At this point Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door's reputation precedes it. This was a very important game to people who grew up with the Gamecube, it was created by Intelligent Systems at a time when they were firing on all cylinders, and it is viewed as a successor to the legendary Super Mario RPG. It's brimming with fresh ideas for the time and has consistently strong comedy unbecoming of Super Mario. On paper, it's a classic. But in practice, the payoff is a very slow burn, and it isn't always worth the drip feed. I have a lot of good will toward the game, but I completely lost interest and can't shake the feeling that I might have been chasing someone else's nostalgia this whole time.

Despite the game's reputation, I don't think Paper Mario is an RPG series. It has a lot of RPG aesthetics, but that's a bit of an illusion. I think it plays as an exploration adventure series with strategy puzzle combat. Maybe it's not a huge distinction for most people, but you should not go in expecting to have characters increase their power and get new abilities through gameplay. Those are reserved for story moments or chapter completion. The leveling system instead is a choice between incrementing your HP, FP, or Badge Slots. The practical choice is always badges because it gives the most flexibility. However playing this way makes it feel much more like you're buying upgrades to your loadout like you would in a mech game or something. EXP does not feel like a very important resource, and quickly gets diminishing returns, meanwhile coins are more likely a limiting factor, and a lot of the strategy you engage with comes from is buying/setting up your badges in between chapters.

The actual battles also betray the RPG-ness of the game because it is based around very small numbers. I see its appeal, but it's not like the game is asking you to do much math here. The numbers being so small makes the game feel slow and puts too much emphasis on passing quicktime events. For example, in the first chapters, passing a QTE doubles your damage from 1 to 2. Messing up a QTE can result in half or even no damage, and it just drags out the whole thing another round. Battles themselves are enjoyable enough but often feel repetitive because you're likely to bump into the same enemy multiple times due to simply following the main quests.

There is too much repetitive backtracking.The game loves to take away your control and make Mario a passenger in other people's stories. It's an intentional choice, but because the scope of the game is relatively small, it feels very tedious. The game is constantly sending you on a wild goose chase where solving puzzles is 20%, talking is 30% of it, and walking from place to place fighting the same enemies is the remaining 50%. It's not the most satisfying use of time, and makes the whole experience feel bloated if you're not connecting with the story or if the puzzle feels trivial.

However -- when the game is good, it's great. I think Chapter 3 is very well paced and has a very focused unique story. Some of the dungeons had decent and memorable puzzles too. But the vast majority of the game feels by-the-numbers. With a few notable suggestions the game feels pretty similar in hour 5 as hour 25, so if you're not that into it, I wouldn't expect it to eventually win you over. You have it meet it on its terms and pacing.

Solar Ash is a beautiful and very well realized game about exploring and moving through space. The game feels like it was built upon its skating and gravity mechanics, with some very solid platforming, big boss fights, and a good number of hidden collectables. It also shows off a fantastic sense of vertical scale every time you reach a new area, you're a given vast establishing shots showing the entire area that you will explore. Each zone feels very distinct and there are memorable challenges in each of them.

But unlike Hyper Light Drifter, this game's story does not speak for itself, instead it's delivered through conversations and data logs which I found hard to get into. The central conflict between Echo and Rei is visually striking and mysterious. The imagery is all we really need, I don't think this game needed to walk the player through the story of regret in such a wordy way. Perhaps it is an unfair standard to compare it to the developer's first game, but I think they could have told this story entirely environmentally with as much focus on the boss fights as they had.

Having lore and NPC stories doesn't really drag the game down much, but it adds up with some other things. The game's full potential is held back a bit by the combat, certain instances of unfair timing, and occasional jank that's to be expected from such an ambitious 3D platformer. Once you've seen an area and solved its puzzles it can be a little tedious to backtrack through them or have to repeat tricky sections. It's not a perfect game but it's one that is definitely worth your time and one that I look at fondly and will probably return for extra challenges in the future.