The infamous one. Yeah, I went into this game not expecting too much, but I wanted to look at it for what it was, not what it could’ve been. Needless to say, that’s easier said than done, and a lot of the time, I just saw it as a complete downgrade to what came before it.

First of all, the battle system, absolutely terrible, I genuinely avoided every fight I could as I wanted to not use stickers, and I usually love battling in games when I can. Aside from that, the thing stickers are absolutely atrocious, the fact that you need a specific thing sticker for certain situations could’ve been handled so much better, because god forbid you guess the wrong thing sticker to use, because you LOSE IT FROM YOUR INVENTORY, and have to go and get it again, and you have to pray that it isn’t a tedious level. Mind you, that never happened to me, but the fact that it so easily could is ridiculous.

I gotta say, this game just felt really soulless, like I especially noticed this around World 2. In Paper Mario 64 when you’re in the desert, you have to go through Dry Dry Outpost, and you go through all sorts of fun scenarios in the town, you talk to interesting characters, who reveal the way to get to Dry Dry Ruins. In this game, the desert area has almost zero dialogue….you’re just walking through different areas, some more tedious than the last. The lack of dialogue in this game is laughable, like there is NO personality here outside of a few circumstances. Bowser, the MAIN VILLAIN, doesn’t even talk ONCE, in the past games, he had so much personality and character, which is all stripped away here?? Why??

As much as I like to talk shit about the game, it also isn’t the bane of my existence, it wasn’t the most dreadful thing ever, it did have SOME redeeming qualities, which is what makes it a 4/10, as opposed to it being lower. World 4 is an obvious highlight, mostly every level is at least decent, Enigmansion, 4-5, and 4-6 are all great, they cooked there. I dig the royal sticker stories after you defeat a boss, they add some character to the bosses, and that’s actually cool. Kamek gets some good characterisation in this game, whenever he shows up he's actually kinda cool, and his presence is much more felt than Bowser's. The levels can be decent at times for sure, although when it’s the “less than 5 minutes” levels that are the best usually, it’s probably not a good thing outright. Oh yeah, Snifit or Whiffit is the best thing about the game, probably.

Overall, does it deserve the hate? Is it THAT bad? Yes, but it does have some redeeming qualities that make it fun at times.

This game does have Petey Piranha, the best Mario character of all time, so that’s also a positive, of course.

Was debating between 4 or 4.5 stars but I think I'll have to go with 4. Compared to PM64, I'd say I enjoyed this a little bit more, the story really engaged me, and I'm saying that about a Mario game, so that should speak to the quality of the story. What keeps me from putting it higher is some of the infuriating levels, cause some of them dragged on for sooooo long, and the gameplay isn’t as good as it was in PM64, but I could look past that for the sheer personality this game had. Despite sometimes getting frustrated with the game, I was always happy to turn this on daily, and although I've only mentioned the bad levels, there are some BANGERS in here that were super fun. More often than not, the levels would be enjoyable.

As I said, the story and characters are definitely the highlight, Dimentio is probably my favourite Mario character ever now. Seeing the perspective of the villains at the end of each chapter was always a treat, as you can tell they treated the characters with such care. This game is also genuinely funny, the dialogue is really good, Thudley's girth for example, was really awesome. Soundtrack was also great. This is definitely a great Mario game, albeit a very divisive one, but I think most people go into it expecting another TTYD, but if you look past that it’s really amazing in a lot of ways.

I feel like playing Sticker Star after this is gonna give me some major whiplash, probably for the worse.

Edit: upped it to 4.5 lol, i constantly look back on it very fondly

Yeah it’s peak, yeah it’s awesome. This was something I had been awaiting for a long while, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I've never been more excited for a piece of fiction more than I was for this, so it is bittersweet to be done with the game, but it’s a wonderful experience. As the OG is my favourite game of all time..seeing the world and characters and moments fleshed out so much more was surreal, and maybe my greatest gaming experience ever, second only to the original FF7.

I could gush on and on about how special not only this game is to me, but the FF7 world is as a whole, it’s impactful to me in a way I don’t think anything else could replicate. There’s a reason I would play this game for at least 8 hours per day, and it was never boring.


SPOILERS



Not to sound like a purist, but I do think the Zack stuff is pretty unnecessary, doesn’t really add anything good to the story as of yet. The game I feel is at its best when it’s following the beats of the original story, and whenever it moved to a Zack segment I sorta just groaned, especially when it’d happen after arriving at the Gold Saucer, like cmon man, let me enjoy my minigames. That’s a minor nitpick though, and all of his segments were rather short, so it's not a dealbreaker yet, but I really hate multiverses and alternate universes in storytelling.

Aerith's death was also kinda handled weirdly, but I see what they’re going for with it. I feel like having like fucking 9 different boss fights after her death was a really fucking weird thing, like I couldn’t feel emotional, because Sephiroth would move through like 6 different forms, and it felt like it took away from the moment, there’s a reason it was so simple yet effective in the original. Aerith's death scene itself lacked all the really emotional and hardhitting stuff that the original had, although I understand that we're seeing it from Cloud's perspective, and he has blocked all that out in his mind, but not having us experience that heartbreak in that moment like we did in the original was a miss in my opinion.

That doesn’t take away from the game as a whole for me though, like I said, this was something special, and something that won’t be replicated by anything until Part 3 comes out, hope to god I'm alive to see it. 🤞