One of the better games (and few
RPGs) on the
Nintendo
GameCube was the third
Mario RPG released on a
console system,
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.
Intelligent Systems' light-hearted RPG took a silly visual premise
(Mario and company as thin paper cutouts) and combined it with a
surprisingly action-packed turn-based battle system, making a game that
is at once witty and fun to play. The same could be said about their
first
Wii offering,
Super Paper Mario, released in April 2007 in Japan and North America, and September 2007 in Europe and Australia.
Unlike previous Paper Mario games, which were traditional RPGs with some movement-based puzzle-solving, Super Paper Mario is an action RPG drawing as much on the classic Super Mario Brothers platformers as it does on Final Fantasy and its ilk. Most action RPGs use a top-down or isometric perspective borrowed from the original Legend of Zelda, but Super Paper Mario
uses a side-scrolling perspective intended as a deliberate
throwback/homage to the NES era of Mario platformers. Enemies are faced
in the usual Mario platform way, with jumping, fireballs, and hammers,
and you can bonk blocks for coins and power-ups. At the same time,
though, Mario and his enemies have hit points, and Mario has an
experience level improved by scoring points.
No description of Super Paper Mario
would be complete without a mention of its central mechanic: dimension
switching. With a touch of a button Mario 'flips' from the 2D
side-scrolling world to an end-on 3D view of the level, revealing
detail invisible (and irrelevant) in 2D. Impassible pits have thin
bridges, impenetrable fields of spikes have a clear path at the back,
and many invisible creatures and items appear in corners. This ability
is crucial for navigating the game and is employed in a variety of
puzzles impeding Mario's progress through the levels.
Mario is
joined on his journey by a variety of helpful beings called 'Pixls',
and three other main characters from the Mario mythos: Luigi,
Princess Peach, and Bowser. Pixls each perform a task similar to
Mario's 'partners' from earlier Paper Mario games, and are almost all
named with horrible puns: one, Slim, flips Mario around (but not the
perspective) to make him invisible and thus invincible in 2D, or to let
him pass through thin gaps in 3D, while another, Thoreau, grabs items
for Mario to, well, throw at things. Only one Pixl and one party member
can be active at one time, making the game somewhat more difficult,
though they can be swapped out at almost any time. The Pixls's help is
necessary to advance through the many puzzles to be found in Super Paper Mario's 32 levels.
Super Paper Mario
was originally shown at E3 2006 as a GameCube game to be released that
fall, seen by many as the 'last hurrah' for the outgoing system. It was
soon a victim of Nintendo's quick abandonment of their last-generation
system, quietly moving to the Wii in the summer of 2006 and being
postponed into 2007 as a result. This new release date put it squarely
in the middle of the Wii's release drought, helping tide over the new
Wii owners between the launch selection and the fall's lineup of
Nintendo stalwarts, but the game was originally designed for the
GameCube and it shows. While Twilight Princess was extensively re-worked for Wii control, most of the special Wii actions for Super Paper Mario
feel tacked-on. With the exception of pointing at the screen for
information on objects and enemies, all the Wii motions simply replace
button mashing with Wiimote shaking and direction-holding with Wiimote
tilting. It is played with the sideways Wiimote, drastically limiting
the number of available buttons; actions such as talking, opening
chests, and spraying fireballs are done with D-Pad directions rather
than their own buttons, and character and Pixl switching is done with
menus rather than the many shortcuts possible with the GameCube's
button collection.
The plot involves foiling the plans of the
sinister Count Bleck through... item collection! There are seven Pure
Hearts at the end of the first seven Chapters and Mario must
collect them all to save the day. This fairly pedestrian plot
develops a variety of twists and turns before the end, some unexpected,
some very silly, and some unexpected and very silly. The plot is much
darker than previous Paper Mario games, with the utter destruction of
all worlds heralded by the eerie, everpresent, and ever-growing Void in
the sky. At best, the game's challenges are inventive and inspired, but
the game does degenerate into tedious fetch quests from time to time,
especially in the hub world of Flipside. In addition, the game is considerably shorter than the earlier Paper Mario games, as the lightweight platformer format makes the eight chapters fly by.
Super Paper Mario is a very nostalgic game, beginning with the near-recreation of the iconic first two levels of the original Super Mario Brothers
and extending through much of the game's design and dialogue. The
Nintendo and video game in-jokes from the earlier Paper Mario games are
intact, but the retro side-scrolling style brings it to a new level.
Authentic 8-bit sprites of the main characters are used in a few
places, including a New Super Mario Bros.-inspired Mega
Star power-up that grows your character into a towering 8-bit sprite
form allowing them to crash through any enemies or barriers that happen
to get in their way.
On the whole, Super Paper Mario is
a good game hampered by a few significant flaws. It is a clever and
well-realized gameplay idea mixed with witty writing, but with
lackluster Wii control and occasional tedious fetch quests.
Nevertheless, it remains one of the better single-player games in the
Wii catalogue, though the game drought that its release attempted to
stave off is beginning to end with the release of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.
(CC)
This
writeup is copyright 2007 by me and is released under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial licence. Details
can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/2.5/ .