As Nintendo fans get itchy for a new Nintendo Direct that’s surely days away, rumors for big upcoming Nintendo Switch games are cropping up as they often do. At this point we’ve heard them all. Halo games on Switch. A new 2D Metroid and/or Metroid Prime Trilogy HD. Crash Bandicoot coming to Smash Bros.
One particular rumor though has inspired me to write a take I’ve had brewing for years. Some are suggesting that not only is a new Paper Mario game coming to Nintendo Switch but it will be a return to the spin-off franchises JRPG roots. To many, that sounds great, a fix for a series that has lost its way. But to me, Mario RPGs were never good to begin with.
As the biggest gaming mascot, Mario is a lot of things. But first and foremost Mario games are platformers, games about the exciting immediate joy of running and jumping, always focused on what’s right in front of you. JRPGs, while a perfectly fine genre, to me have always seemed antithetical to that idea, what with their slow exploration and turn-based combat. And yet that hasn’t stopped Nintendo from mashing up these seemingly contradictory ideas time and time again, going all the way back to the Square Enix-developed Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars on Super Nintendo. But for me the problems were already obvious even back then.
In an effort to spice up the combat with more active Mario action, players time button presses to make attacks and defense more potent. This sounds like a good idea, a way to make an otherwise boring activity more engaging. Unfortunately, it leaves battles in a kind of limbo between passive and active. They still aren’t interesting enough to command your full attention. But now you can’t even go on grinding autopilot without sacrificing those benefits. Their noble attempt to make things more bearable backfires, it makes fights repeated more annoying than if they were just traditional turn-based affairs. Every Mario RPG, from Paper Mario to the Mario & Luigi games, uses this system and it’s the biggest reason why I always check out before ever finishing them.
The other big reason though is the writing. Yes, boo me for this but it’s how I feel. No matter how charmingly translated the dialogue reads or how creative the conceit sounds (I hate that I don’t love the Inner Space antics of Bowser’s Inside Story more) I’m so thoroughly uninterested in a Mario game where I have to read reams and reams of text.
I get that some folks like this because it adds more plot to Mario’s world they love so much. But Mario’s world is shallow by design. These RPG narratives strain themselves adding tons of weird side characters that barely feel like they belong. Characters like Geno, literally only cared about by extremely online Nintendo fans and no one else. “The Thousand Year Door” is such a ridiculously overwrought subtitle for a Mario game. Super Paper Mario may have ditched the turn-based battles for a nifty 2D/3D side-scrolling gimmick, but it still featured a novel’s worth of material about evil squares getting married that I just found impossible to care about. Mario is fun, not epic. As far as lighthearted Nintendo role-playing games go EarthBound and Pokemon thread that needle much more gracefully.
That’s not to say that the controversial modern Paper Mario games (Sticker Star for 3DS and Color Splash for Wii U) are fantastic. I personally think they’re a little underrated and make some of the best use of the paper idea both visually and mechanically. But they’re undoubtedly shallower than what has come before, the vestigial RPG elements feel even more pointless. I’m just saying Mario benefits from being light on his feet, not dragged down by one of the densest game genres out there. Before Mario & Luigi developer AlphaDream got shut down it was wild to me that not one but two Mario RPGs series were actively happening. And some fans still complained that, say, the Mario sports games didn’t have enough RPG elements. The story mode in Mario Tennis Aces is essentially a long tutorial, but not once while playing did I wish I had to stop and talk to some NPCs for hours.
I hope if this new Paper Mario exists it’s either good or it’s what RPG fans want. Worst case scenario, it’s neither. But even in the best case scenario, for me, I don’t think it can be both.
two bearded 55 yr old intellectuals, sitting opposite of each other in two stately leather seats. musing upon the concept of a “Paper mario”
— wint (@dril) January 1, 2017
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