i've tried giving this a chance several more times since beating it when it came out, and after ten years i still can't understand how anyone could think this is okay, even without the context of the first decade of the series. none of this is fun. i don't know, i guess if you'd never played any rpg or any story-based game before and you're just coming in like "ooh, it's the guy from new super mario bros wii, but there's dialogue! neat!" and you just power through the obtuse puzzles and unrewarding gameplay because of the novelty of talking toads.

also frustrating that people still respond to this like "oh you just don't like it because it's not exactly like ttyd" like no fuck off, i don't want another ttyd, i want the paper mario game they should have made after years of learning from and building off of ttyd and spm; instead they completely threw everything out and started the entire "mario... but he's paper!" concept from scratch and it took them three/four games over eight years to muddle their way into something almost as good as the first time they did it 20 years earlier.