Super Paper Mario (Wii)
3.5 stars
Overall, Super Paper Mario for the Nintendo Wii console is a great game. The positives far outweigh the negatives. There are negatives though and they are significant enough that it loses one and a half stars. I was really looking forward to playing this and to this point I’m pretty happy with it.
The Background
Super Paper Mario is the Wii console’s follow-up to the N64’s Paper Mario. The original Paper Mario was a Mario game with a bit of a twist. Nintendo incorporated RPG elements into the standard Mario side-scroller fun that we all love and know. There were more story elements. You collected things like characters and attacks. Attacks took place in turns, which was weird but you got used to it. So rather than jumping on a Goomba as soon as you saw it, you’d go to a fight screen and then take turns attacking one another. It wasn’t the very simple run while holding turbo and then jump onto things Mario game that we were used to.
The Good
There’s a lot of good in this game. These are only a short list of the best points.
1. The best thing that they’ve done is a direct improvement on the original. Fights have gone back to being open format. You don’t have to take turns anymore. It was a cool concept in the original game … at first. It got rather annoying as you moved through the game. You’d have to go to a fight screen and take turns every single time that you wanted to kill a goomba or a turtle. It was a great idea that ended up being kind of silly in practice. Thankfully that’s gone. I was kind of worried about that coming into this.
2. The 3-D. This is another improvement. The Paper Mario games have always been based in 2-D. The characters look very flat; they’re like paper dolls. You spend most of your time in Super Paper Mario in 2-D, however you can press a button to flip into 3-D. It’s really cool because it allows them to hide entire boards, paths, and items outside of your regular view. It makes the game a bit more difficult which is nice. It obscures your line of sight to the logical steps that you should take to complete an objective. As a matter of fact, many of the boards are laid out nearly identically to boards from earlier Mario games and the 3-D allows new things to be inserted into the boards that you know and love.
3. There’s a lot to it. The game is massive and everything takes a really long time to do. It’s cool. I’ve been playing it for a week and a half or so and I’m only 25% of the way through. It’s a very good value at $50.
4. It’s engrossing. I’ve lost time a few times now while playing. It’s easy to just lay on the couch and play for two hours while feeling like only 15 minutes have passed.
The Bad
1. It’s a little too … ‘on the nose’ shall we say. Much of the dialogue and story elements seem to alternate between being intentionally hokey and metatextual. I know that it’s common for the Mario and Zelda games to do this. They seem to make fun of themselves a bit. In Super Paper Mario, it’s just too much. I understand that I’m nearly thirty and that I’ve been playing Mario games for over twenty years, and that maybe … just maybe … that’s worth poking a little bit of fun at. I don’t expect the poking to come from Nintendo though.
2. You fight alongside a series of helpers known as pixels … erm sorry I mean ‘pixls’. Yeah, they really spell it that way. They all look like odd colored bits thrown together. Calling them pixels is a clever joke that’s neither clever nor funny. Everyone knows that images are made of pixels. It’s not necessary to point it out in your character class naming.
The Ugly
There’s really only one thing that falls into the Ugly category. It’s really Ugly though. The game lost an entire star for it.
1. There’s way too much story. No really, there is way too much story. There are points in the game where fifteen minutes pass while you’re staring at dumb cut screens and reading dialogue. It may be a generational thing because I know that many games today are like this, but I’m not into it. I want to save the princess, I don’t want to read War and fucking Peace. I play video games because I want to turn my brain off for a little while rather than to be fed an overcooked hacky backstory. I’d be watching a movie or reading a book if that’s what I felt like doing.
And In Conclusion….
It’s a great game. There are a lot more positives than negatives. Admittedly, the negatives aren’t all that negative either. I’m just a bit picky. It’s a great game and you should check it out.
