This game was a lot more fun than I thought it would be, especially since I really enjoyed SMRPG and thus I held Paper Mario to high expectations.
The partner system was a neat feature that differentiates the game from SMRPG in a great way, and it’s loads of fun swapping between the different party members you meet along the way to help solve puzzles in the world or utilize properly in battles. I was very glad to see the button timing mechanics brought back as well which generally makes battles far more enjoyable than standard pick your move and watch the character perform it.
The story was charming and the style of everything was cute but I was expecting a bit more “paper” to be prevalent in the game (Super Paper Mario does a good job at this with being able to flip the camera around). Aside from the stylistic choice of making all the character models flat, there aren’t really any creative liberties I noticed that took advantage of the paper aesthetic aside from some character/enemy animations. Either way the game still looked and played great, and it’s proof that simplicity in a game works.
While I still think SMRPG is the slightly better game, Paper Mario is a wonderful successor that pleased me once again with Mario’s dive into the RPG genre.
The partner system was a neat feature that differentiates the game from SMRPG in a great way, and it’s loads of fun swapping between the different party members you meet along the way to help solve puzzles in the world or utilize properly in battles. I was very glad to see the button timing mechanics brought back as well which generally makes battles far more enjoyable than standard pick your move and watch the character perform it.
The story was charming and the style of everything was cute but I was expecting a bit more “paper” to be prevalent in the game (Super Paper Mario does a good job at this with being able to flip the camera around). Aside from the stylistic choice of making all the character models flat, there aren’t really any creative liberties I noticed that took advantage of the paper aesthetic aside from some character/enemy animations. Either way the game still looked and played great, and it’s proof that simplicity in a game works.
While I still think SMRPG is the slightly better game, Paper Mario is a wonderful successor that pleased me once again with Mario’s dive into the RPG genre.