Paper Mario at it's absolute worst, maybe even Nintendo at its worst. The tedium, the backtracking, the convoluted mandatory puzzles that are near impossible without a guide lest you want to spend hours running around picking up random stickers hoping they solve the puzzle. It has bad gameplay, bad story, bad characters.

I'm not someone who just jumped on a hate bandwagon either, I've played the game to it's end and collected every thing sticker to unlock the secret sound test/music room it has. And yeah it's as bad as they say, maybe even worse than they say if you experience world 2 and 3 for yourself.

The only things this game does right is it's visuals which look really nice and it's music that is surprisingly good.

Overall could not recommend this game to anyone. It has very little to nothing for a long running Paper Mario fan, and any non Paper Mario fan looking for a simple Nintendo turn based 3DS game to play have the Mario & Luigi 3DS Titles right there.

Bravely Default is a JRPG with a super unique battle system. In battle you can stock up actions by using a defensive move called 'Default' mid battle to block attacks and store up 'Brave Points' to then use 'Brave' and unleash multiple different skills, items, or attacks all within a single turn depending on how many Brave Points you have.
As you progress and defeat bosses you will gain new classes or 'jobs' you can change your party members into to completely change how you strategize and go about battles.

The menu and battles screens can be navigated super fast with the snappy controls and helpful built in optimization that keeps things aware from being a chore. The game also has on the fly toggleable difficulty and the ability to disable enemy encounters if you want to back track without wasting time.

The gameplay is amazing, but its also carried by its music, voice acting, and characters. The music is consistently absolute bangers from the start to the end of the game. The final boss theme is one of the best I've ever heard. The voice acting ranges from just entertaining and funny to actually really impressive, it never got annoying and was enjoying to listen to throughout the whole game. The 4 main characters can be stubborn, annoying, and questionable at first in how they work together, however as it picks up and progresses they actually do grow and change in meaningful ways and its great to see how far they go. The villains and side characters are hilarious and amazing, with outlandish designs and voices that kept me wanting more of them.

The only real downside this game has (Besides for random encounters in general) is the horrible late game pacing. The gameplay pacing suddenly gets really weird later in the game and forces you to do a lot of the task you've already done over and over again countless times if you want to achieve the 'true ending' the game has. A lot of end game side quest also have little rewards or incentives unless you just want the challenge and the chance to interact with the characters and villians more. The story can also be questionable especially in the later half of the game as it becomes more convoluted with the pacing.

However for me the story, characters, voice acting, incredible music, and minute to minute gameplay kept me going even through the tedium (and entirely on hard mode) through all the side content and all the way to the true ending of the game. which felt like one of the craziest things I've ever accomplished in a game.

I gave this game a fair chance, I really did, but this is one of the few games I will never see through to the end because of how tedious and confusing it is. It's a JRPG without a traditional levelling system and yet the enemies get stronger as you progress traditionally. You'd instead level up specific attacks instead of your characters overall level but the game doesn't tell you the difference between similar moves and most stats and mechanics that are important are either hidden away or aren't shown to you at all (Or at least I couldn't find them when digging through the game and looking it up). You are punished for fleeing battles by sending you back to the start of the zone but most long and tedious encounters will sometimes not drop any money and you wont see progress towards levelling up moves. I could not find anywhere in the game that shows how far away I was from gaining a new level on a move. And there's also extreme difficulty spikes and sometimes surprise forced encounters if things weren't bad enough.
Can't really recommend this game to anyone, there's far better JRPGs on the 3DS that are much more worth your time.