Iwata Asks: Paper Mario: Sticker StarInteresting tidbits (but you should just go read the whole thing instead):
Tanabe: At our first meeting [for Super Mario RPG], Square presented us an image of Mario wearing a cape, riding a horse, and holding a sword!
Kudo: Our first proposal combined Square's specialty, a world of swords and sorcery like in Final Fantasy, with Super Mario.
Tanabe: I remember how the first thing Miyamoto-san said when he saw that was, "That's not right." He started with how Mario wouldn't have a sword, but might have a hammer.
Iwata: I suppose that when Super Mario became an RPG, Miyamoto-san had an idea in his head from the start about what he wanted to make use of and what couldn't budge.
Tanabe: But that was Miyamoto-san's only specific request. My impression is that Square understood the rest and turned it out nicely.
Paper Mario concept art, March 5 1997
Tanabe: The biggest reason was that Miyamoto-san said he wanted us to make a big change in the atmosphere for Paper Mario this time. I heard that Miyamoto-san was really thinking for a while about how to handle the Super Mario series and pondered over a number of things.
Iwata: We imagined rather early on that Paper Mario would be a good match for the Nintendo 3DS, and the papercraft atmosphere of the actual prototype was good.
Tanabe: That was about three years ago, at the end of 2009.
Aoyama: At the beginning of development, we were simply incorporating an idea making use of the stereoscopic display function. Then at the 2010 E3, before release of the Nintendo 3DS, we revealed several images.
Iwata: So why did it drag on until now?
Aoyama: After E3, Miyamoto-san played the prototype and said it was just a port of the GC version.
Tanabe: I had heard that at first Miyamoto-san said that something like an RPG would be fine, so for a while I thought that something like the previous one would be fine.
Iwata: Listening to you talk, it sounds like Miyamoto-san was a scary presence for the team.
Aoyama: Yeah, he was! (laughs)
Tanabe: Aside from wanting us to change the atmosphere a lot, there were two main things that Miyamoto-san said from the start of the project—"It's fine without a story, so do we really need one?" and "As much as possible, complete it with only characters from the Super Mario world.
Iwata: That's a difficult task. In some ways that would be the exact opposite direction from recent games in the series.
Tanabe: Yeah. With regard to the story, we did a survey over the Super Paper Mario game in Club Nintendo, and not even 1% said the story was interesting. A lot of people said that the Flip move for switching between the 3D and 2D dimensions was fun.
Kudo: I originally saw it in a way that's similar to Miyamoto-san. Personally I think all we need is to have an objective to win the boss battle at the end of the game. I didn't think we necessarily needed a lengthy story like in an RPG.
Iwata: When it comes to characters, in the session of "Iwata Asks" covering Super Mario Galaxy, Miyamoto-san said that he was finally able to put the essence of Mario into words for the first time. [...] He says that a Mario-like design follows from function, so when something otherwise comes into the mix, it doesn't feel right.
Iwata: Creatively, restraints aren't necessarily a bad thing. A lot of new attractive features come out of that.
Tanabe: That's right. At first, we were making a lot of individual allies as in a regular RPG, but when we decided to focus on stickers, in order to make a clear change with previous games in the series, it was like we started all over again by throwing out the system—including those characters—that we had made up to that point.
Iwata: You purposefully threw out the basic RPG structure.
Tanabe: Yes. We decided to make it so that players would face stronger opponents by throwing out the whole concept of experience points and levels in favor of gradually gathering stronger stickers.
I had actually been thinking for a long time that I wanted to get rid of the RPG experience points. In the Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland game, which Kudo-san and I worked on together, the player-character didn't develop at all. We adopted a system whereby they solved everything with money.
Nakajima: I've been involved throughout the whole series, but this is the first time the game has a world map, so you can play the courses over and over. We tried to make it enjoyable no matter when you play or which areas you play, so I hope people will really get into it!
Kudo: Well, as mentioned before, the mechanics present new challenges and the gameworld represents a new start. We worked hard so that this game would become the new standard for future Paper Mario games, so please play it to the fullest!
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