I’d like to apologize to everyone over the years who heard from me that Super Paper Mario wasn’t actually as bad as everyone made it out to be.

Perhaps this is a series destined to only have two games worth playing, both of them being the chronological first entries. Super Paper Mario, unlike its predecessors, is a game defined by occasional moments, rather than anything that can meld into a cohesive whole. Playing through it is like stirring water into oil. Yeah, you’ve got the part where you work off a debt, and the part where you play a Princess Peach dating sim, and the part where Mario dies and goes to the River Styx, but these are little more than sandbars peeking out from beneath a sludgy lagoon. You’d be hard-pressed to call them forgettable, but that’s only because it’s twice as difficult to remember anything else from the bulk of the game.

I think that the only reason I had fond memories of this to begin with stemmed from me being stuck at my elementary school “girlfriend’s" house every day after school with nothing to do besides play this or Cars (2006). She didn’t have too many Wii games, and I didn’t think of her the way that our moms wanted us to, which meant that it was going to be Super Paper Mario or nothing. A man dying of thirst will drink from the foulest stream. Honestly, the one thing I remember really liking at the time was the fake-out Underchomp fight where the game turns into Dragon Quest for three minutes before chucking you back into the platformer stuff. It’s good to know that I’ve been an insufferable Thousand-Year Door turn-based RPG purist since before I hit fifth grade.

I digress. The point to make here is that what I was once content to pass the time with as a child has since been revealed to be incredibly fucking boring through the lens of a new run through it. Honestly, I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it this time around. I managed before, when I was younger, and had lower standards, with literally nothing else to do. A decade and a half later and I had to bail before Chapter 6 hit.

There’s just so little to like and so little to do in the massive, sweeping valleys between the very brief peaks that this game has that makes it genuinely kind of tough to discuss. How many ways can I say “it’s just walking to the right and then walking to the left and then walking to the right again”, really? You go to a place, get told you need a thing, walk to the thing, get the thing, walk back to the place to deliver the thing, end of stage. Sometimes you don’t even get that much — the entire Sammer Kingdom is just knocking out way too many mooks across way too many rooms and then holding right for five straight minutes before you do one of another countless middling boss fights. With your mechanics reduced to little more than various flavors of jumping on a guy’s head, you can pretty much sleepwalk through every lengthy encounter by getting sufficient height and chaining incredibly easy bounces with less satisfying momentum than Super Mario Bros. for infinite damage.

I suppose what really got the hooks into its fans was the narrative, which I regret to say was not the sweeping, epic tale of love everlasting that I thought it was when I was ten. Maybe it’s the muted, reversed-instrument “dun dun DUN” score that sweeps over the emotional scenes that sells this as being grander and more impactful than it is. What really damns the entire overarching plot for me is that how few characters are actually permitted to be characters; you can end the game with twelve(!!!) supporting Pixls in your party, and I literally cannot remember the name of a single one of them save for Tippi. Where the previous two games usually had your partners reacting with dialog wholly unique to them in any given scene (meaning that if you really wanted to see all of the text in the game, it would necessitate something like at least eight different playthroughs), Tippi is virtually the only one ever allowed to speak. Partners in the previous titles would often talk for Mario — Mario is little more than a symbol in the vein of Mickey Mouse, you see, so he’s not actually allowed to speak in full sentences — which added personalized flavor to cutscenes based on who you had deployed at a given time; here, the entire burden falls squarely on the wings of your living mouse cursor, and she just isn’t interesting enough to pull that much weight.

The good moments here are genuinely impressive, and you could make the argument that they’re some of the better bits that the series has to offer, but they’re ultimately little more than that: moments. No greater implications, no cohesion, nothing to really sink your teeth into. It commits the cardinal sin of being immensely boring for the overwhelming duration of its runtime, and the vignettes hinting at a greater experience somewhere in here cannot possibly withstand the torrent of sluggish tree climbing sections nor toilet paper fetch questing nor infinite heavenly stair scaling.

Count Bleck’s real name being Blumiere implies that he’s French, making him the most vile villain Nintendo has ever created.