Super Paper Mario review
Something weird happened last Friday… Let’s not talk about it ever again. However, it seems I'm a lot happier than before. I guess I mostly had to get my anger out on something. This doesn't make right every moment of anger I had in the past; but if anything, I hope this means I won't have as many moments of anger in the future.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Just ask Bowser. Every time he went giant he'd still get his ass kicked. |
It seems love isn't two hearts together, it's eight hearts getting together to stop an evil one from destroying the Multiverse. |
Nastasia... you should smile more often. You're a cute Pixelly character when you smile. And I honestly don't mean that as a joke. |
*sob* I promised to myself that I wouldn’t cry!
So, this is the end of the game. After this point,
you can still go back to every level, talk to every character (again, minus
Dimentio, Blumiere or Timpani). Officially, the game is over. Boy, I hope the
next Paper Mario is as awesome as this one!
SLAP
That was a goof, Miyamoto!
So, if you want to explore everything that is yet to
be found in this game, you’ll spend numerous hours completing side-quests and
bonus dungeons. Here’s a list.
-With the Sammer’s Kingdom back, you can finally go
and try to defeat all 100 Sammer Guys. It’s a tough fight, bring plenty of
Ultra Shroom Shakes.
-You can also access both Pits of 100 Trials. In the
first one, you encounter almost every regular enemy seen in the game. There’s a
resting area every 10th floor so you can maybe buy stuff or go back to
Flipside. On Floor 100, you fight a stronger version of Fracktail, the robot
dragon at the end of Chapter 1. This one’s named Wracktail and would be more
difficult, if Luigi’s super jump didn't make it so easy to punch its lights out. The
Flopside Pit is a special case; all the enemies are pitch-black, featureless
versions of regular enemies. They are also much stronger, having more HP and
higher attack power. Once again, there are 100 floors with a resting area every
10th floor, and trust me you’ll need it. When you get to Floor #100,
you are told you must reach the Flopside Pit’s Floor 100 a second time to see
the boss. So do that (beat the Flopside Pit in its entirety a second time), and you face Shadoo, a shapeshifter pitch-black creature
who goes through shapes of all four heroes, also gaining their abilities. This
boss has 400 HP, 100 for each form, and is definitely harder then Super
Dimentio. It’s quite an achievement to beat it. Good luck! As a fun fact, if
you do go and beat both Pits (including the Flopside Pit twice) before heading off to the final Chapter, you WILL
find Bleck and Super Dimentio ridiculously easy, even easier than I felt they
were.
Don't try, Shadoo, you're not scaring us. We've had to deal with much more annoying shapeshifters. |
-Some guy in Flopside sells about 20 different maps
leading to places in the game. Visit these places, then use Fleep on the region
marked with an X to discover brand-new Catch Cards. It’s not the longest
side-quest, but it’s necessary to complete the Catch Card collection. It’s also
a good reason to revisit the levels in the game, which are more lacking in
enemies and content now that the Story Mode is over. Of course, getting all
Catch Cards is a challenge all to itself, which forces the player to find every
secret passageway in the entire game.
-Getting all of Safron and Dyllis’ recipes. For this,
you need money, and you need to revisit every shop in the game. It’s an
extremely difficult mission, and you’ll most likely need a guide to get
everything. It’s hard as Hell, and there’s a lot of exploration required. A lot
of coins, too (THOUSANDS, in fact), so you might have to harvest cash by going in the more
enemy-populated levels.
All 13 Pixls. Enjoy! |
If you want, you can also go chat with O’Chunks, Mimi
or Nastasia. Not that they’ll talk about much, but it’s still pretty neat. Most
NPCs in the game are still where you find them, so have a blast. Hell, for some
reason, even Luvbi is alive! Don’t ask. Even the game acknowledges this makes
no sense. I still don’t like Luvbi, but hey, everyone deserves a happy ending…
A final thing, the four mini-games available are:
-Mansion Patrol, where you, as Toad, have to shoot
plenty of Boos in a haunted mansion. My least favorite mini-game.
-Tilt Island, you tilt the island so that Mario can
pick up food and avoid the baddies falling. You get bonuses if you only
collected one type of food. There are also power-ups here. It’s my favorite
mini-game here.
Those four mini-games are fun, but the fact that you
have to pay to play them, and the small selection, makes them really a minor
part of the game, one that will probably not be used much. Well, unless you
want the InterNed’s prizes.
Alright, I think this covered everything. Final
thoughts?
This game is marvelous, beautiful, awesome, amazing,
grand and great. Let me throw my dictionary of synonyms aside and continue.
Yes, this is a good game, no questions asked. I’ll be the first to acknowledge
I’ve been openly negative about it. But it’s a good game. It really is. Going
down the list of tropes and clichés that I deeply despise, this game makes me
cross more of those than other games do. I chalk it up to the “Chosen One” and
“Jesus symbolism” stuff, as those are the main tropes that bring all the others into play. Also, there are numerous moments that also greatly
annoy me, such as all the moments where the plot forces the characters to act
stupid. I mean, when we know it’s Mimi, we still have to play her little game?
Ah, come on. TVTropes has a term for that: Idiot Ball. That’s when characters
are written to act stupider for certain plots to be forced upon them, plots
that wouldn’t happen if the characters used their brains. Then there are plenty
of small details that irk me through the plot. The brothers from Chapter 1-2
come to my mind… Oh, don’t get me wrong, I can accept jokes. I can also choose
not to find certain things funny. Same goes for Francis, who I still don’t like
all that much, but the post-game scenes kinda try to show him in a slightly
better light… Same goes for Luvbi, who seems less annoying after her revival.
I still don’t like much of the story in this game and the slew of Messianic tropes it carries (it's been done so often it's become an annoyance to me), but I must
say it brings up a good point about love. After all, many of the villains
represent a twisted, impure form of love. There’s Mimi’s vanity, Francis’s
treating of women as trophies, King Croacus who got polluted and became
narcissistic as a result, and I’m sure the list could get longer. But in the
end, not only does friendship and loyalty save the day (by removing the final
boss’s invincibility), true love saves the multiverse. Call it sappy if you
want. But in a strange way, the whole game had been building up to that
conclusion.
This green rectangle is the screen you'll see the most. |
I do have quite a number of nitpicks as well: You must
pay to play the mini-games. The shops are located all over Flipside/Flopside
and sometimes in the game’s levels (and you need to remember what each shop
sells if you want to complete the cooking side-quest). Said side-quest is, by
the way, nearly impossible without a guide. There is too much backtracking in
certain levels during Story Mode. The Cursyas are annoying as Hell. The
password in Chapter 5-2 is insanely long, you’ll have to have a piece of paper
on standby, not a good thing. Traveling around Flipside and Flopside can take
some time, even after a special pipe has been installed. Some levels become
boring post-Story Mode, as the plot-related events are done and many rooms end
up either empty or with a lot less enemies. Chapter 7-3 is way too freaking
long, the very definition of a marathon level. It’s difficult to jump on 2D
characters while in 3D Mode, the perspective makes it complicated. You can’t
fight against any bosses again after they’ve been defeated. And most bosses are a little too easy to defeat... But that’s all
minor stuff.
Everything else is great. The gameplay: Awesome. As
much as I hate having to switch all the time, Mario and Co.
having all these abilities makes them very fun to play. Not to mention that
having the right character and Pixl at the same time can lead to game-breaking
combos. Bowser is slow? Not on Carrie, he isn’t! And he can breathe fire even
in the middle of a jump when he’s standing on that Pixl! Luigi’s super jump
becomes a great weapon against flying enemies, including Bleck, or those whose weak points are located higher, like Bonechill. Hell, just having Princess Peach, Bowser
AND Luigi as playable characters makes this game better in my opinion. But, more
than anything else, the gameplay is FUN. That’s all I ask for, really.
Flamm demands that you complete his side-quest. Oh hey, he has a South Park Canadian face too! |
The choice of side-quests is great, playing through all of them will add many hours to your play total. If you’re persistent, you can do everything and find all the recipes, all the catch cards and all the hidden treasure chests. I know I did that the first time I beat that game. The Pits of 100 Trials are great bonus dungeons, and the Sammer Guys Challenge is a fun post-Story Mode fight.
The graphics are beautiful. 2D and 3D don’t fight for
power here, they complete each other near-perfectly. And it’s a treat to look
at a zone in 2D, then flip and look at it in 3D. Not to mention that’s
practically required if you want to find every secret. Now, the puzzles based
around flipping could become rather complicated, but it’s otherwise a very neat
feature and the level designers used as much of their creativity as possible. They did every possible puzzle one could do with this ability. Same goes for the music; it’s so great you could make playlists out of the best
tunes in this game. And then there's all the incredibly creative character designs, the bosses, the creatures who mix 2D and 3D, and the environments... Just so much creativity, that's awesome. The soundtrack in Super Paper Mario is generally regarded
as excellent, an opinion I agree with.
The large selection of items, the controls (all with
only the Wii remote!), the NPCs (well, most of them; some are better than
others. Looking at you, the Bridge Brothers!), the even larger selection of
enemies (over a hundred!)… Point to just about any aspect of this game, minus
the story, and I’ll tell you it’s good. It’s just a good action RPG. And those
who complain because it’s not a straight RPG like the other Paper Mario games,
well… seriously, how about you play it before complaining. Look, I’m ready to
admit Super Paper Mario is not perfect, but the flaws I see have nothing to do
with this being an action RPG. On the contrary, I think it greatly mixes Mario’s
platforming roots with the complexity of RPG adventures. And if you don’t want
to accept it this way, if you don’t want to give it a chance, then you are a
sad, strange little person, and you have my pity.
So, outside of its problematic storytelling, Super
Paper Mario has basically everything that makes a great game. I sincerely
suggest you play through it someday. You might not like every aspect of it, and
that’s perfectly fine. As long as, in the end, blind hatred doesn’t cloud your
judgment and you are able to see the good and the bad, and not only one of
them. I learned that hating for the sake of hating is pointless. Sure, it’s
funny to watch and read, but it’s pointless. And no matter how much bad you see, there
will always be the good to balance it. And sometimes, you just have to search
for it. But rest assured that for every awful story, there are many great ones.
For every piece of crap, there’s an acclaimed masterpiece. For every bad video
game film, there’s a handful of good ones waiting to be seen. And for any media out there, especially animated media like films or games, even if a story isn't top-notch doesn't mean everything else in that oeuvre is also terrible; on the contrary, the rest could salvage it. Never fall into
negativism as I so often did, and most of all, never forget to smile.
And this closes the second anniversary review for
Planned All Along. I hope you enjoyed. We’re gonna start the third year with a
game called Fishing Master: World Tour, and then we’ll go into more games and
series I still haven’t discussed. This year, I hope to review more visual novel
video games, more M-rated games, and possibly one or two Pokémon games.
See
you soon!
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