| Mario games (rated E for everyone!)
the Thousand-Year Door is extremely accessible. Mario doesn't have any
complex statistics or anything of the sort governing his abilities and so he doesn't
have anything like strength, speed or intelligence ratings to worry about. Instead,
he and his sidekicks' attack powers are advanced by acquiring new badges and by
receiving a few special upgrades throughout the game. Experience and leveling
are still present, although similarly simplified: after every victory, Mario receives
a number of star points as reward. Gaining one-hundred star points advances him
a level and with each level he gains, players choose between upgrading hit points,
flower (mana) points or badge points, which allow Mario to equip more skill-augmenting
badges. I found this level of simplicity suitable for the game, though a bit stifling
in regards to customization.
The battle system, equally streamlined,
borrows a lot from its predecessors: after attacking a foe in the overworld, Mario
and whichever of the game's seven sidekicks he has active at the time appear on
a theatre-style stage opposite their enemies. Everything is completely turn-based,
so enemies won't take shots at you while you're fiddling around with menus (I
prefer it when they can, although I didn't much mind the slower style here). Mario
and his party have a healthy variety of maneuvers at their disposal, each of which
can be improved by successfully inputting the corresponding action command. All
of the moves are easy to execute once you get the hang of them, but some moves
are more enjoyable to perform than others. I get a great deal of satisfaction
from performing Mario's jump moves which require players to press A at the exact
time shoe meets head, but I'm not such a huge fan of, say, Yoshi's basic attack,
which calls for mashing the right shoulder button as quickly as possible.
While I don't think most players will find any of the encounters in the game very
challenging, there's usually enough going on during fights to keep you attentive
and entertained. The new stage setting in particular is used to ingenious effect:
props fall from the ceiling, audience members throw power ups or harmful objects
(Mario can retaliate) and smoke machines diminish the accuracy of combatants.
If you perform well during fights by successfully executing action commands and
adding stylish flourishes whenever possible, you'll draw more eager spectators
to your show. The larger the audience you attract, the more their collective praise
can fill you star meter, allowing you to execute powerful, mini-game-like special
moves. Fail to perform well and the audience will jeer your efforts and then leave,
taking their precious potential for star power with them. Interestingly enough,
different audience members have different abilities. Some will add more star power
than others, while some won't add any at all. Though they do provide some actual
function, I would've preferred more interactivity with the audience. As they are
now, the groundlings (and a lot of the battle screen's wackier elements) primarily
act as a sort of pleasant distraction: one more thing to keep an eye on during
the battles, most of which are again habitually effortless.
When you're
not fighting, game progression basically flows something like this: players spend
time exploring the hub town of Rogueport until they find some item or upgrade
that allows them to reach a new warp pipe in the town's sewer. They hit the warp
pipe, go on an adventure (sometimes straightforward, sometimes wacky) and then
return after every chapter with a new ability or two that allow them to access
still newer areas or items back in Rogueport. Puzzles are solved by jumping on
things (hurray), hitting switches, using Mario's paper powers (rolling up into
a tube shape, folding into an airplane or boat - that sort of thing) and by utilizing
the abilities of Mario's various sidekicks, some of whom actually have pretty
clever ways of interacting with the environment. Most of the game's puzzles are
simplistic but enjoyable. There is occasionally too much hand-holding and lecturing
(a typical symptom of Nintendo design philosophy these days), but a lot of the
puzzles do expect players to expand on what the game shows them and figure out
how to apply Mario's wide assortment of moves for themselves. The platforming
elements don't always hit the mark-Mario's jump doesn't really feel like Mario's
jump here, perhaps because he can't accelerate to a decent running speed without
the aid of Yoshi and thus cannot add any real momentum to a leap-but they offer
a nice change of pace from the puzzles and turn-based battles.
That said,
the game can be frustrating at times, especially when it refuses to give players
the benefit of the doubt. Observe chapter six, "3 Days of Excess," wherein Mario
must solve various mysteries while aboard a train bound for the ritzy Poshley
Heights. The first whodunit is fairly simple: someone has stolen the chef's special
dinner from the train dining room and it is Mario's job to find the culprit. An
astute player might logically conclude the perpetrator is none other than the
fat fellow in cabin 003 with the spoon in his hand and a twinkle in his eye. Nothing
would be gained by talking to him or searching his room, however, because the
stew pot in question won't magically appear there until Mario examines the drops
of stew on the floor outside the man's cabin. The game has a lot of that sort
of overly- (and overtly)-linear structure and you occasionally have to satisfy
really asinine prerequisites in order to trigger certain events. You'll also be
expected to take control over some fairly mundane tasks: there is a scene a bit
later in the game, for example, where the male half of a Pianta newlywed couple
must tell his wife that he loves her one hundred times. And the game, thinking
it's being cute or clever, actually expects you to press A or B one hundred times
to properly refresh the dialogue bubble. I find this sort of thing endearing in
small doses, but for some the game may not be able to build up enough equity to
justify tooling around like this. There is also some backtracking to be done throughout
the adventure, usually nothing too dreary or monotonous (unless you count the
optional quests) but enough to break an otherwise brisk enough pace.
It occurs to me that some of the game's more tedious elements could have been
added (or perhaps originally designed) to extend its length and expand its scope,
which couldn't be more unnecessary. I'd liken it, loosely, to taking a perfectly
fine and functional wallet-sized photograph and blowing it up to make a billboard.
It just misses the point and it exposes flaws that would have been otherwise largely
unnoticeable. The game works best as something small and quaint. The adventure
feels naturally epic at times-Mario is saving the world, after all-but ultimately
everything about the game, from its mechanics to its settings to its graphical
style, has a certain smallness, simplicity and sometimes even restrictiveness
to it. The result of all this stretching is a game that goes on just slightly
too long, wearing out its welcome earlier than it should.
Worse still,
the game has a habit of telling you the story, rather than allowing you to play
through it. It doesn't always feel natural for a Mario game to be so… nonreciprocal.
The dialogue, especially long in the tooth at moments, may be the best example.
Many utility characters have the bad habit of yammering on with an unrelenting
fury long after they've served their purpose and divulged all useful information-the
prologue in particular just goes on and on and on and on. There may also be too
many hip kid colloquialisms, out of place "real-world" references and fourth wall
breaking in the dialogue for some tastes. A lot of characters also speak with
that ellipses-laden "um… er… jeepers…" style and the more serious villain characters
could stand to be a hair more articulate.
On the other hand, some of
the game's other characters are legitimately entertaining, either in what they
have to say or merely in their design or story. Luigi, for one, spins some genuinely
charismatic yarns. Equally compelling is Admiral Bobbery, one of Mario's more
impressive sidekicks. He is a bob-omb, you see, who is also a navy admiral. He
looks like a navy admiral should (if admirals were just bombs with feet and faces)
and he has a story that goes something like this: once an able navigator, Admiral
Bobbery returned home from long a voyage at sea to discover that his beloved wife
Scarlette, with whom he shared love unmatched, had succumbed to illness and passed
away while he was gone. Blaming himself for not being there when his lover needed
him most, Bobbery became a depressed recluse and vowed never to sail again. This
is all great, of course, because Bobbery is nothing more than a bob-omb with a
sailor's hat and bushy, grey mustache. I really like these outlandish characterizations
and I think that they, along with the kind of scenarios that see a supercomputer
falling in love with Princess Peach or Bowser romping through classic-style sidescrolling
levels or Mario fighting in an arena under the ring handle of the Great Gonzales
for an unscrupulous Southern promoter, manage to expand Mario's universe in a
way that makes it all the more appealing and personable while still allowing it
to retain much of its original identity.
Overall: 7.5/10
The
new Paper Mario is more successful as an experience than it is as a game.
Nebulous terms, I know, but basically while the game can be a joy to move through,
a lot of parts aren't necessarily fun to play. To die on a boss or otherwise lose
a decent chunk of progress might be more frustration than the game is worth. It
seems that, knowing this, developers chose to sap out anything that might be too
challenging for players, opting instead to provide a better pace at the expense
of any great sense of achievement. Nevertheless, on the whole the game was a pleasant
experience for me, at least as a fan of Super Mario. It has its share of
shortcomings, but it's saved by charm and personality. The world Intelligent Systems
has created around Mario is engaging and inviting even if the Thousand-Year
Door's various design flaws and sometimes-too-rigid role-playing structure
more than once impeded my desire to explore it.
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