I've always been a fan of the Paper Mario aesthetic, and it's never looked better. It's sharp and bold, with gorgeous animations and a staggering attention to detail.
The awful battle system is especially frustrating because everything wrapped around it is so lovable. That's not even to mention the silly, minor conveniences that were somehow overlooked, like the fact that picking a pre-painted card doesn't skip straight past the card-painting menu. There is no XP or progression system, other than the ability to carry more paint, which makes already-boring battles feel even more unrewarding. The card system meant I ran out of the basic attack cards fairly constantly, and was forced to use more powerful cards on minor enemies or run back to town to pick up more basic ones. Then, and only then, can you start engaging in traditional Paper Mario combat, until the next turn, when you have to do it all over again.Įvery battle, major or minor, is a chore.
For each and every single turn, you're required to look at the Wii U GamePad, scroll through a horizontal listing of cards-duplicates can't be stacked atop each other for some reason-pick your card or cards, press a button prompt to signify that you're done, then press the screen to paint in the cards, then tap that you're done again, then finally flick the cards upward to transfer them to the main screen. What makes the card system so galling is how tedious a single battle can be. "You're in a new area and over here we use Battle Cards," essentially. No particular world-building reason is given for the Battle Card system. Gone are your reliable Jump and Hammer moves, replaced with "Battle Cards." All of your moves have been replaced by this new card system, but the lack of any basic moveset means that if you're out of Jump cards, you simply can't use a Jump, regardless of whether that's the best tool for a given enemy. Deal With ItĪt the fifth iteration, Nintendo seems to have decided Color Splash needed a shake-up. Paper Mario simplified it by restricting you to Mario himself, sometimes with a single companion, and the diorama aesthetic gave it both a clever writing hook and the ability to toy with the physical space in the game. Jump and Hammer as basic attacks, timing-based prompts for scoring extra damage or blocking attacks, and a traditional RPG XP system. The rest of the time you get Paper Mario: Color Splash.īorne out of the weird but lovable Super Mario RPG from the Super NES era, Paper Mario has tended to follow a pretty familiar pattern. Most of the time you get a sense of delightful surprise, or at the very least, an intrepid experiment that is imperfect but intriguing. For all the grief Nintendo receives for playing it safe with its marquee franchises, it usually attempts some twist or new gameplay element whenever making another entry in a long-running series.