Less alliteratively, this is ultimately about
fundamental differences in American and Japanese sense of self and the concept of the individual.
Just think Pokemon. Cubone wears his mother's skull on his head. You can catch Cubone. So can everyone else. You can catch multiple Cubone. You can have a team of six Cubone. You can breed two Pokemon in the day care and get an egg, and Cubone can hatch out of that egg.
As far as I can tell, the whole Toad (and Yoshi, and Birdo) thing is the same thing. Japan would say yes, Toad is a character. And here is a Toad. And here are more Toads. Also Goomba is a character.
Look at the way they're described in even the English manuals:
Little Goomba
A mushroom who betrayed the Mushroom Kingdom. One stomp and he dies.
Koopa Troopa (green)
Soldier of the Turtle Empire, his orders are to find and destroy Mario. Jump on him and he stops moving for a while.
Koopa Troopa (red)
This turtle is chicken! Very timid, he gets scared easily and runs back and forth a lot. Jump on him and he stops moving
Buzzy Beetle
Quite the toughy, fireballs don't even faze him.
The Hammer Brothers
These wily twin-brother turtles come at you throwing hammers.
Spiny
Lakitu's pet, but a wild fighter. You can't kill him by jumping on top of him.
Lakitu
The mysterious turtle who controls the clouds. He chases after Mario and drops Spiny's eggs on top of him.
Shyguy - Red
A member of the "8 bits" (a club from evil dreams). He wears a mask because he's shy.
Pidgit
He brings evil dreams. He can't fly on his own, so Wart gave him a flying carpet.
Ostro
He thinks he is a girl and he spits eggs from his mouth. He'd rather be called "birdetta."
Yurarin Boo
This is the big brother of Yurarin. It moves up and down spitting out fireballs, and a superball has no effect on it.
Pionpi
Hopping about and persistently dogging Mario, no matter how many times you jump on Pionpi, he keeps coming back to life. But you can defeat him with a superball.
Buzzy Beetle
He's back again. This time he can walk on the ceiling.
Now look at this quote from Game Informer's Miyamoto interview a couple months ago:
If you're familiar with things like Popeye and some of the old comic characters, you would oftentimes see this cast of characters that takes on different roles depending on the comic or cartoon. They might be businessmen in one [cartoon] or a pirate in another. Depending on the story that was being told, they would change roles. So, to a certain degree, I look at our characters in a similar way and feel that they can take on different roles in different games. It's more like they're one big family, or maybe a troupe of actors.
And then this:
Miyamoto doesn't think of Mario in terms of "How many birdos exist? Is there a familial relation between the birdo you killed in this level and the birdo you killed in that level?" To Miyamoto, it's "This is the part of the story where we have a boss. Let's have Birdo play that role!" In SMB1, "Hammer Brother" is not a species -- it was two twin brothers, who reprised their role as antagonists on multiple levels. For me, a more modern example than the Popeye cartoons that Miyamoto gave would be the Muppet movies -- especially adaptations like
Muppet Christmas Carol and
Muppet Treasure Island, and the movies that are very self-aware about being movies, like
The Muppet Movie and
Great Muppet Caper. We need someone to play Bob Cratchit -- let's make it Kermit! New movie -- now Kermit and Fozzie are going to be twins!
The fans tend not to see it that way. More casual players are perfectly content to go "Oh, Yoshi! You're here again, even though I killed you two levels ago!", but more serious diehard fans want more of a Paper Mario route where there are all these members of these various species with names and stories and families and there's a whole big breathing world.
And now Miyamoto is saying he doesn't want that:
The Paper Mario series started when we introduced RPG elements as a means of differentiating the game from the platformer series. Through the inclusion of this story and the characters we wrote to fit that story, we ended up giving the game a unique character. However, for Sticker Star, Mr Miyamoto asked us to create a game using only characters already found in the Mario world rather and not any of our own. So instead of focusing our attention on the story or characters we focused instead on paper. We tried to add as many creative uses of paper as we could to the game. The theme of the game is stickers and we also put a lot of effort into this (including paperisation). Creating a world and story using only Mario characters meant for example we had to give each Toad a distinctive character even if they looked the same. So it was quite a challenge but I feel that we succeeded in overcoming it.
Sticker Star is a fun game, but if it's the direction future Paper Mario games are going in terms of atmosphere and character, I am not happy. The main platformer series is for the Popeye/Muppets stageplays. Paper Mario is supposed to be where it all gets developed into an actual working multispecies world where
Goombas go to college.
