Pretty much everything about this game is mediocre and boring. the parts that are fun are simply taken from previous entries in the series, such as the combat mechanics, except even those are worse this time. Battle cards and paper Mario in general don't feel good to use. On top of this boss battles that consist of using the same few moves over and over and over again often last over 20 minutes sometimes, making them extremely boring and repetitive. Its not just the battles that are way to long however. the main story of this game takes around 25 hours to complete, and does absolutely nothing to deserve it. you pass through the same boring Mario landscapes you've seen a million times with nothing interesting, fight the same enemies over and over, and have absolutely no interesting story to tie it all together. there is zero point in checking out this game. Its dull, boring and disappointing in all regards.

Truly one of the most disappointing games ever for me personally. Everything good about either of the Mario RPG series is STRIPPED away here, no unique characters story or locations. Just the boring NSMB tripe we had A LOT of back in those days. Although, Paper Mario had already been struggling for a few good years at this point. This could have been a great love letter to both series, but it succumbed to the sterilization of the Mario brand.

Though at least this game is MUCH better than those sub par and foul modern Paper Mario entries. You can still just veg out and play a Mario RPG and actually level up. Bowser is always great as usual, though I don't know why Starlow is still here?? She's so mean to Luigi get her out of here!! And the soundtrack by Yoko Shimomura is wonderful as always.

But All in all, your better off playing the Super Mario RPG remake, or hell even the M&L remakes. At least their foundations are from GOOD games.

Garbage. This game is literally a crime.






I could've ended off here, but it now falls on me to do the explaining. Mario and Luigi was once a masterful Mario RPG subseries made by the late Alphadream that Nintendo used as an excuse to ruin Paper Mario, on the pretense that they already had a Mario RPG series, and wanted to do something different with Paper Mario, hence transforming Paper Mario into Paper Jam with Sticker Star. This resulted in a dangerous loop for both series ironically, where Paper Mario was mortified into a zombie looking even creepier than Doopliss, and Mario and Luigi was left on life support for a few years, before dying off thanks to this piece of garbage, Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam. A game that was supposed to marry both beloved subseries together, only stifled creative liberty by destroying everything that made Mario and Luigi great via jamming Paper Jam's solace and stupidity into the forefront. The rich storytelling of MandL was completely axed in favor of yet another Paper Jam story, where two Bowsers act in tandem to do evil things for the umpteenth time, intruding on a series whose first main antagonist wasn't even Bowser. Give the Koopa King a break, writers. He deserves better than this.

Despite the gameplay very much being Mario and Luigi, the tone and feeling is again severely corrupted. The gameplay is still fun and I would give this abomination a 5/10 just for having fantastic gameplay if it hadn't crushed Mario and Luigi with it. Paper Jam is the reason Alphadream went bankrupt, because this game was so unappealing and antithetical to a subseries whose creative status was untouched, so it had to be destroyed for the greater good according to Nintendo. This is why Paper Mario should've never been ruined, because its influence is what destroyed Mario and Luigi to begin with.

voilà là c'est le point de non retour qui a demandé ce crossover déjà ? restez dans votre zone nan ? on dirait ils avaient la flemme de faire un paper mario et un mario & luigi dcp ils se sont dit azy on fait les deux en meme temps mdrr
nan en vrai c'est drole psq je sais j'y ai joué mais le jeu devait être tellement mid et peu marquant que j'en ai aucun souvenir mdrr, aussi jcrois c vers là qu'ils ont commencé à plus du tout mettre de persos originaux donc pas ouf du tout j'ai vraiment pas envie d'y rejouer le jeu m'a endormi

I'm not exaggerating when I say this is a sin against humanity, I HATED this game and how much it consistently wasted my time. With the constant story beats that kept dragging on and on, fighting the same fights over and over again, padding for the sake of padding. This game had it all. For any aspiring game designers out there I point you towards this game, a complete example of what NOT to do when creating a fun game. There is virtually nothing fun about this game and anything this game has done the previous entries have done better. This is a soulless complete heap of garbage that I've ever played and I will NEVER return to. Game deserves all the hate it gets, it really is that bad, there was no saving grace here, nothing in this game was memorable and nothing stood out.
You order food at a restaurant and this is the kind of the stuff they dig out from the back of the trash can and serve to you on your plate. The combat was frustrating, the exploration was uninteresting, the music is forgettable, EVERYTHING IN THIS GAME WAS HORRIBLE.
The Paper Toad Missions make me want to pull every single last strand of hair out, these stupid paper morons and their horrible one liners, I hated them with a burning passion.
The Countless amounts of gimmick and minigames this game throws at you is so exhausting, the previous M&L games had minigames yes but this game throws it in all the damn time, you're always doing SOMETHING whether its a poorly designed stealth mission, a find the item mission, a chase the guy mission, a mission where you just play HIDE AND SEEK???
WHAT DEMOGRAPHIC WAS THIS MADE FOR? IT CAN'T BE FANS OF MARIO AND LUIGI, BECAUSE THEY WOULDN'T PLAY THIS, AND IT CAN'T BE NEW FANS BECAUSE OF HOW DIFFICULT THIS GAME GETS LATER ON.

Yes, I think this is without a doubt the hardest Mario and Luigi game in the series, which isn't saying much cause these games aren't even hard but this one just... oh my god. This one just was a pain in the ass. The devs try to remedy this games poor enemy pattern design by making boo cookies stupidly cheap and their sole purpose is so you can practice the bs enemy patterns but you know what my counter argument is to this? The whole fun of a M&L game is learning the patterns and picking up those yourself, yes its trial and error but the enemies always, ALWAYS, gave an indication of who they'll be attacking. In this game because there's 3 people to worry about it makes dodging so uncomfortable and when the game requires you to press all 3 buttons at once I despise it. NOBODY can tell me this was a fun control scheme, say what you want about Partners in Time, but you were still controlling 2 bros at the end of the day, the babies were just piggyback riding off of them. In this game you gotta manage 3 at one time and it's not fun, it's so frustrating because if one falls the other 2 will and then it becomes a domino effect. I really want to know what was inside the devs head when making this cause this wasn't fun at all to play. The Bros attacks in this game are also so forgettable and lame and nothing fun like in BIS or hell, even Dream Team. The Big Paper Craft battles were so boring and such a tacked on gimmick, you could remove these from the game and NOTHING would change. They're so insignificant to the entire game that playing them made me wish I wasn't.

But yeah, those are my thoughts on Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam. A complete waste of your time that no one should ever subject themself to. This is a one and done, forever.

Finally, I've finished replaying all the original games in the Mario and Luigi series since becoming an adult. I remember not being a fan of this game when I played it as a child, and this game definitely does have some significant flaws, but I was very surprised by how fun a lot of the gameplay was!

To start off with the positives, Paper Jam has the best combat in the whole Mario and Luigi series! This is what kept me motivated to continue playing the game, despite its low points. There are frequent boss fights all throughout the game, which were a BLAST to play. The main reason why the boss fights in this game are so good is because they have more creative and diverse attacks and counter opportunities. One of my favorite examples of this is the paper airplane attack that the Bowser Juniors' have. In this attack, you are basically playing chicken against Paper Bowser Jr. to see who can let their paper airplane get closest to the ground without landing. This attack is extremely unique, fun to play, and doesn't overstay its welcome. Several boss attacks in Paper Jam are also challenging to consistently counterattack, which I really liked! A common problem I had with the older games (especially Partners in Time) was that figuring out how to consistently counter all of a boss' attacks was too simple, and the fights would quickly become dull as you slowly chip away at the very large HP pool of the boss, with almost no risk of taking damage; at that point you already know that you've won but you just have to sit through the rest of the fight repeating the same action commands until the boss runs out of HP. Paper Jam keeps things exciting by including more counterattack options than just jumping and hammering and opting to make bosses more difficult by making countering tighter and more complex, rather than simply increasing the amount of health that each boss has.

The flashiest innovation that Paper Jam includes is the addition of Battle Cards. Serving as the replacement for Badges from Bowser's Inside Story and Dream Team, Battle Cards are abilities that you can activate, without consuming your turn in battle, at the cost of Star Points which you earn for performing successful attacks. The fun thing about Battle Cards is that you draw one each turn out of your custom deck of 10 cards! This inclusion of deckbuilding mechanics did a lot to make Paper Jam feel mechanically very different from all of the other Mario and Luigi games. Improving my deck by buying new cards from the shop and getting holographic cards drops from enemies added moments of excitement to the game that I am very appreciative of. I am pleasantly surprised by how well Battle Cards fit into the already established formula of a Mario and Luigi game, and I am sad that we didn't get the opportunity to see this concept iterated upon further in a future Mario and Luigi game!

The last big shakeup in this game is the addition of a third party member, Paper Mario. Other games in the Mario and Luigi series have added additional party members before, but Partners in Time did a very poor job executing this concept, as you can effectively only have 2 party members active at one time and the babies are entirely redunant characters anyways, and while Bowser's Inside Story did literally have three party members, the majority of that game was spent exploring the world as two separate parties (Mario and Luigi as one party and Bowser on his own). Paper Jam makes the simple change of adding Paper Mario to the Mario brothers' team, and this addition subtly makes the Mario and Luigi gameplay so much better. A problem shared among every Mario and Luigi game is that counterattacks are often easily cheesable. You are encouraged to counter enemies by closely looking at their behavior immediately before they attack to determine what bro they are targeting and then press the appropriate button (A for Mario, B for Luigi) to help the corresponding character avoid danger. But what is much easier to do is to simply press A and B at the same time so that regardless of who an enemy is attacking, you can preform the appropriate dodge without even needing to engage with the enemy's specific telegraphs. The addition of a third concurrent party member greatly alleviates this problem thanks to simple fact that it is very difficult to press A, B, and Y simultaneously. The specific implementation of Paper Mario goes even further to solve this issue, by also making him stand a significant distance behind Mario and Luigi. The reason why this is relevant, is because Paper Mario's distance from the enemies makes their attacks take longer to reach him, making his timing for many counterattacks offset from those for Mario and Luigi. This effectively makes it impossible to cover multiple bases at once by trying to counterattack with Paper Mario and another character at the same time. I consider the cheesability of the other games in the series to be a significant design flaw, and it is very nice to see that problem finally addressed in this game.

While Paper Jam made some incredible improvements to the standard Mario and Luigi experience, it does introduce some serious flaws as well. My biggest issue with the game is that there is a large amount of mandatory gameplay that just isn't fun. In the early game especially, there are many required quests you must complete to advance the story that are a completely different style of gameplay from the standard turn based battles and overworld exploration. The worst offenders, in my opinion, are the quests that make you play hide and seek to find hidden Paper Toads and the quests that make you chase and tackle Paper Toads in the overworld. There are many other types of quests in this game, many of which I actually did enjoy playing--like the quiz and Yoshi racing ones, but strangely most of the fun quests were optional.

The biggest waste of time though, is without a doubt, the papercraft battles. This is an evolution of the giant battles from Bowser's Inside Story and Dream Team, but instead of participating in cinematic turn based battles, you destroy other papercrafts in a 3D free-moment environment. These sections suck for multiple reasons. For one, the controls are very awkward and feel pretty terrible. You use tank controls, movement is pretty slow, there isn't much to actually interact with in any of these sections, and the combat is absolutely horrific. You are meant to bait attacks from enemies and then counterattack them after they miss. This already isn't great, since moving around your papercraft doesn't feel good, but it gets even worse because the enemies sometimes take a long time to get aggressive and try to attack. This leaves A LOT of awkward pauses in between each attack and counterattack combo. This gameplay loop made me very impatient, leading me to another major source of frustration: the lack of expression. The jump attack you use to destroy the enemies has a significant amount of windup, making it implausible to attack enemies before they make themselves vulnerable with a miss. It ended up not being worth the effort and time to try and play offensively due to the extremely railroaded design of this gameplay. There is also a stamina system in papercraft battles, which serves no purpose other than to be annoying. Stamina does not refill automatically and you must go to recharge stations to refill. This ends up being a total time waster because it takes several seconds to recharge and there is absolutely no risk while recharging, as enemies will not follow you to recharge stations. I honestly have no idea how this mode ended up in such a sorry state, the game would have been much much better without the inclusion of papercraft battles.

Something missing form Paper Jam is the imagination and humor that was present in the previous titles. This game is not creative. All of the enemies here are bog standard. There are no weird NPC races like the bean folk or the block people, there are no new enemy concepts like the cavity pokies or the shroobs, the theming of this game is extremely sterile. The most creative part of this game's theming is the addition of the Sticker Star rendition of Paper Mario, and if you know anything about Sticker Star you should know that paints a grim picture. The areas are also just as bland, sporting the all too common plains, desert, forest, ice, beach, and lava themes that the Mario fanbase has long since grown tired of. The world is also really small in this game, you get to the opposite end of the map very early on and you backtrack to every area of the game 1-2 times over the course of the game. One of the biggest falls from grace that this series has suffered in this game is the quality of the writing. Nothing interesting happens in this plot; Bowser kidnaps Peach and you rescue her. The paper characters were written in a way that I think is extremely boring, where they are essentially identical to their real counterparts in all ways other than being flat. And so little is said in so many words that I wouldn't blame you if you mashed A through the dialogue altogether. The humor that was present in the other games is mostly gone now, and many of the games attempts at being funny felt extremely dry, low effort, and fell completely flat for me. I can see these downgrades ruining the game for fans of the previous games, which is such a shame since the battling has never been better.

My remaining nitpicks and praises:
- The inclusion of a speed up button for cutscenes is nice, as the default speed is painfully slow. Its inclusion leave me wondering why they didn't just speed up the cutscenes though. Holding down R to speed up gets annoying too.
- The Koopalings have never been better than in this game. They actually feel like they have personalities here and are one of the only examples of the game doing something interesting with its characters.
- There are a lot of reused assets from Dream Team and Sticker Star to the point I found it distracting. This, the lack of polish in the secondary objectives, and the excessive backtracking leaves me thinking this game was rushed.
- I just dislike how Paper Mario looks in this game standing next to Mario and Luigi. He also doesn't really feel like Paper Mario. His major difference from Mario and Luigi is that he has a flutter jump, which isn't something he has in his home games leaving his inclusion feeling a little arbitrary.
- Paper Mario uses his thumbs up animation way too much, it got distracting.
- The optional boss rematches were very fun! I would like the mode better if you were auto leveled to the max level so that the experience could be more balanced, but it was still very fun additional content and beating the secret boss at the end of the boss rush was very exciting.
- All the tutorials are skippable! You can view them from the menu at anytime later too. Very nice feature.

Overall, I do like this game a lot and I plan on playing it again sometime, but it is such a shame that the overworld, writing, and many of the mandatory missions hamper the experience to such a significant degree. If you like the battling of Mario and Luigi or Paper Mario I'd say that this game is definitely worth your time, despite its many problems. Hopefully one day this series can get revived, because the formula it uses is really fun.

I'm honestly super glad this game didn't end being a giant fan-fictiony pandering crossover fuckfest with no rhyme or reason like most people wanted (for some reason) but I think the story ends up on the opposite side of that extreme, which is being too standard and safe. It's not bad by any means, it's just generic as all hell. That doesn't really matter though cuz this is still an M&L game, meaning it still has fun gameplay, an amazing battle system, charming dialogue, a great soundtrack, and oodles of charm. Tmw when the "worst" Mario & Luigi game is still really good. I miss this series, dude...

obligatory “this crossover would’ve been peak 15 years ago” comment

ok now thats out of the way i think this game gets alooooot more hate than it should get, some of it justified and some of it isnt. yes the story could’ve been this 50 hour long epic where the bowsers becomes a super ultra god and talks about the idea of death or whatever but i think the one we had isnt that bad either. it basically does the “bowser kidnaps peach” thing but also gives up near the end and just becomes a story about getting a book back.

the gameplay is actually very fun, probably the best in the series, i think battle cards are far more interesting than badges because they’re instant and you dont have to spend 20 turns getting one you can waste in one attack. the bros attacks are either really broken or kinda pointless.


papercraft battles while not as cool as the giant battles from BiS or Dream Team are still fun on their own. none of the fights are actively frustrating as far as i remember.


overall i think this game was a great finale to the original mario and luigis and was a great sendoff to a great series.

it's cool mario & luigi would pair up with paper mario but it feels like a missed opportunity since they don't really do a lot of interesting things with it, they could have brought a lot of interesting story aspects and characters from the paper mario series but the only thing they really do is mention how paper mario is paper compared to mario & luigi and the dumb paper mache battles. it feels like an even worse kick in the dick that all the areas in the game are all generic mario locations seen time and time again and the main villain is just bowser again compared to other mario & luigi AND paper mario games. they don't do anything interesting and it just feels like a missed opportunity. the combat is still the same so it's still fun but this game feels like a massive downgrade and it sucks this was the last non-remake in the mario & luigi franchise before alpha dreams unfortunate demise.