As I went through the first half of the game, I was incredibly worried that the game wouldn't live up to my expectations. The gameplay was extremely underwhelming, it's a pretty tedious puzzle-platformer with platforming that feels worse than the RPGs. Even then, I was hoping the story would make up for it, but the first four chapters left a pretty rough impression on me. It had an absolutely glacial pace where it didn't feel like the plot was progressing that smoothly outside of a few brief moments. All of the worlds were really underdeveloped, I didn't feel any real attachment to the places I went to outside of some worlds only having a single notable landmark. It was really frustrating, since I thought a lot of the interesting elements were stuck behind a dull and tedious experience. I was ready to write about this being disappointing.

And yet... minutes before I started writing this, right before the credits started to roll... I actually cried.

I cannot understate how much more engaging Super Paper Mario becomes at its 2nd half. Chapter 5 actually managed to hone in on a lot of the worldbuilding I found was lacking in the previous chapters, the villains were getting more present within the story, I got invested the world that I was only really visiting for a brief time. I was really interested to see the direction it would go with its worlds moving forward.

...and then chapter 6 happens.

If you're at all familiar with Persona 3, then you're probably familiar with people talking about October 4th being the point where the emotional gutpunch really comes in, with a feeling of dread and resolve coming out of it. Chapter 6 is that exact moment for SPM. The impending feeling of dread throughout the world made every single one of the 1v1 samurai battles far more tense, with the race against time ongoing. You feel the need to hurry as fast as you can to get the pureheart, but before you know it... it's too late. The world is destroyed and you're thrown out of it. Once you go back through the door to that world, all that's left is a white void. It goes on and on endlessly, with only scattered fragments of what it used to be. It's an incredibly haunting experience in a game that has been pretty cheerful up to this point. Outside of a few humorous moments, it doesn't really let up on this emotional weight. I could go on about how it does this, but I just want to focus on one particular point of interest, Count Bleck.

Count Bleck is one of the most engaging villains that the Mario series has ever had to offer. His conflict of wanting to destroy everything after being separated from the one he loved isn't a completely unique premise, but with the way it's explored is genuinely sad Even behind all of his fun theatrics, you can feel the emptiness and regret he feels over everything. It makes the fact that Tippi still believes in him and believes that things can be set right so heart-wrenching. Seeing that hope reach him by the end as he helps set things right with the love that he's still been able to hold on to is genuinely beautiful.

I know excusing bad gameplay solely over the strength of a story is a mindset that's been joked about a lot, (Hell, if you found this from my twitter media thread, you know used a meme that does exactly that) but I think most of the time, the experience of the story makes going through some rough gameplay completely worth it. (Provided that it's not picking up ALL of the slack from the gameplay) While I think some tweaks to both the gameplay and narrative pacing would've made this even stronger, I can safely say that I'm really happy with my playthrough. It makes me want to go back and fully finish the other two games that came before it. Despite what Discord gif search might have to say, Super Paper Mario is pretty dang cool.