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Author Topic: Mario & Luigi & Paper  (Read 27919 times)

« Reply #15 on: June 17, 2015, 11:42:24 PM »
I'm disheartened by the unrelenting torrent of Sticker Star hate that is this thread. Sticker Star was something far more interesting than "Paper Mario again. Again." Although you all aren't, I'm very glad Intelligent Systems refused to keep making the same thing over and over and over (e.g., the mind-numbingly repetitive M&L series)

Sticker Star was a JRPG where the only battle command was THROW. That's genius. No one -ever- uses THROW (because why use up limited items when you have many unlimited forms of attacking) so they were like "Fine in this game ALL YOU CAN DO IS THROW MWAHAHAH" and thus, the developer and player are both forced to finally actually explore the design space of THROW.

I also liked the heavy adventure-game elements to Sticker Star: having a large collection of inventory items and having to figure out what and where to use them in the environment to solve puzzles. Even the boss fights were basically puzzles. Mario's never really had an adventure-genre game and this was kind of one.

It was a side-effect of the THROW-based battle system but I also like the lack of XP and stats. **** stats. They were just created so you could feel like you were getting better in RPGs because they had no actual gameplay to -actually- get better at. Exploring, going through a story, solving puzzles, that's the actual good stuff. Numbers going up is just a psychological trick not meaningful content.

Also the paper world looked rad in 3D.

CrossEyed7

  • i can make this whatever i want; you're not my dad
« Reply #16 on: June 18, 2015, 12:27:19 AM »
Most of the internet hate for Sticker Star gets directed at the battle system, I think because it's the easiest thing to name and latch onto, but I really don't care about it either way. If Sticker Star had been the exact same gameplay-wise but had named characters and an actual story and Bowser and Peach had dialogue, I absolutely would have liked it. There are definitely some interesting design choices in the game, and the graphics and music were great, but I will not forgive them for taking my favorite series and removing everything I liked about it (again, not the RPG gameplay elements (I do still think removing XP made battles feel pointless, but the point in the game where I started feeling that way was around the same time that I was getting really annoyed about not having a story; if I'd been enjoying the game overall, I probably would have been less inclined to ignore battles), but the feeling of a larger coherent world, something they could have conveyed regardless of gameplay. I'm not a huge fan of Super Paper Mario's gameplay, but I liked it because I was exploring an actual world and getting invested in actual characters and got to see Bowser being a dork and Peach kicking ass, which is what Paper Mario is (of course, I would have liked it even more if it'd had interesting gameplay). If the gameplay was a falling-blocks puzzle or a side-scrolling shooter or a rhythm game or trading card battles, it would still be Paper Mario). I'd love to see them try new things, so long as they don't completely ignore every good thing about the series.
"Oh man, I wish being a part of a Mario fan community was the most embarrassing thing about my life." - Super-Jesse

Tavros

  • he was hello
« Reply #17 on: June 18, 2015, 12:28:45 AM »
The battle system was awesome to me, it was just that everything else made me not like it.
read jitsu wa watashi wa

BP

  • Beside Pacific
« Reply #18 on: June 18, 2015, 01:11:29 AM »
Was Paper Mario ever known to repeat itself?
All your dreeeeeeams begiiin to shatterrrrrr~
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CrossEyed7

  • i can make this whatever i want; you're not my dad
« Reply #19 on: June 18, 2015, 10:29:10 AM »
I feel like the progression of PM64-TTYD-SPM was at least as much non-repetitive-variety-while-still-being-a-series as SMB1-SMB2-SMB3.
"Oh man, I wish being a part of a Mario fan community was the most embarrassing thing about my life." - Super-Jesse

BP

  • Beside Pacific
« Reply #20 on: June 18, 2015, 11:36:48 AM »
And correct me if I'm wrong but does Sticker Star not repeat
-Bowser having a flying castle like in Paper Mario 1
-Bosses who are larger/sparkly versions of normal enemies
-Standard grass/desert/beach/jungle/ice/fire Mario worlds for settings in lieu of even Super Paper Mario having locales and objectives as interesting as having to babysit for the queen of hell to earn Mario's life back
All your dreeeeeeams begiiin to shatterrrrrr~
It's YOUR problem!

« Reply #21 on: June 18, 2015, 07:07:52 PM »
I'm happy about this game. I sort of hope for a Paper Mario Wii U title somewhere down the road, but this looks great.

I wish that the Mario and Luigi series felt as "new" as its first game, but they tend to reinvent some aspects of the series, which is pretty cool. This looks to be the weirdest/most different game in the series. I just liked the BeanBean Kingdom environment. The series hasn't taken me anywhere too new lately, aside from Dream Team.
I'm a horrible person.

Sqrt2

  • 1.41421356
« Reply #22 on: June 19, 2015, 02:44:18 PM »
Was Paper Mario ever known to repeat itself?

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is essentially the first Paper Mario with a new paint job.
AA fanboy and proud!

BP

  • Beside Pacific
« Reply #23 on: June 19, 2015, 03:10:41 PM »
I disagree. Paper Mario 2 is an example of a sequel done right. Paper Mario 1 was very good, solid, and tight, like a walnut, Paper Mario 2 cracks the shell open to let the nut inside be free and experience the beautiful horrors of the world. Is that better? I wouldn't necessarily say so, even though I like it that way. But it makes the game very, very, very, VERY different. You can't really choose a play style in the first game because of the restrictive stat caps, smaller number of badges always found in finite numbers, partners not having HP of their own, no way to outright avoid damage, no rewards or punishments for performance in battle outside of whether or not you're doing enough to defeat your enemies. When I say I want a Paper Mario 3, I don't mean I want a Paper Mario 2 ROM hack with a different story and different locations, I mean that I want a second evolution of what Paper Mario 1 put on the table. With a different story and different locations.

The partners having similar abilities and the story having a similar skeleton, I'll concede, but you're not going to tell me Super Paper Mario was a retread for those things too, are you?
All your dreeeeeeams begiiin to shatterrrrrr~
It's YOUR problem!

« Reply #24 on: June 19, 2015, 07:33:55 PM »
TTYD is to PM1 as Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal is to Red/Blue/Yellow.
YYur  waYur n beYur you Yur plusYur instYur an Yur Yur whaYur

The Chef

  • Super
« Reply #25 on: June 19, 2015, 07:48:12 PM »
A bunch of points.

Imma respond to this point by point:

#1: None of us have expressed any outright hate towards Sticker Star, at least I don't think. Personally I was more disappointed and terribly confused by it than anything else. And accusing the Paper Mario series of being repetitive when the third out of four games was already a massive change-up is pretty bull. Furthermore, our collective beef with Sticker Star has nothing to do with its battle system. Our beef is that everything except the battle system is old and boring. You may as well have titled it "Paper New Super Mario Bros.". And that's not good, because Paper Mario 2 still has some of the most unique characters and environments the Mario series has ever seen. That's at least 1/3 of the reason people loved it so much. Everybody I've ever run into *****es at Sticker Star for using the same old bog-standard Mario tropes when the RPGs are pretty much renowned for being the sole source of new characters and locales. CrossEyed even made a whole thread about this!

#2 and #4:
Conceptually I didn't think Sticker Star's battle system was that bad. It actually kind of reminded me of Mega Man Battle Network. Unfortunately, just because it's new doesn't mean it's totally functional. More often than not you either have more stickers than you know what to do with, or you're running out of stickers because you ****ed them all away on a single battle. There's never a middle ground. And on top of that, there's practically no incentive to battling because all you get from it is coins which let you buy more stickers to refill the inventory you just wasted on that battle. It's a never-ending cycle that goes nowhere. At least MMBN gave ol' Megs a piddly weak buster gun to chip away at enemies if you had no battle chips on hand. This game gives you zlich. And it ends up forcing the dev team to give the player the option to run away from boss battles. This is hella stupid: Why would a boss who is assigned to kill you dead allow you to run away and stock up on inventory to fight him again? This is nonsensical even for Mario, man.

Secondly, of all the games you could've used to point out how much JRPG stats suck, Paper Mario and its sequel are probably the absolute worst example. This is because neither game is particularly stat-driven in the slightest. They're driven by customization. You don't gain more attack and defense by grinding, you only gain more health and fuel. And you can choose which of these to gain as you go on. Better weapons are handed to you by the plot. Everything else is determined entirely by which badges you put on. You can create hundreds of different possible combinations. You make a damage sponge Mario that's all HP and HP-increasing badges, you can make an elementalist Mario that's got tons of FP and all different types of special moves, you can make an untouchable Mario with high defense and abilities that keep enemies away. Mario is your oyster. Paper Mario's stat and battle system is beautiful, and I was only looking forward to see what else they could do with it. Hell, I think they could've only improved this system by replacing level-based HP gains with heart containers like the ones in Sticker Star. Make the player work for his HP, [darnit].

Finally, there are two fairly major changes to Sticker Star's system that baffle me to no end -  A: For some reason you can't pick your target in battle, and B: All of the enemies' HP is combined into one big bar. I legitimately cannot figure out why they thought these were good ideas. I do not understand what practical purpose these changes were supposed to serve. It's one thing if these were bugs, oversights, or some other sort of mistake, but this had to have a been a conscious decision on the part of the development team. Somebody thought these were good ideas. If there really is a solid reason behind these two changes, I have absolutely no idea what that reason is. Can anybody help me out on this? Anybody at all?

#3: Paper Mario already played like an adventure game, though not of the text or point-n-click variety. BP even once pointed out that if you removed the turn-based battles from Paper Mario (and Superstar Saga, for that matter), you'd essentially be left with "Mario as Zelda". One big difference in Sticker Star is that the game allows you use up the items you need to solve each puzzle. And if you do, you have to go all the way back the place where you found the item, get another one, then pay that one Toad a bunch of coins to have it turned into a sticker again. Or just buy the item from that sketchy Toad for even more coins. That is some bull[dukar]. An actual point-and-click Mario adventure game, or perhaps a new Paper Mario without turn-based battles, or even a whole new Mario game with heavy adventure elements would've been much better.

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is essentially the first Paper Mario with a new paint job.

This has to be the single worst description of a given game sequel I have ever heard in my entire life.

trading card battles

Since I mentioned MMBN, I may as well point out that I'd like a Paper Mario game that did something like this. If they combined Paper Mario 2's basic battle system with the deck-building and hand-dealing from MMBN, that'd be pretty neat.
« Last Edit: June 19, 2015, 07:51:29 PM by The Chef »

BP

  • Beside Pacific
« Reply #26 on: June 19, 2015, 09:06:57 PM »
Just to reinforce that I don't want "the same thing over and over," here are what I think are the key weaknesses of Super Paper Mario which, if fixed, would leave a very strong, very good game, and none of them are "mweh weh it's not an RPG anymore".

-The 3D mechanic is actually very uncreative and serves as a "solve apparent dead end" button, when another, slightly more creative one, already exists in the form of Tippi's invisible item finder.
-The 3D mechanic will force obsessive compulsive secret hunters to play as the most boring character.
-Squirps and Luvbi's story arcs are the only memorable ones. The loss of partners is a huge reason for this, as they were like ambassadors for the NPCs and the worlds that got you to care about them--it is telling that the story arcs I did care about were the ones with characters who DO something. This is not the only way to get a player invested in a game, but it was something Paper Mario 1 and 2 did so exceedingly well, and what SPM does instead does not work as well.
-It's also harder to get invested because of the lazy character designs for most NPCs. Say what you will about graphics not mattering, when you do care about quality in art and entertainment, it can take you out of the experience when you're thinking about how lazy the character designers and animators were instead of about what the piles of rectangles they made want or think or feel.
-The flow of the game is inherently poor. In PM1 and 2, it's slow. It's not boring (partially because it's entertainingly written) but it is relaxed. In SPM, the battles are no longer turn-based. The platforming and combat get your adrenaline going... or are supposed to, but you have to keep coming to abrupt stops to change characters and change pixls. It's one thing to relieve combat fatigue but another to make the game feel like STOP-GO-STOP-GO-STOP-GO because the time spent in action and the time spent preparing for action are about the same length. This is why the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time is REALLY so hated, not for actual difficulty but because you're constantly made to stop thinking about navigation or objectives, open the menu, equip/unequip the boots, and close it. Having to repeatedly change your focus like that is grating. The menu really gets on my nerves in Majora's Mask too because of the masks on top of the usual items necessitating more equipment changes than usual.

I have spent a long time thinking about SPM in this way, about what really works for it and what really doesn't, because I really do think its fatal flaws bring down what would have been a really great game. SPM is the game I study and think about the most when I work on my Unity project--if I have a mission statement for that, it's to make a game that is like Super Paper Mario without all of its diseases.
All your dreeeeeeams begiiin to shatterrrrrr~
It's YOUR problem!

CrossEyed7

  • i can make this whatever i want; you're not my dad
« Reply #27 on: June 19, 2015, 10:35:19 PM »
-The 3D mechanic will force obsessive compulsive secret hunters to play as the most boring character.
This is me. I'm the type that switches to Goombario/Goombella every time I enter a new room and tattle every NPC with them to see everything I can, and it's that very instinct that actually led to me missing the majority of interesting dialogue in SPM because I always had to play as the mute character because he can flip and there might be something to see in 3D.
open the menu, equip/unequip the boots, and close it. Having to repeatedly change your focus like that is grating.
Relatedly, it's a bit more minor of a complaint, but the hub world is annoying to navigate, since the 2D-only layout meant it had to be divided into multiple floors, and switching between floors takes longer than it really should. In Rogueport, I could really get a feel for the different parts of town and remember where everything is pretty easily over time (and it didn't take very long to navigate around the town anyway), but I have no idea where anything in Flipside and Flopside is.
"Oh man, I wish being a part of a Mario fan community was the most embarrassing thing about my life." - Super-Jesse

« Reply #28 on: June 22, 2015, 03:02:32 AM »
A few things:

And accusing the Paper Mario series of being repetitive when the third out of four games was already a massive change-up is pretty bull.
I accused M&L of being repetitive. I commended PM for NOT being repetitive.

At least MMBN gave ol' Megs a piddly weak buster gun to chip away at enemies if you had no battle chips on hand. This game gives you zlich.
You get some random basic stickers if your inventory runs out.

A: For some reason you can't pick your target in battle, and B: All of the enemies' HP is combined into one big bar. [...] this had to have a been a conscious decision on the part of the development team [...] Can anybody help me out on this? Anybody at all?
Both A and B stem from the same "conscious decision": to treat each group of enemies in a battle as one 'unit'. Thus, there's only one thing to target and one health bar. Yes the individual enemies do have their own health so the 'unit' still looses attacks as you damage it. I'm not really defending this choice, but that's the philosophy behind the stuff that's confusing you.

And if you do, you have to go all the way back the place where you found the item, get another one, then pay that one Toad a bunch of coins to have it turned into a sticker again. Or just buy the item from that sketchy Toad for even more coins. That is some bull[dukar].
True.

BP

  • Beside Pacific
« Reply #29 on: June 22, 2015, 03:49:07 AM »
I could really get a feel for the different parts of town and remember where everything is pretty easily over time (and it didn't take very long to navigate around the town anyway), but I have no idea where anything in Flipside and Flopside is.

I would say this is more just because Flipside is really samey-looking. If being up-down-left-right 2D alone spelled doom for being able to remember where things are in respect to each other, Metroidvania wouldn't exist.
All your dreeeeeeams begiiin to shatterrrrrr~
It's YOUR problem!

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