I am excited to write about Super Paper Mario after my lengthy 100% save file. I started this most recent save file on a whim, and quickly learned that I have intensely nostalgic feelings for this game. This was one of the first games I got for the Wii as a child, and upon booting the game I was amused to see that my original save file had 76 hours logged. For reference, this game can easily be beaten in less than 20 hours and my 100% playthrough took only 36 hours. I am very aware that my perception of this game is warped by my nostalgia for it, so keep that in mind for this review.
Something you will notice right away with this game is its geometric artstyle. It is nothing like anything seen in any other Mario game, with most characters and locations being made of a collection of simple shapes and geometry. I think it looks alright, it’s cute if maybe a little underwhelming. But when playing this game as an adult I realized that this artistic style was chosen to align the visuals of the game with imagery from computers of the early 2000s. As a child I only noticed the mouse cursor that selects Mario when he goes 3D, but this motif is much more ubiquitous than just that. The characters and environments are so simple and geometric because they are meant to look like things you could draw in MS Paint. I also think that Tippi is a pretty clear reference to the MSN butterfly, the Cragnons from chapter 5 look just like the Apple “Finder” icon, and Mario’s 3D countdown bar looks just like the color bar from old MS Paint. My theories as to the meaning behind this direction are that either this game is set in a computer to show a progression of storytelling mediums like its predecessors did (PM64 is told through a storybook, PMTTYD is told through a play, and SPM is told through digital media), or that the developers chose to represent the story through the lens of a computer to show their love of the technology of the time and to tie in the visual theming of the game to the narrative’s theme of love.
Super Paper Mario is known as the Mario game with a story, and people are not kidding when they say that. Playing it as an adult, the narrative of this game was the best part about it. It starts off strong, with an en media res cutscene on the title screen that introduces the game’s main antagonist, Count Bleck, as well as the staple Mario characters Peach, Bowser, and Luigi. It also puts the games primary theme of love in clear view, with the antagonist’s evil macguffin, the Chaos Heart, being made through a corrupted expression of love created by the non consensual marriage of Peach and Bowser. The purpose of this scene makes a lot more sense after actually starting a save file and getting through a bit of exposition, but the title screen cutscene is a nice way of immediately hooking the player before they have to sit through any exposition. None of SPM’s narrative elements on their own are outstanding, but when combined with the whole package of the music, characters, writing, and colorful visuals I think that this game is something special. The game even got me a bit emotional a couple times. SPM’s theme of love is loosely followed throughout the rest of the game, with chapters 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 clearly connecting the narrative climax of the chapter to loving others or loving the world itself. Not to mention that the Pure Hearts you collect from each chapter are said to be literally made of love.
Something I never noticed about the early parts of the game, as a child, was Tippi’s negative attitude. From the moment you meet her at the end of the first cutscene, she seems disinterested in everything going on. She becomes a reluctant guide for you once you reach the main hub, at the request of Merlon. But at the end of chapter 3, Tippi starts becoming much more invested in the world and her relationship to others. This change gets spelled out for the player a bit later, but her tone shift from that point on is very noticeable on its own if you are engaging with her dialogue. Knowing the full context of her character, I think her initial attitude is a clever way of connecting Tippi to Count Bleck, both of whom have essentially lost interest in the world around them after they were separated due to the unfair denial of their love. Playing this game with a level of reading comprehension above that of a second grader has made me a lot more invested in the world of SPM (shocking, I know). There is a lot of lore in this game. Some of the pixls let loose juicy lore nuggets about the pixl uprising 1,500 years ago, there are murals in the pit of 100 trials describing where the ancients entrusted the Pure Hearts, each of the Pure Hearts has a story about how it came to rest where it is found, and there are many details about supporting characters’ histories that can be learned. I have yet to interface with any of the other Paper Mario games on as deep a level as this one, but I would be surprised if any of the other games contain as much worldbuilding as SPM.
The largest source of lore is the pair of bartenders who can be found in Flipside and Flopside. They will tell you a short story about the world, at the cost of 10 coins. I am befuddled as to why this service costs coins, as they don't provide you with any mechanical benefits. The primary purpose of the tales is to enrich the world, and they succeed at that! But I don't understand why this coin barrier was put in place to detract from a player’s ability to engage with this part of the game. The cost eventually adds up, as there are 34 stories to hear, totaling to 340 coins. Unfortunately, this is far from the only example of SPM discouraging players from engaging in its supplementary content.
The three major forms of side content in SPM, being maps, recipes, and cards, are all implemented extremely poorly and have negative synergy with the game’s other mechanics due to the exorbitant coin cost for all of them. You will need to grind coins in order to fully engage with these supplementary mechanics. The best way to grind coins in SPM is by using Catch Card SPs to catch Amayzee Daisies, and then selling their card at a 200 coin profit. You will need to do this around two dozen times for enough coins to fund everything. This method is extremely easy and doesn't take very long, maybe slightly above a minute per card, but I am so perplexed as to why the game was designed in a way that requires grinding several thousand coins. Grinding coins this way is already a chore, but if someone didn’t know about this method and instead did something like grinding coins by killing enemies– that would water down the overall quality of the game by ballooning the playtime spent on this extra stuff, even more than it already does. Roughly half of my playtime was spent engaging with this bonus content and I was already wishing it took at least a few less hours to complete by the end of it.
To finally get to this bonus content, Maps are the simplest, and probably the best designed, of these activities; you buy a map with coins and then go to the location shown on the map to find hidden treasure. Very often you will be rewarded for completing a map with a rare card, but other times it will be something with little value, such as cooking ingredients that are much more easily found in other places, or a sellable item that doesn't make a very good return when factoring in the cost you had to pay to buy the map in the first place. I like the maps because seeing the environments and music is one of the best parts of this game and, after beating the game, most NPCs will have new dialogue to see, so maps are a good extrinsic motivator to give all the towns a second visit.
Cards are my least favorite of these mechanics, as collecting them is mostly braindead busywork. As mentioned earlier, catching Amayzee Daisies with cards is the best way to make money, but other enemy cards essentially are never worth collecting, other than for completion’s sake. Owning a card for an enemy also gives a passive damage multiplier against the enemy on the card, but this is really not necessary at all. Without any card boosts, enemies will rarely take more than 2 hits to kill and pose no real threat to the player when you can just walk around an enemy in 3D if they are problematic. Rather than catching every enemy manually, it is much more efficient to buy random cards from a vendor in Flipside. I am glad that you don't need to catch all 256 enemies manually, but this method does not bring joy to my heart. The vast majority of your cards will be collected by buying random cards, one at a time, for 10 coins each. Even if you got all of the cards first try (which you won’t since you can pull repeats), that would be more than a 2,000 coin investment and several hundred button inputs to repeatedly go through the card purchase dialogue hundreds of times (my hand eventually got sore from spamming the 2 button)! The cards aren't even cool! They don't feature original art and their text is usually a much less interesting and shorter description of the tattle text that Tippi would tell you if you asked her for info about the actual character. This feature is honestly really bad and the game would be better without cards full stop.
Recipes are the last massive piece of side content that is displayed on the menu, and I can at least say that it is the most fleshed out of the three. There are two chefs (one in Flipside and one in Flopside) who can cook ingredients you give them to make dishes. This feature is MUCH more expansive than it deserves to be, featuring almost 100 unique recipes for different dishes. You can try to guess some recipes by providing the chefs with items you think will work, but to figure out all the recipes you will realistically need to find all of the cooking discs that are scattered around the world, each of which has about a dozen recipes on it. Unfortunately, there are multiple major flaws that ruin the cooking mechanic. Most importantly, essentially none of the dishes you can make are worth the effort. The majority of single item dishes are something like converting a 7hp healing item into a 12hp healing item, and the majority of dishes made by combining items have an effect like combining two 10hp healing items to get a 15hp or 20hp healing item. These dishes are less effective than simply using two items, it requires you to bring the items to the chefs and watch the unskippable cooking cutscene, and it requires you to either already have the cooking disc that tells you those items can be cooked or to risk losing the items by having a chef cook an unconfirmed recipe. That is a lot of reasons to not engage with the cooking service, and when comparing it to simply buying a Super Shroom Shake in Flipside which heals 20hp right out of the gate, it's a no brainer. And if you do want to make an individual item more effective by cooking it, there is no reason to deviate from the simplest recipes that you already know work (such as cooking a Super Shroom Shake or an Ultra Shroom Shake), leaving the other ~90 recipes out to dry. Despite their uselessness, I was still able to find enjoyment in simply making new recipes purely to add them to my recipe log. However, the worst part of the cooking process that made me kind of regret even going for 100% was the terrible layout of Flipside and Flopside. Say you want to cook a Blue Honey Shroom (Super Shroom Shake + Honey); you'll need to get the ingredients, and fortunately both of these items can be bought in the hub. If you start from Flipside F2, you would need to go to the Itty Bits shop on Flipside B1 to buy the Honey, then back to Flipside F2 so that you could go to Flopside. There you can get a Super Shroom Shake from the Flopside shop and then go to the chef on Flopside F1 and cook the two items together. So the full path would be FlipF2 > FlipF1 > FlipB1 > FlipF1 > FlipF2 > FlopF2 > FlopF1. Each loading zone has a cutscene in between, making for a very long path, especially when considering that these are the most accessible shops in the game! To make this feature less annoying, I think all the hub chefs and ingredient shops should have been consolidated between Flipside F2 and Flopside F2 to cut down on travel time. The excessive travel time is exacerbated both by Mario’s small inventory size of 10 items and the fact that the shops in Flipside B1 and Flopside B1 don't allow you to put items into your storage from there. Time spent getting ingredients gets even longer when a recipe requires items that can only be found outside the hub, and don't get me started on when a recipe requires you to cook part of the recipe with one chef and the rest of the recipe at the other. I get that the game doesn't want to break immersion by putting all of the parts of town that are of interest to the player right next to one another, but this is just brutal and honestly kills the feature. If they really wanted to keep the stores where they are, allowing the chefs to at least access ingredients from your storage would have helped a lot. Making cooked items significantly more potent would have also helped with making them more valuable. I am certain that at least two hours of my playtime was spent monotonously walking to and from shops in the hub while cooking new recipes.
The remaining optional content in the game isn’t much better than what I've already described. There are two pits of 100 trials in this game, and you have to clear the second one twice! I thought it was alright for the first ~200 rooms but it got a bit grating after that. Chapter 6 is also completely different after you beat the game, but that postgame chapter is literally just fighting 100 variants of the same enemy which is even more samey than doing the pit 3 times. Even though I think that the side content in this game is kinda just shameless padding, don't let that discourage you from playing SPM! I willingly chose to engage with all that this game has to offer, all of the side content is very much optional and there is no relevant downside to choosing to sidestep all of it entirely.
As I briefly mentioned, I think that the characters, music, writing and visuals of SPM combine to elevate the game a lot. The actual gameplay though– it's mid. Puzzles are common in this game, and they almost always have the most boring solution imaginable. The majority of the puzzles in this game will be finding a locked door and then walking past it along a linear path, which has a key at the end of it. Then backtrack to the locked door to advance. It’s inoffensive, if uncreative. Switching from a 2D to a 3D perspective is a major part of this game, and while I think the gimmick is cool, it is utilized poorly in several places. It certainly does enable some creative new puzzle scenarios, but sometimes there is also just something hidden in 3D without any clue that you need to flip there to find it, and flipping to 3D in every single room to look for secrets is just tedious and not worth the time it takes to check (the cooking disc randomly inside of one of the many houses in the hub is a perfect example of this). The characters control fine, but there is never any serious platforming or combat that requires the player to express any skill. I was shocked to find that none of the bosses in this game pose any threat (aside from the optional superboss at the end of the Flopside pit). Almost all of the bosses can be killed in a matter of seconds without the need for items by just attacking nonstop with no regard for incoming damage. The gameplay really is just a vehicle for the story, music, and visuals, and while I think that it performs that purpose well, I am sad that the gameplay wasn't given the attention necessary to be good on its own and allow it to combine with the game’s other aspects to make an even greater product.
Even though I wouldn’t recommend anyone to 100% this game, engaging with every aspect of this game brought me to appreciate it in ways that I wouldn't have otherwise and I am looking forward to playing through the campaign another time in the eventual future. This game is obviously very different from the two games that preceded it, and likely more flawed, but I think it is certainly far from what ruined the Paper Mario series, as some people think. This perspective may be clouded by nostalgia, but I think anyone who enjoys narratives in games and also anyone new to video games would appreciate the endearing story and charming atmosphere of Super Paper Mario.
Something you will notice right away with this game is its geometric artstyle. It is nothing like anything seen in any other Mario game, with most characters and locations being made of a collection of simple shapes and geometry. I think it looks alright, it’s cute if maybe a little underwhelming. But when playing this game as an adult I realized that this artistic style was chosen to align the visuals of the game with imagery from computers of the early 2000s. As a child I only noticed the mouse cursor that selects Mario when he goes 3D, but this motif is much more ubiquitous than just that. The characters and environments are so simple and geometric because they are meant to look like things you could draw in MS Paint. I also think that Tippi is a pretty clear reference to the MSN butterfly, the Cragnons from chapter 5 look just like the Apple “Finder” icon, and Mario’s 3D countdown bar looks just like the color bar from old MS Paint. My theories as to the meaning behind this direction are that either this game is set in a computer to show a progression of storytelling mediums like its predecessors did (PM64 is told through a storybook, PMTTYD is told through a play, and SPM is told through digital media), or that the developers chose to represent the story through the lens of a computer to show their love of the technology of the time and to tie in the visual theming of the game to the narrative’s theme of love.
Super Paper Mario is known as the Mario game with a story, and people are not kidding when they say that. Playing it as an adult, the narrative of this game was the best part about it. It starts off strong, with an en media res cutscene on the title screen that introduces the game’s main antagonist, Count Bleck, as well as the staple Mario characters Peach, Bowser, and Luigi. It also puts the games primary theme of love in clear view, with the antagonist’s evil macguffin, the Chaos Heart, being made through a corrupted expression of love created by the non consensual marriage of Peach and Bowser. The purpose of this scene makes a lot more sense after actually starting a save file and getting through a bit of exposition, but the title screen cutscene is a nice way of immediately hooking the player before they have to sit through any exposition. None of SPM’s narrative elements on their own are outstanding, but when combined with the whole package of the music, characters, writing, and colorful visuals I think that this game is something special. The game even got me a bit emotional a couple times. SPM’s theme of love is loosely followed throughout the rest of the game, with chapters 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 clearly connecting the narrative climax of the chapter to loving others or loving the world itself. Not to mention that the Pure Hearts you collect from each chapter are said to be literally made of love.
Something I never noticed about the early parts of the game, as a child, was Tippi’s negative attitude. From the moment you meet her at the end of the first cutscene, she seems disinterested in everything going on. She becomes a reluctant guide for you once you reach the main hub, at the request of Merlon. But at the end of chapter 3, Tippi starts becoming much more invested in the world and her relationship to others. This change gets spelled out for the player a bit later, but her tone shift from that point on is very noticeable on its own if you are engaging with her dialogue. Knowing the full context of her character, I think her initial attitude is a clever way of connecting Tippi to Count Bleck, both of whom have essentially lost interest in the world around them after they were separated due to the unfair denial of their love. Playing this game with a level of reading comprehension above that of a second grader has made me a lot more invested in the world of SPM (shocking, I know). There is a lot of lore in this game. Some of the pixls let loose juicy lore nuggets about the pixl uprising 1,500 years ago, there are murals in the pit of 100 trials describing where the ancients entrusted the Pure Hearts, each of the Pure Hearts has a story about how it came to rest where it is found, and there are many details about supporting characters’ histories that can be learned. I have yet to interface with any of the other Paper Mario games on as deep a level as this one, but I would be surprised if any of the other games contain as much worldbuilding as SPM.
The largest source of lore is the pair of bartenders who can be found in Flipside and Flopside. They will tell you a short story about the world, at the cost of 10 coins. I am befuddled as to why this service costs coins, as they don't provide you with any mechanical benefits. The primary purpose of the tales is to enrich the world, and they succeed at that! But I don't understand why this coin barrier was put in place to detract from a player’s ability to engage with this part of the game. The cost eventually adds up, as there are 34 stories to hear, totaling to 340 coins. Unfortunately, this is far from the only example of SPM discouraging players from engaging in its supplementary content.
The three major forms of side content in SPM, being maps, recipes, and cards, are all implemented extremely poorly and have negative synergy with the game’s other mechanics due to the exorbitant coin cost for all of them. You will need to grind coins in order to fully engage with these supplementary mechanics. The best way to grind coins in SPM is by using Catch Card SPs to catch Amayzee Daisies, and then selling their card at a 200 coin profit. You will need to do this around two dozen times for enough coins to fund everything. This method is extremely easy and doesn't take very long, maybe slightly above a minute per card, but I am so perplexed as to why the game was designed in a way that requires grinding several thousand coins. Grinding coins this way is already a chore, but if someone didn’t know about this method and instead did something like grinding coins by killing enemies– that would water down the overall quality of the game by ballooning the playtime spent on this extra stuff, even more than it already does. Roughly half of my playtime was spent engaging with this bonus content and I was already wishing it took at least a few less hours to complete by the end of it.
To finally get to this bonus content, Maps are the simplest, and probably the best designed, of these activities; you buy a map with coins and then go to the location shown on the map to find hidden treasure. Very often you will be rewarded for completing a map with a rare card, but other times it will be something with little value, such as cooking ingredients that are much more easily found in other places, or a sellable item that doesn't make a very good return when factoring in the cost you had to pay to buy the map in the first place. I like the maps because seeing the environments and music is one of the best parts of this game and, after beating the game, most NPCs will have new dialogue to see, so maps are a good extrinsic motivator to give all the towns a second visit.
Cards are my least favorite of these mechanics, as collecting them is mostly braindead busywork. As mentioned earlier, catching Amayzee Daisies with cards is the best way to make money, but other enemy cards essentially are never worth collecting, other than for completion’s sake. Owning a card for an enemy also gives a passive damage multiplier against the enemy on the card, but this is really not necessary at all. Without any card boosts, enemies will rarely take more than 2 hits to kill and pose no real threat to the player when you can just walk around an enemy in 3D if they are problematic. Rather than catching every enemy manually, it is much more efficient to buy random cards from a vendor in Flipside. I am glad that you don't need to catch all 256 enemies manually, but this method does not bring joy to my heart. The vast majority of your cards will be collected by buying random cards, one at a time, for 10 coins each. Even if you got all of the cards first try (which you won’t since you can pull repeats), that would be more than a 2,000 coin investment and several hundred button inputs to repeatedly go through the card purchase dialogue hundreds of times (my hand eventually got sore from spamming the 2 button)! The cards aren't even cool! They don't feature original art and their text is usually a much less interesting and shorter description of the tattle text that Tippi would tell you if you asked her for info about the actual character. This feature is honestly really bad and the game would be better without cards full stop.
Recipes are the last massive piece of side content that is displayed on the menu, and I can at least say that it is the most fleshed out of the three. There are two chefs (one in Flipside and one in Flopside) who can cook ingredients you give them to make dishes. This feature is MUCH more expansive than it deserves to be, featuring almost 100 unique recipes for different dishes. You can try to guess some recipes by providing the chefs with items you think will work, but to figure out all the recipes you will realistically need to find all of the cooking discs that are scattered around the world, each of which has about a dozen recipes on it. Unfortunately, there are multiple major flaws that ruin the cooking mechanic. Most importantly, essentially none of the dishes you can make are worth the effort. The majority of single item dishes are something like converting a 7hp healing item into a 12hp healing item, and the majority of dishes made by combining items have an effect like combining two 10hp healing items to get a 15hp or 20hp healing item. These dishes are less effective than simply using two items, it requires you to bring the items to the chefs and watch the unskippable cooking cutscene, and it requires you to either already have the cooking disc that tells you those items can be cooked or to risk losing the items by having a chef cook an unconfirmed recipe. That is a lot of reasons to not engage with the cooking service, and when comparing it to simply buying a Super Shroom Shake in Flipside which heals 20hp right out of the gate, it's a no brainer. And if you do want to make an individual item more effective by cooking it, there is no reason to deviate from the simplest recipes that you already know work (such as cooking a Super Shroom Shake or an Ultra Shroom Shake), leaving the other ~90 recipes out to dry. Despite their uselessness, I was still able to find enjoyment in simply making new recipes purely to add them to my recipe log. However, the worst part of the cooking process that made me kind of regret even going for 100% was the terrible layout of Flipside and Flopside. Say you want to cook a Blue Honey Shroom (Super Shroom Shake + Honey); you'll need to get the ingredients, and fortunately both of these items can be bought in the hub. If you start from Flipside F2, you would need to go to the Itty Bits shop on Flipside B1 to buy the Honey, then back to Flipside F2 so that you could go to Flopside. There you can get a Super Shroom Shake from the Flopside shop and then go to the chef on Flopside F1 and cook the two items together. So the full path would be FlipF2 > FlipF1 > FlipB1 > FlipF1 > FlipF2 > FlopF2 > FlopF1. Each loading zone has a cutscene in between, making for a very long path, especially when considering that these are the most accessible shops in the game! To make this feature less annoying, I think all the hub chefs and ingredient shops should have been consolidated between Flipside F2 and Flopside F2 to cut down on travel time. The excessive travel time is exacerbated both by Mario’s small inventory size of 10 items and the fact that the shops in Flipside B1 and Flopside B1 don't allow you to put items into your storage from there. Time spent getting ingredients gets even longer when a recipe requires items that can only be found outside the hub, and don't get me started on when a recipe requires you to cook part of the recipe with one chef and the rest of the recipe at the other. I get that the game doesn't want to break immersion by putting all of the parts of town that are of interest to the player right next to one another, but this is just brutal and honestly kills the feature. If they really wanted to keep the stores where they are, allowing the chefs to at least access ingredients from your storage would have helped a lot. Making cooked items significantly more potent would have also helped with making them more valuable. I am certain that at least two hours of my playtime was spent monotonously walking to and from shops in the hub while cooking new recipes.
The remaining optional content in the game isn’t much better than what I've already described. There are two pits of 100 trials in this game, and you have to clear the second one twice! I thought it was alright for the first ~200 rooms but it got a bit grating after that. Chapter 6 is also completely different after you beat the game, but that postgame chapter is literally just fighting 100 variants of the same enemy which is even more samey than doing the pit 3 times. Even though I think that the side content in this game is kinda just shameless padding, don't let that discourage you from playing SPM! I willingly chose to engage with all that this game has to offer, all of the side content is very much optional and there is no relevant downside to choosing to sidestep all of it entirely.
As I briefly mentioned, I think that the characters, music, writing and visuals of SPM combine to elevate the game a lot. The actual gameplay though– it's mid. Puzzles are common in this game, and they almost always have the most boring solution imaginable. The majority of the puzzles in this game will be finding a locked door and then walking past it along a linear path, which has a key at the end of it. Then backtrack to the locked door to advance. It’s inoffensive, if uncreative. Switching from a 2D to a 3D perspective is a major part of this game, and while I think the gimmick is cool, it is utilized poorly in several places. It certainly does enable some creative new puzzle scenarios, but sometimes there is also just something hidden in 3D without any clue that you need to flip there to find it, and flipping to 3D in every single room to look for secrets is just tedious and not worth the time it takes to check (the cooking disc randomly inside of one of the many houses in the hub is a perfect example of this). The characters control fine, but there is never any serious platforming or combat that requires the player to express any skill. I was shocked to find that none of the bosses in this game pose any threat (aside from the optional superboss at the end of the Flopside pit). Almost all of the bosses can be killed in a matter of seconds without the need for items by just attacking nonstop with no regard for incoming damage. The gameplay really is just a vehicle for the story, music, and visuals, and while I think that it performs that purpose well, I am sad that the gameplay wasn't given the attention necessary to be good on its own and allow it to combine with the game’s other aspects to make an even greater product.
Even though I wouldn’t recommend anyone to 100% this game, engaging with every aspect of this game brought me to appreciate it in ways that I wouldn't have otherwise and I am looking forward to playing through the campaign another time in the eventual future. This game is obviously very different from the two games that preceded it, and likely more flawed, but I think it is certainly far from what ruined the Paper Mario series, as some people think. This perspective may be clouded by nostalgia, but I think anyone who enjoys narratives in games and also anyone new to video games would appreciate the endearing story and charming atmosphere of Super Paper Mario.