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.
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.
6 Comments
Damn that comment makes me seem more aggressive than I actually wanted to, this sucks!
@BlazingWaters by all means go off. the haha toilet paper fetch quest could kill a lesser man than i
This is a pretty terrible review relative to the score implying it’s genuinely really bad.
Yes some things can be pretty middling and it’s not really a challenging game, but I’d hardly consider much to be outright terrible throughout the run; most chapters do a pretty good job keeping a longrunning narrative going if not impressing with visual variety and theming per chapter. It can be fun to use the 3D to peer around corners or use Bowser’s fire to decimate your ahead path. The vibes on their own are pretty solid and sometimes lend to gameplay in fun ways like with the Underchomp battle or the Francis dating sim bit.
Even the story the only thing you bring up is the forgettable partner Pixels; something even fans of this game largely consider to be less interesting by default. It’s moreso a lot of the moment to moment writing and the writing of Count Bleck’s anime villain squad that tends to be seen as the highlights there. Also I don’t know if you knew this but a lot of the cutscenes are also changed depending on which character you have as the playable one to chat. If gameplay in this E for Everyone game was really so damning it’s apparently awful, maybe you’d have slightly more luck trying Bowser’s Inside Story which marries similarly charming writing with more actual characters and RPG battle mechanics.
Yes some things can be pretty middling and it’s not really a challenging game, but I’d hardly consider much to be outright terrible throughout the run; most chapters do a pretty good job keeping a longrunning narrative going if not impressing with visual variety and theming per chapter. It can be fun to use the 3D to peer around corners or use Bowser’s fire to decimate your ahead path. The vibes on their own are pretty solid and sometimes lend to gameplay in fun ways like with the Underchomp battle or the Francis dating sim bit.
Even the story the only thing you bring up is the forgettable partner Pixels; something even fans of this game largely consider to be less interesting by default. It’s moreso a lot of the moment to moment writing and the writing of Count Bleck’s anime villain squad that tends to be seen as the highlights there. Also I don’t know if you knew this but a lot of the cutscenes are also changed depending on which character you have as the playable one to chat. If gameplay in this E for Everyone game was really so damning it’s apparently awful, maybe you’d have slightly more luck trying Bowser’s Inside Story which marries similarly charming writing with more actual characters and RPG battle mechanics.
@SunlitSonata Not sure I'm understanding how the score is inappropriate relative to the content of the review when I write that it's bad and boring and then give the game a score reflective of it being bad and boring. Equally unsure how the game being bad and boring is at all excused by its ESRB rating when I've said much worse about M-rated titles and much better about other E-rated games. I don't value "vibes" and "visual variety" that highly, so I don't see how considering them any further would make the final score on this go any higher.
Uh oh the score police are here
BlazingWaters
1 year ago
I don't agree as strongly but, as weird as it sounds, I am glad this game's getting a pushback in recent years, even if some of it devolves to hilarious GIFs to spam on Discord. I don't like going on a whole "nostalgia goggle" rant in certain cases cause it makes me sound like a bitter curmudgeon that yells at clouds, but uh, that's kinda what it feels like here! It's easy to notice every single fan detailing the story while eschewing mentions of the barebones 2D platforming that makes even the earlier, mainline games feel more involved than they actually are. Obviously I don't want immense ill thrown towards the fans, it's perfectly fine to like this game with or without the goggles, this is really me personifying my "bitter growing up moments" where I realize this probably isn't as epic as it was now that I had more things to go through.
Also no fan of SPM should be allowed to talk about pacing issues with regards to the prior titles while ignoring how the middle section of this game has the absolute worst and most dulling moments in this series' span at that point, which is worse since right after that is when the narrative's biggest meat is unveiled. Insane how much of a bore the Space and Prehistoric chapters were, the latter especially since even as a kid I loathed it.