General Mario Thread

Paper Jam was received poorly?

BUT IT LOOKS SO GOOD!

edited 27th Jan '16 4:52:14 PM by lalalei2001

It's gotten the "worst" (at 77) Metacritic score of any M&L game.

I'm sure it's fun, and I'm glad it seems to have improved on some of my issues with previous games (tedious tutorials, 2D sections), but I'm not super interested in it. I kinda gave someone on here an overly complicated reason for why that is through PM, but thinking about it since then, I'm pretty sure the primary reason is that (no matter how untrue or paranoid this is) playing Paper Jam is going to be a consistent reminder for me that a lack of original characters and settings is the future of both Mario RPG subseries.

edited 27th Jan '16 4:57:30 PM by FawfulCrump

I've put about an hour into it so far. It's fun with all that fun M&L combat and decent dialogue. But I can see the complaints. The Paper variations put a neat twist on several attacks, but the overall variety is feeling lower this time. And while I don't mind the Toad hunts at the moment, I can see them getting repetitive fast.

Don't worry, the toad hunts pay off story-wise at some point. And while the lack of Original Generation is a downer, they fleshed out existing characters, something that never happens in a Mario platformer.

Since fog rolling in and making everyone's attacks constantly miss was such a fun stage event.

Or spinning three poison mushrooms on the roulette and having your stats halved as punishment for being good at action commands, that was always fun especially in the Pit of 100 Trials.

Or explosions randomly going off and killing you when you were one turn away from killing Bonetail. That actually happened to me last game.

Superguarding I could take or leave. I like that in the first game damage was unavoidable, so you had to actually budget your healing items and worry about having enough health. In TTYD you can just superguard everything and never have to heal or upgrade your HP. But it does also add a risk-vs-reward element since the timing is a lot tighter than just blocking.

edited 27th Jan '16 8:40:51 PM by Anomalocaris20

I love the challenge gaming/speedrunning community.

edited 28th Jan '16 2:59:12 PM by unnoun

Everyone keeps joking and making memes about the half A press video, but nobody's saying anything about the video with way more views where he offers a THOUSAND DOLLAR BOUNTY to anyone who can replicate a certain glitch. This guy takes Mario very seriously.

(I wish someone would put this kind of effort into exploiting the Spyro PS 1 games. *sigh* Those games are the best...)

edited 28th Jan '16 7:48:01 PM by spashthebandragon

Okay, so I haven't actually played Paper Jam yet, but...

I dunno, I feel like I'm in the minority in not minding that the recent RP Gs don't have newly-made characters or baddies. It's not like that leads to a lack of variety, since there's plenty of Mario enemies... and honestly, it leads to certain bits I really like, like the very idea of Koopalings having dialogue for once or the one boss in Sticker Star being a Mr. Blizzard, which barely ever appears anymore and was really nice in comparison to Petey Appearance #12. Or heck, something as stupidly simple as Paper Jam apparently having Big Bob-omb. On the summit.

Basically: for all the issues Sticker Star actually had, it wasn't due to using regular Mario enemies, and I doubt Paper Jam would really suffer from it either.

That man is so insane, I love it.

My favorite part of that whole video is how nonchalant he is about everything, especially the 12 real-life hours part.

Oh yeah, the guy has other videos about other abuses of the SM 64 engine. I don't recall most of them having commentary, and several that do being only text and not audio, but there's plenty of interesting things in there.

Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam Miiverse interview

Seems like lack of new characters was a result of developer choice rather than Executive Meddling like many paranoid people me might have thought.

Click "View Oldest Comments" to see the whole interview, BTW.

edited 29th Jan '16 2:35:17 PM by FawfulCrump

Exactly as I thought. Nintendo rarely forcibly meddles with these sorts of games.

And when they did, they got a lot of backlash which they hopefully payed attention to.

Miyamoto's suggestions =/= forcing his will on poor IS.

At the same time, when Shigeru Miyamoto makes a suggestion, I don't think anyone's going to go against it.

"Also, for some reason, I really focused on getting the roundness of Luigi's behind just right."

Oh...

That's pretty typical information of a crossover, if there's ever going to be an original character it's most likely going to be the cause of the crossover.

Crossovers generally use that as a chance for different worlds to interact, there's never really time to introduce new things when you have so many other opportunities to use in the story.

edited 29th Jan '16 3:19:42 PM by randomness4

Doesn't really excuse the generic environments or bland plot, though.

They explained why they kept it simple, but they may have done so a little too simple.

It does mean people can stop doomsaying about how big bad Nintendo are dead set on ruining the RPGs now.

...They won't, of course, but they should.

edited 29th Jan '16 3:37:36 PM by Perseus

You should change your signature to "Idiocy is the essence of society."

I'll stop doomsaying just as soon as Nintendo puts out a new, non-bland RPG...

What I don't understand is why Nintendo seems to be the only company that has to be flawless. Unless it's a major mess up, if a game from another company is bland or even kinda bad, they'll get a lot of flack for that game but I don't think most people throw doom on the entire company. For Nintendo, on the other hand, even one mistake will cause half of the Internet to scream that they're doomed and are going to go down in flames.

Honestly, I sometimes wonder the very same thing! It even happens here, on what I consider to be one of the more civil places in the internet.

I love Nintendo, and I know that they sometimes make mistakes, but is it really the end of the company when an entry is even slightly divisive?

edited 29th Jan '16 4:40:07 PM by kablammin45