue her. The paper characters were written in a way that I think is extremely boring, where they are essentially identical to their real counterparts in all ways other than being flat. And so little is said in so many words that I wouldn't blame you if you mashed A through the dialogue altogether. The humor that was present in the other games is mostly gone now, and many of the games attempts at being funny felt extremely dry, low effort, and fell completely flat for me. I can see these downgrades ruining the game for fans of the previous games, which is such a shame since the battling has never been better.

My remaining nitpicks and praises:
- The inclusion of a speed up button for cutscenes is nice, as the default speed is painfully slow. Its inclusion leave me wondering why they didn't just speed up the cutscenes though. Holding down R to speed up gets annoying too.
- The Koopalings have never been better than in this game. They actually feel like they have personalities here and are one of the only examples of the game doing something interesting with its characters.
- There are a lot of reused assets from Dream Team and Sticker Star to the point I found it distracting. This, the lack of polish in the secondary objectives, and the excessive backtracking leaves me thinking this game was rushed.
- I just dislike how Paper Mario looks in this game standing next to Mario and Luigi. He also doesn't really feel like Paper Mario. His major difference from Mario and Luigi is that he has a flutter jump, which isn't something he has in his home games leaving his inclusion feeling a little arbitrary.
- Paper Mario uses his thumbs up animation way too much, it got distracting.
- The optional boss rematches were very fun! I would like the mode better if you were auto leveled to the max level so that the experience could be more balanced, but it was still very fun additional content and beating the secret boss at the end of the boss rush was very exciting.
- All the tutorials are skippable! You can view them from the menu at anytime later too. Very nice feature.

Overall, I do like this game a lot and I plan on playing it again sometime, but it is such a shame that the overworld, writing, and many of the mandatory missions hamper the experience to such a significant degree. If you like the battling of Mario and Luigi or Paper Mario I'd say that this game is definitely worth your time, despite its many problems. Hopefully one day this series can get revived, because the formula it uses is really fun.

And so completes my time with the final Mario & Luigi game I had not yet beaten. It isn't the best one, that honor still goes to the first game in the series (as far as my memory goes, although I plan to play the remake soon, so I'll be testing that memory soon enough), but it's a really strong contender for 2nd place. The crossover gimmick is one of the strongest the series has had and one of the best incorporated into the overall whole (a big complaint I've always had of Inside Story is that it feels like a game of two halves: a really fun Bowser half and a really standard, kinda boring Bros. half). It took me a little over 30 hours to beat the game, and I played it in Japanese. I didn't find ALL the things, but I did find most of them (and did 60 of the mini-game challenges).

So the main gimmick is that the Paper Mario universe has exploded out into the Mario & Luigi universe, and the Marios (and a Luigi) need to join forces to fight the power of two Bowsers and their combined armies from kidnapping the two Princess Peaches. The game has nowhere NEAR as much text in it as something like Paper Mario: Color Splash, but I enjoyed the writing that was there. The way the Mario & Luigi characters interact with their flat counterparts is consistently amusing, and I especially enjoyed the way that the Peaches and Bowser Jr.s respectively bonded with their doubles, and how the Kameks and Bowsers constantly fought and bickered with their respective doubles XD .

The normal combat will be immediately familiar to anyone who has played a Mario & Luigi game, especially Dream Team. There aren't just a lot of animations reused from Dream Team, but a lot of Bro Moves taken wholesale from that game too (although Dream Team really needed improvements, so I'm completely fine with this game building off of what that game did well). As normal, Mario is the A button, Luigi is the B button, and the new addition Paper Mario takes the Y button.

Paper Mario fights really differently to the other Bros., and it really helps make up for how similar the Bros fight compared to Dream Team. Paper Mario can summon up to 6 copies of himself to help him fight and also tank hits for him. If he gets hit, he'll lose some copies, but he can just use his next turn to resummon them (meaning you REALLY wanna keep him from getting hit if you want him to be as effective as possible). His copies allow him to let each copy do a successive jump on a target, as well as spread out as evenly as possible to hit each enemy on screen with a hammer strike. He also has Trio Moves, which are basically Bro Moves that require all 3 Bros to be up and unincumbered to do, and they usually are effectively Bro Moves with better AOE damage. The Mario & Luigi games have always had very similar combat from game to game, but Paper Jam does a good job of varying things up without making enemies feel too spongey or the combo attacks feeling too technical (a problem Partners in Time had pretty bad). If anything, the game has a bit of the opposite effect where it can get pretty hard against later-game bosses and enemies, as both you and them tend to hit quite hard, and dodging their attacks gets pretty tricky. I never got a game over, but this is definitely one of the harder Mario & Luigi games there's been.

The last addition to the combat are battle cards (but not like Paper Mario Color Splash). As you do better action commands, you earn star points, which allow you to play battle cards from the touch screen. You can find cards from rare shiny enemies (who hit like freakin' cars and are real scary despite the rewards they give if they catch you off guard) as well as buy them from shops, and you can have a deck of 10 cards and you can see 3 cards to potentially play at a time. They go a long way as to making what is otherwise probably the hardest Mario & Luigi game a lot less unforgiving, and certain boss battles even put interesting spins on them.

Speaking of making things easier, this game has some incredible accessibility and quality of life features. The game has an easy mode you can turn on to make the whole thing easier, nearly every tutorial has a skip option, and you can hold R to fast-forward through any cutscene. The game does a really good job of giving the player the option to play it no matter their skill level, and that's something I always appreciate.

However, the best change, in my opinion, is they have FINALLY gotten rid of the gimmicky, slow, and simple giant battles that Inside Story and Partners in Time had. In their place are giant papercraft battles which are basically giant 3D environment mech battles. Now this is hardly Virtual On in terms of complexity, but it manages to be engaging and fun in a much more simple package. B is your dash, A is your jump, and you move vaguely like a tank with the L button focusing the camera and allowing strafing and the R button allowing for a quick 180-degree turn. You play as 5 different paper mechs through the course of the game, and each plays a little bit differently. It spices up the boss battles really nicely, and I never had the "oh heck this again" feeling that Inside Story and Dream Team's giant battles gave me.

What I did have a bit less patience for are the Paper Toad rescue missions. There are certain points in the game where you need to do different mini games to rescue Paper Toads who are lost and terrified in the Mario & Luigi kingdom. They vary them well, and they definitely don't grate as badly if you aren't doing the hard-mode versions of them (some of which are downright vindictively unforgiving) to try and unlock some of the best battle cards like I did, but it's still something I wish weren't in the game quite as much.

As a final note, I did play the game on a NEW 2DS XL, and that did bring with it some good things and bad things. The good things are some minor NEW 3DS functionality. You can press the ZR and ZL buttons to automatically top up your BP and HP respectively in the most efficient way possible from the items currently in your inventory. You can also use the C-stick to turn the camera (albeit a bit too slowly to be that useful) in the mech battle sections, and you can also use it to move the map around on the touch-screen when walking around instead of moving it with your finger. The bad parts came from the 2D. It doesn't happen that often, but there are a few bosses and normal enemies whose attacks are more difficult to dodge than they should be when playing in 2D rather than 3D. The game isn't really hard enough to make it anything more than an annoyance, but it's something that happened enough that I can't not mention it here.

Verdict: Recommended. Though it does not top the original, it is the Mario & Luigi game that has come closest. The games have always had a problem in not really sicking out that much from each other, and Paper Jam is no exception to that, but it is one of the better in the series for sure, and an excellent swansong to the series (at least a far better one than Dream Team was). If you can only play one Mario & Luigi game, you should definitely play Superstar Saga, but if you can only play TWO, there is very good reason to make Paper Jam your second pick. It's certainly not the best RPG on the 3DS, but it's still a great addition to any 3DS library, and an overall good time.

Well, this is it. A sad conclusion to an unfortunate series that started amazingly, got a hiccup, hit again awesomely and then...yeah. A bland fourth game, 2 remakes (1 completely unnecessary) and this.

We come from a long way but the series finished not with proper justice.

The battle system is fun and way more interesting than what Partners in Time and DTB had to offer. Story is there.

Pretty much everything about this game is mediocre and boring. the parts that are fun are simply taken from previous entries in the series, such as the combat mechanics, except even those are worse this time. Battle cards and paper Mario in general don't feel good to use. On top of this boss battles that consist of using the same few moves over and over and over again often last over 20 minutes sometimes, making them extremely boring and repetitive. Its not just the battles that are way to long however. the main story of this game takes around 25 hours to complete, and does absolutely nothing to deserve it. you pass through the same boring Mario landscapes you've seen a million times with nothing interesting, fight the same enemies over and over, and have absolutely no interesting story to tie it all together. there is zero point in checking out this game. Its dull, boring and disappointing in all regards.

So immensely tragic. I really like this series, and i really like this game. But the game STINKS of missed potential!! Mario and luigi crossing over with Paper mario could've been SUPER INTERESTING. but they took the most boring parts of paper mario, slapped the brothers in really lackluster areas, and removed ALL the cool characters that were a staple of the Mario and Luigi series. The game is still fun, the writing is good, combat is really good, and the pacing is way better than in dream team, but it could've been so much more.

obligatory “this crossover would’ve been peak 15 years ago” comment

ok now thats out of the way i think this game gets alooooot more hate than it should get, some of it justified and some of it isnt. yes the story could’ve been this 50 hour long epic where the bowsers becomes a super ultra god and talks about the idea of death or whatever but i think the one we had isnt that bad either. it basically does the “bowser kidnaps peach” thing but also gives up near the end and just becomes a story about getting a book back.

the gameplay is actually very fun, probably the best in the series, i think battle cards are far more interesting than badges because they’re instant and you dont have to spend 20 turns getting one you can waste in one attack. the bros attacks are either really broken or kinda pointless.


papercraft battles while not as cool as the giant battles from BiS or Dream Team are still fun on their own. none of the fights are actively frustrating as far as i remember.


overall i think this game was a great finale to the original mario and luigis and was a great sendoff to a great series.

Me ha encantado, es la idea principal de esta review. Me flipa lo bien que se ve el plantel de papel en este juego, además de lo curradísimo que está todo el tema del cartón. Me sobran algunas cositas, pero es juegazo/10
A veces rescatar toads no es lo que más apetece, y desde luego hay puzles que se me han atravesado hasta quitarme las ganas de jugar, pero luego viene una cinemática graciosa y pum, combatazo.
Los combates de mechas están metidos con un calzador enorme, pero qué quieres que te diga, están graciosos.