Completion Criteria: Credits Rolled

I think most people who go into this game with some knowledge are going to go in with a little with a little bit of bias. I was there for Sticker Star and I disliked that I completely skipped this and Colour Splash. I've heard the "its not so bad" but that's not particularly uncommon given a maligned game. And to my surprise they weren't wrong...sort of.

So ironically the game isn't good but the common narrative is that "the game has no soul" which actually may be it's most saving grace. Because the real soul of Mario RPGs has really been it's writing and this game has some pretty good writing. It messes up in some areas but for the most part it does well. It's just that nothing else in the game really supports it to well. In general, it's combat has somewhat of an identity crisis. No exp and breakable equipment are pullovers from Sticker Star that were hated for good reason. It incentivizes you to dislike combat and leads to you making the game more difficult for yourself. By the final boss, I had not used any legendary equipment as I expected to need it for the final boss. There is a party system in the game that feels like it's was shoved in last minute to people please. They pretty much do nothing because the goal of the combat is to wave clear in. Hitting an enemy before combat also does nothing because you only hit one enemy and, as mentioned before, the goal of combat is to clear the wave in one round.

Combat itself comes in three modes. Normal Encounter, Boss Encounter, and Action game. Normal encounters begin interesting but they take so much time that they are not worth doing by the end. On the flip side, sometimes you just don't have to deal with it, if you are strong enough you can just kill an enemy with an advantage attack. and some enemies you fight by just attacking them in the world until they explode. Bosses on the other hand have you following a maze to line up actions. This is fun in concept but again, it's more just you doing a puzzle and spending the bounty of coins you have to get a bit more time to logic them. Also.

Gameplay isn't the only issue, of course I have to bring up Characters because they have half done it. There are some meaningfully different toads which are fun characters but that only leads to the disastifaction of how many normal toads there are. We are in toad town rescuing the residents so from a world context, it makes sense for there to be a ton of toads, and as a collectible it's kind of great because they are all so homogenous but when you find toads that aren't hidden, or important to distinguish then, please put some effort it. It's not acceptable to think you can design an important npc by giving him a red jacket instead of a blue jacket. It's really weird when it's almost commented on with Bo-omb. They provide a pretty mature story and an extremely unexpected and insane concept of suicide bombing for you. And in the pen-ultimate scenario. Olivia notices they all look the same AND THEN completely ruin any emotional feeling for them by having you shoot them to their death on mass. This wouldn't have so out of tune if you even provided him with a hat, even if I think that's the bare minimum.

So on a more positive note, the world is pretty enjoyable to explore, some of the areas later on especially (maybe due to the reduction of necessary fights due to vehicles. Maybe felt like there was a bit of filler to try make the game longer which it could do without. I imagine the Great Sea would have been a chore if I didn't immediately go back for the upgraded engine. Weirdly there's a lot of instant Game Overs by the end of the game that really dampen the mood for exploration.

Some of my final complaints that I noted down. I lost the initiative to 100% this game early on but I even ignored rescuing all toads due to a few things. First is the lack of meaningful fast travel, I don't mean pipes, just the spin dash. The idea of walking to some of these areas and accidentally messing up a hammer swing was a scary thought. No technical reason due to the breakable equipment keeping me geared for the finale and, ironically too clear on gathering all accessories meant no incentive there either. Thirdly, no visceral reason. Even though the goal is to rescue toads to bring back to toad town, by the time it's mostly full, it still looks so incredibly sparse. Your lucky to get 2-3 toads in the same screen at the same time that I just stopped caring about wanting to see it full.

There are a lot of comfy scenes in the game. Coffee and Rest Areas were a nice breather and I always looked forward to them. This is a good place to note Olivia may be the strongest "companion" character in any game I've played. She acts childish but it feels quite real without being annoying, Mario feels quite fatherly ironically even though he doesn't really do anything which is an achievement to her writing.

So I was debating giving this a 3.5 but I'm not sure I can justify it given that I want to give it to it in spite of the gameplay. I don't think they can get away with being sticker star and super paper mario and more. The platforming RPG has legs still give it another shot in Super Paper Mario 2 and work on improving the base RPG and maybe we can get back on track