Revisiting this almost 20 years later from when I first played it as a kid, and I'll be honest?

Ain't vibin' with this one, chief.

The soundtrack and visuals are top notch, and the battle system is genuinely more engaging than the first game. However, the writing feels VERY early 2000s with a lot of one-off gimmick characters who don't add much to overall plot. Also the very stale progression of going to point A to point B, backtracking to A to go to point C is pretty grating for me.

It's a neat game if you don't mind a lot of surface level style, but I prefer something with a little more meat to it or understanding that keeping things simple is sometimes just better. I'll stick to the original Paper Mario and that's perfectly fine with me.

they took what they had with paper mario 64 and expanded upon it greatly. what i loved about paper mario 64 and all the other mario rpg's was how they expanded upon and really built context into the mario universe, with this game it really felt like they had a lot of creative freedom to add a bunch of wacky creative stuff into the mario universe, having mario go into a whole new locations not really seen before in mario games. almost each chapter always has something interesting going on and almost all of them are memorable. it would get a five if it weren't for that one chapter where you have to backtrack a bunch.