Am I allowed in this thread?
No?
TOO BAD.
PM64: Still the best game out of the lot. It's the one that feels most like a Mario game to me. Has the best atmosphere and musical direction in the entire series. It wrote Bowser the best (He's actually the villain! While still being funny! Why was this so hard for the later games to grasp?). The partners weren't anything groundbreaking, but they were all memorable and well-designed and you had gems like Bow and Lakilester in there. The bosses are all fun, fit in perfectly, and pretty much all of them had great music (shout outs to my boys Tubba Blubba and King Crystal). Another thing I really liked? You walked just about everywhere. Even when you did stuff like ride the train or the whale, you still needed to hike a decent amount to get where you needed to go. It felt more adventurous and epic (for lack of a better word). Gameplay-wise, I enjoyed that while the game wasn't inherently difficult, it allowed for a really great degree of customization and allowed for challenge runs that could really push you to the limit. And even on a normal run, a lot of the harder battles still played like puzzles and you really did need to try and work out what move you needed to do next. It was just almost perfectly designed, if you ask me.
TTYD: A lot of steps forward and a lot of steps back. Aesthetically, the game has all the obvious visual improvements and you even got smaller details like Mario's walk cycle looking more like a paper puppet. Musically? They shit the bed. The music in TTYD is so bland and forgettable with only a handful of good tracks that really stand out (Rogueport is the star of the show, the only boss themes I like are Rawk Hawk and Doopliss, etc.), where as I love just about everything in the soundtrack of PM64 like you have no idea. Atmospherically? They shit the bed even harder. Areas are smaller and more cramped (when they really shouldn't have been i mean really), but they still try to have a lot going on, which just made everything seem crowded to me. Rogueport is pitifully small, which is really a shame since it's the best area in the game, but still suffers from being port hub. I really, and I mean REALLY, disliked how getting around in TTYD basically amounted to "take vehicle" or "find slightly out of the way warp pipe". It just took away so so much of the actual adventure feel for me. The towns weren't all that great either (which I neglected to mention in PM64, but I like the greater lot of them), while some of them had some decent aesthetic or a fun quirk (Russian Bob-ombs!), I just couldn't get into them as much. Doesn't help that some of them were kinda rehashy (oh look, another village of friendly koopas) or the town WAS the entire level (oh Glitzville. you were so so good and so so bad at the same time). Character-wise, the game is really a shining star. The majority of the NPCs in the game really do have a lot of personality and even had their own connections and subplots going on (I absolutely loved the Pianta mafia), it made that tiny cramped world feel a more alive and I appreciate that. For the partners, their dialogue was super improved and made their personalities stand out more, but at the same time, I find that the partners didn't fit in as well? In the first paper mario, all the partners were friendly takes on common enemies and I would think that a sequel would crank that up a little by having a few more like a Magikoopa or a Hammer Bro, but instead we got half of the party being repeats from the first game (in terms of species. Mz. Mowz gets points for being an uncommon enemy, but loses points for being a terrible party member), a yoshi (in a game that doesn't have yoshis!), and two inexplicable beings that can just be called "__ spirits". It didn't feel as genuine, even if the party members themselves were solid enough (Flurrie, Vivian, and Bobbery are all great, and the others are all inoffensive aside from Mz. Mowz who is just terrible at what they wanted her to be, gameplay-wise). But alas, the game has terrible villains. None of them fit in at all. AT ALL. Aside from maybe Doopliss but he loses points for being in the worst, THE WORST, chapter in the game (more on that later). It really says something about the villainous cast when the basic mooks have more personality and fun to them than the actual leaders (Grodus was fucking awful and Crump was an annoyance, Beldam was a shallow bitch and Marilyn was tacked on), to say nothing of that ATROCIOUS final boss some know as the Shadow Queen. Seriously, the Shadow Queen is just some trite, shallow "rool duh wurldz" final boss that isn't even fun to fight, and the whole "possessing Peach" thing was just a case of "like you would really do it" that held no real weight (especially after Peach was essential to beating bowser in the first game!). The only antagonist (key word there) that was actually fun and enjoyable was Rawk Hawk (he's still a little too easy, though), but I digress. Moving on to gameplay, a lot of the improvements that they made to the system were perfectly natural and fit in well, but they came at something of an important cost. To put it bluntly, they made the game too easy. Superguard? The harder timing made it a greater risk, but master it and you were invincible. Giving Partners HP and letting them go in front? It gave them more presence in gameplay but also provided you with meatshields (who could ALSO Superguard), making you even more functionally invincible. Stylish Moves? Removed any need to use your turn to gain precious Star Power, removing any risk born from using a turn building power. That said, I don't necessarily dislike these changes and improvements, but they did remove a lot of challenge. Oh, and uh, I didn't like TEC all that much. I thought it was pretty funny, actually. A computer sees Peach naked and goes "damn I wanna piece of THAT". The Metal Peach Solid segments were a lot more time-wastey too (also not much Metal Peach Soliding. it was more just "go here, maybe do minigame). And finally, YOU BACKTRACK WAY TOO FUCKING MUCH IN THIS GAME LIKE JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. WHO THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO MAKE CHAPTER 4 A CONSTANT BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN TWO AREAS. WHY DOES A GAME ON A MORE POWERFUL CONSOLE HAVE SMALLER AREAS THAT NECESSITATE SEEING THE SAME SCREENS OVER AND OVER AND OVER. WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS GOOD DESIGN AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH. that said I totally wanna replay it sometime.
SPM: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHH-Fuck this game. No seriously, you will not find a mario game in existence that fills me with such pure, indignant hatred as this one does. It's honestly the one of the few games I have ever played that I can say that I hate with 100% certainty. While TTYD just made some changes that didn't work out and had shitty villains, it didn't go out of its way to be as utterly BAD as this game seemed to do. Literally nothing in this game is enjoyable or appealing in any way. I can't even laugh at how bad this game. It's just that bad. It's ugly as hell. It sounds ugly as hell, the character designs are awful, the level design is idiotic like nothing else (hey let's advertise being able to switch to 3d, then limit that to one character and put a timer on it. also, let's make switching to 3d completely ugly looking. they didn't even use it for anything clever it was usually just "oh look a wall i can't pass, better flip), and the battles were just "Bowser", if the game didn't force you to use someone otherwise. And you might say that Sticker Star removed partners but oooooh no, I'd rather take no partners than the garbage that was the Pixls, especially after TTYD's partners had such presence. They just throw in these one-note, unfunny pixls to take their places. Note to mention, Peach, Bowser, and Luigi were basically glorified Pixls in themselves (oh I can't do this as mario better switch to so and so then switch back to mario). Really, I see no reason why they couldn't have just divvied the pixl powers among the cast so that you actually needed to change between them for more than the single situations that necessitate them. And the writing, jesus h. samuel l. jackson CHRIST, the writing was TERRIBLE. Any form of wit that you might be able to find in previous games was gone. The humor in the game boiled down to quirks, quirks that weren't even very funny (Dimentio makes nonsensical similes! oh how charming), and...making fun of otaku (YOU'RE BETTER THAN THIS NINTENDO). and that's not even getting into the godawful story that reads like something out a bad Tales of game (or as I like to call them, Tales of games, hachachacha) with a cast that is completely out of place, generic, and so poorly written that they made me wonder when I fell into a cheap jrpg. And the game tried to feign depth by giving all the villains some kind of tragic or mysterious backstory and it just didn't fucking work at all. Nothing within in the story felt like it had any place with a mario game, and NOT in a way that was just something new for the series. I'm okay with stuff like that. I was okay with Luigi's mansion and Super Mario Sunshine and all those things, but Super Paper Mario is just something that feels like it was going to be a completely different series, it's so out of place. None of the characters fit. The romance didn't fit. The backstory didn't fit. Count Bleck doesn't fit. Tippi doesn't fit. Dimentio doesn't fit. Mimi doesn't fit. Mr. L doesn't fit. None of these characters feel in anyway like Mario characters. They felt like cheap, stock characters from a jrpg that only goddamn weeaboos could find to hold any meaningful depth or character. And why did they have a goddamn heaven and hell level that's just pretentious as shit. It just doesn't fit. And the final boss is the ugliest most poorly designed piece of shit I've ever seen.
SS: I'm gonna level with you guys, I was disappointed with what I saw in Sticker Star at first. I was excited when we got the screens that had partners back (a Chain Chomp, no less!), and when the game came out, I was skeptical. But when I got my hands on the game, I immediately understood something: Paper Mario Sticker Star is not an RPG. It's an inventory puzzle game with turn-based battles. And I was able to enjoy the game a lot more when I shed my preconceptions and desires and started looking at the game from the angle I think was intended. The battles in Sticker Star are all puzzles, not "use this sticker to beat that enemy" kind of puzzles. These were puzzles that required making proper judgement calls and being willing to take the right risks to gain better returns. In a way, it was nostalgic to the battles in PM64. Something that I found to be a real challenge was how damage was frequently inevitable, and you had to work around that rather than being able to avoid it completely in most cases. It just added more flavor to the battles. Some might say that the battles weren't necessary or that the game encouraged you to skip them, but I disagree. Battles are generally your best source of money, which serves as your essential lifeblood. And I can tell you, being without money in Sticker Star is a hell of its own kind. Not to mention it costs some good coinage to acquire Things, which are your real powerhouses. The battles just felt like a natural extension of the puzzle gameplay, rather than a distraction from it, really. And you might say that bosses are just "use the weakness" but it allows for some much more than that. Don't want to use a weakness? Well get ready for the ride of your life because fighting bosses head on is an amazing challenge. Even Megasparkle Goomba will test your management abilities if you fight him without using his weakness. Another thing that the game does? Nonlinearity. With clever thinking and a little luck, you can tackle the game in just about any order you please, which is something that no other Paper Mario games lets you do without glitch exploitation. And also, the game FEELS like a mario game. there's so many familiar enemies (that even get used in new and creative ways! Like Mariachi Guys! or Boo Stack!) and the locations didn't feel out of place at all. Even the writing, scant as it admittedly was, had this dry wit permeating it (at points I could swear that this game was localized by a Brit or something) that just felt so organic and welcome. And the music, ye gods, the music is fantastic! So much of the soundtrack is just full of energy and personality that I can't think of a single track that I really dislike! I mean really, if you don't that jazz and mario are a perfect marriage, I'm convinced that you don't really exist. The motif of the final boss theme has even become Bowser's motif in general (and again, if you don't think jazzy metal and bowser are a perfect marriage, you have questionable existence). But, I'm not about to go and say that the game is perfect or anything, I agree with a few complaints on the game (namely the length and lack of memorable characters, and also the lack of writing for characters like Bowser and Peach), but I do think that a lot of people should give the game another go with a different mindset. It has many things about it that I appreciate in spite of it not being the Paper Mario game that I wanted, but it's still a charming and fun puzzle adventure that I think people are just plain too hard on.
AND THAT'S ALL I GOT TO SAY ABOUT THIS. PEACE OUT LOSERS
