Honestly, having not played any other Paper Marios, this game has the capability of not feeling bad to play in the moment. It is like a standard Mario platformer with more exploration and paper in some regards. It only really truly hit me how poorly the game is designed after noticing how much of the game was left after World 3.
I have my fill of the game's structure by the end of World 2, and next the game presents a massive forest labyrinth with required backtracking that destroys any sense of pacing, and then somehow anticipates the player will stomach that they're only halfway through. World 3 is a next-level playthrough killer for how many superfluous levels it introduces, all of the required items needed with no direction toward where to look for them, and centering on what is ultimately a large-scale fetch quest with very little personality on display. Further compounding the problem is the game's more inherent battle system issues, such as not having any leveling mechanics, in turn making scalability a non-factor, and the bosses demanding the most random thing stickers in order to present a reasonable challenge.
People debate all the time about how whether straightforwardly bad media is better than that which is boring, and usually I think it is a circumstantial matter. There are many different shades of bad, from being unintentionally entertaining to outright repulsive to experience; I think there are also different shades of boring that, depending on the work, allow us to be more or less charitable to the efforts of the creators regardless of our personal apathy of the thing itself. People can debate this forever, but the absolute bottom level for media in my book, however, is reserved for works that possess the deadly combination of being both long and the vapid kind of boring. I absolutely despise games that just waste my time for a billion hours without offering anything to meaningfully consider afterwards, other than that it was a bad idea to play that shit.
Nintendo had too much faith in this game's concepts to at least make the game reasonably short, and this translates into a product that asks for so much more of your attention and maintenance than it is willing to give back with substance.
I have my fill of the game's structure by the end of World 2, and next the game presents a massive forest labyrinth with required backtracking that destroys any sense of pacing, and then somehow anticipates the player will stomach that they're only halfway through. World 3 is a next-level playthrough killer for how many superfluous levels it introduces, all of the required items needed with no direction toward where to look for them, and centering on what is ultimately a large-scale fetch quest with very little personality on display. Further compounding the problem is the game's more inherent battle system issues, such as not having any leveling mechanics, in turn making scalability a non-factor, and the bosses demanding the most random thing stickers in order to present a reasonable challenge.
People debate all the time about how whether straightforwardly bad media is better than that which is boring, and usually I think it is a circumstantial matter. There are many different shades of bad, from being unintentionally entertaining to outright repulsive to experience; I think there are also different shades of boring that, depending on the work, allow us to be more or less charitable to the efforts of the creators regardless of our personal apathy of the thing itself. People can debate this forever, but the absolute bottom level for media in my book, however, is reserved for works that possess the deadly combination of being both long and the vapid kind of boring. I absolutely despise games that just waste my time for a billion hours without offering anything to meaningfully consider afterwards, other than that it was a bad idea to play that shit.
Nintendo had too much faith in this game's concepts to at least make the game reasonably short, and this translates into a product that asks for so much more of your attention and maintenance than it is willing to give back with substance.