Surprisingly engaging and self-serious narrative. Why though?
The original character and enemy designs are all very consistent with each other and the backgrounds, and not at all with the Mario characters. It feels like Intelligent Systems wanted to make an entirely different game and ended up tossing Mario and the gang in at the last second.
Actually playing this game is a total chore. I'm fine with moving away from the proven Paper Mario formula as long as we're moving towards something that's fun, but this is not a satisfying platformer. I think IS knows this, too, because as the game progresses it gets farther and farther away from platforming and instead goes to puzzles, which are all based more on tedium than reasoning or anything. Haha, Peach is asleep and you need to feed her a fruit but not that one! Oh, not that one either hahah silly you! I'd be in the mood to be the butt of a joke if you guys stopped reusing the punchline or at least got it over with faster.
And the tedium, dude. Why do the animations for changing characters, changing fairies, using most fairy powers, changing dimensions, and walking through doors take SO long. And why are enemies allowed to reposition during cutscenes and cheapshot me before I get control to dodge them. Only for the most fleeting moments did I catch the sense of wonder that the environments in PM64 or TTYD always gave me, probably because there were only fleeting moments that the camera was pointed at the game's flat and boring level geometry at an interesting angle.
Also what is up with the mouse cursor motif? Is there some kind of digital theme happening here? Is that why the backgrounds are mostly rectangular or abstract? Is that why all the music sounds really compressed? What am I supposed to take away from this?
After being thrilled with TTYD, I've been holding out hope that there was three good Paper Mario games, but it looks like we're up to two and a half tops. There's great moments here but it's such a slog to get to them.
The original character and enemy designs are all very consistent with each other and the backgrounds, and not at all with the Mario characters. It feels like Intelligent Systems wanted to make an entirely different game and ended up tossing Mario and the gang in at the last second.
Actually playing this game is a total chore. I'm fine with moving away from the proven Paper Mario formula as long as we're moving towards something that's fun, but this is not a satisfying platformer. I think IS knows this, too, because as the game progresses it gets farther and farther away from platforming and instead goes to puzzles, which are all based more on tedium than reasoning or anything. Haha, Peach is asleep and you need to feed her a fruit but not that one! Oh, not that one either hahah silly you! I'd be in the mood to be the butt of a joke if you guys stopped reusing the punchline or at least got it over with faster.
And the tedium, dude. Why do the animations for changing characters, changing fairies, using most fairy powers, changing dimensions, and walking through doors take SO long. And why are enemies allowed to reposition during cutscenes and cheapshot me before I get control to dodge them. Only for the most fleeting moments did I catch the sense of wonder that the environments in PM64 or TTYD always gave me, probably because there were only fleeting moments that the camera was pointed at the game's flat and boring level geometry at an interesting angle.
Also what is up with the mouse cursor motif? Is there some kind of digital theme happening here? Is that why the backgrounds are mostly rectangular or abstract? Is that why all the music sounds really compressed? What am I supposed to take away from this?
After being thrilled with TTYD, I've been holding out hope that there was three good Paper Mario games, but it looks like we're up to two and a half tops. There's great moments here but it's such a slog to get to them.