Super Paper Mario

Overview

Today on the show, I’m going to review one of the most popular games to hit Wii – Super Paper Mario! Originally released on April 9th, 2007, Super Paper Mario is the third game in the Paper Mario franchise. Intended to be made for the GameCube, the game was slowly pushed back and then released on the Wii. Let’s see if this game stacks up to its predecessors!

Single Player

As with previous Paper Mario games, there’s no multiplayer element in this one either, so the game consists entirely of a Single Player mode. When you begin Super Paper Mario, the storyline will seem quite familiar – Princess Peach has gone missing once again. When Mario and Luigi set out to Bowser’s Castle, assuming of course that Bowser is up to his usual mischief, they find themselves caught up in evil Count Bleck’s plan. Count Bleck has arranged a marriage between Bowser and Princess Peach, which triggers an event as foretold in the Dark Prognosticus, a book which predicts the end of all worlds. This results in a void being opened up in reality and Mario having to collect the seven life hearts in order to defeat Count Bleck, as told in the Light Prognosticus.

The Good

The gameplay in Super Paper Mario is similar to that of the previous Paper Mario games, with some new features added, and some old features removed. The player has to traverse through the usual 8 chapters, collecting a life heart at the end of each of the first 7, with the 8th chapter being the final boss fight. Just like before, you’re able to recruit various partners in the game called Pixls, which help you traverse the terrain, attack enemies and so forth. New to Super Paper Mario is something called the “3rd Dimension”. By pressing the ‘A’ button, Mario can switch back and forth between 2D and 3D in every level. Why? For example, if a wall is blocking your way in 2D, simply switch to 3D in order to find a hidden switch, etc. Unfortunately, there’s a time limit to how long you can remain in the 3rd Dimension – if time runs out, you lose 1 HP and return to the 2D world of the level.
Action Commands make a welcome return to the game, and are made much more effective by the fact that the Wii Remote itself is used to perform them, such as shaking the remote a certain way or drawing lines on the television screen.

Since Super Paper Mario was originally intended for the Nintendo GameCube, the graphics in the game are identical to those seen in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, with some slight effects and animations added. Items return as well, but some of the familiar ones seen in past Paper Mario games now take on a different effect due to a change in gameplay which I’ll talk about in the next few paragraphs.

The challenges in the game are quite unique and may take a while to figure out at first, but when you do discover them, you’ll be amazed at what the solutions to them were. The sound and music have the same feel to it as in the previous two games, so there’s no change.

The Bad

First of all, the graphics in the 2D worlds look pretty awesome, but as soon as you switch to 3D, the landscapes begin to look a bit bland. This sort of takes away from the 3D perspective, which is critical to the entire game.
Next comes the storyline itself. There’s so much text to read in this game, it’s crazy! Younger players will wonder to themselves if the whole game consists of just reading text, or if they’ll actually get to play. The irony to this is that the text can be quite funny at times if you read it, but you’ll often get bored and wish the characters would just shut up. Of course, this may lead you to keep pressing the 1 button on the Wii Remote to skip through the text quite fast, however, if you do this, you might miss a key point on how to defeat a certain enemy or reach a certain part in one of the levels.

The last and worst change to the Paper Mario franchise is the battle system. In previous Paper Mario games, every time you encountered an enemy, you would engage in a turn-based battle with them, similar to those seen in Final Fantasy and Pokémon games. This provided unique gameplay elements and strategy, since you could outfit Mario and his partner with different attacks depending on the situation you were faced with. In Super Paper Mario, however, the turn-based system has been completely eliminated and replaced with a “real-time” system, like in the old Super Mario Bros. games, where you simply jumped on an enemy to defeat it. Although this new system results in a faster-paced gameplay, it removes practically all of the strategy previously required in past Paper Mario games.

As a result of this new battle system, FP (Flower Points) and BP (Badge Points) have also been removed from the game. Certain items that used to take effect in the turn-based battles no longer exist and those that still do have different effects now, based upon “real-time”. If that wasn’t bad enough, even though you still have partners in this game, each one only has one ability – not like in past Paper Mario games where your partners could each learn four different attacks.

The RPG system hasn’t been completely thrown out the window though. Mario still has HP (Heart Points) and the score displayed on the top of the screen doubles as an Experience Meter – the more enemies you defeat, the more experience you gain toward leveling up. When you gain a level, your HP increases by 5 and your attack damage increases as well.

But this isn’t strategy at all – basically, by jumping on and hammering enemies, Mario can take and inflict more damage. There’s no option like before, where by leveling up, you could increase either your HP, FP or BP, resulting in unique battle scenarios (for example, increasing your HP allowed Mario to take more damage, increasing his FP allowed him to deal more damage and increasing his BP allowed him to use more attacks).

To conclude, this “simplified” RPG system isn’t really an RPG system at all. It’s just been added so that the game could appear to have one, when it really doesn’t. This is what hurts. But why did the company, Intelligent Systems, do this? I have one theory – simply look at the name of this game.

Super Paper Mario – a combination of Super Mario and Paper Mario. I believe Intelligent Systems was trying to “kill two birds with one stone”, hypothetically speaking. Before this game, there were basically two types of Mario gamers – those who liked Paper Mario for its RPG strategy elements, and those who liked Super Mario for its first-person real-time action adventures. Intelligent Systems wanted gamers who liked the Super Mario franchise to be “converted” into the Paper Mario franchise, while still keeping the dedicated Paper Mario fans.

Unfortunately, this thought may have back-fired on the company. Traditional Paper Mario fans will be turned off because of the lack of a turn-based battle system and certain key features such as Flower Points and Badge Points, and Super Mario fans will be turned off by the ridiculous amount of text to read and the “flatness” of the characters and graphics.

Conclusion / Final Scores

Super Paper Mario has many new features which we’ve all been looking forward to the moment we saw what Wii was initially capable of when the system was first released in November of 2006. The action commands in the game are unique to the Wii Remote and the challenges presented are both puzzling and attractive. The storyline is incredibly funny, and as in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the dialogue between characters is hilarious.
Unfortunately, the lack of a turn-based battle system and key strategic RPG elements present in both of the previous Paper Mario games simply doesn’t appeal to me, who happens to be a true Paper Mario fan.

Even though IGN, Gamespy and other game sites have given Super Paper Mario a high score, I have not. In my opinion, Intelligent Systems has made a huge mistake. They should’ve never combined the elements of Super Mario with the gameplay of Paper Mario. Each game should have remained separate, tailoring to the two different kinds of Mario fans.

Graphics: 8/10 - Same graphics as in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.

Sound/Music: 8/10 - Same type of sound and music as used in the previous two
Paper Mario games.

Gameplay: 5/10 - No turn-based battle system, as well as the lack of Flower Points
and Badge Points, eliminates what made the previous Paper
Mario games best-sellers.

Controls: 10/10 - Unique methods of performing Action Commands. Challenging
but ingenious puzzles on every level.

Lasting Appeal: 1/10 - After the completion of the storyline, there is nothing left to do
after the final boss, Count Bleck, has been defeated.

Final Score: 6.4/10 - Super Paper Mario no longer follows the same type of game-
play as in its predecessors. This game is not worth buying.