Headscratchers / Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam

• How is Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam a "crossover" if it only uses Mario-series characters and elements? Crossovers such as Super Smash Bros., PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, Mario & Sonic, and Street Fighter x Tekken all combine different game franchises into one. Paper Jam doesn't do this.
• What ever happens to Bowser Jr. and Paper Bowser Jr.? They don't explode like other defeated enemies, and we never see them again after their defeat. They were pretty concerned about being separated too, so I would have thought that was an important plot thread to tie up.
  • They might've stayed unconscious for the remainder of the game. Paper Bowser Jr. may have been placed back into the book, and as for Bowser Jr....well, once he finds out...
• The UK Market-Based Title makes no sense. Paper Jam Bros.? When you don't play as Paper Luigi?
  • They also got Dream Team Bros. instead of just Dream Team. Now that you mention it, neither makes too much sense, but to each their own. Nintendo of Europe and Nintendo of America are just fond of making names not match up, not just in Mario & Luigi (it makes using online guides a headache, that's for sure). Whyever that name was chosen, I'm sure it was because of Mario and Luigi, not Paper Mario and Paper Luigi.
• If Count Bleck or Dimentio succeeded in destroying all worlds with the void, would the void spill over into the Mario & Luigi universe and eventually destroy that world too?
  • I'd imagine it would probably just destroy the book. (Or better yet, just leave it blank - the World of Nothing was portrayed as naught but a blank void.) The void was said to be a rip in between dimensions, and the Paper Mario world and the Mario & Luigi world are not separated from each other by an inter-dimensional gap - one of them is simply a book located inside the other, meaning the book would probably count as the "universe" of Paper Mario, which the Void is capable of destroying.
• Do the Mario & Luigi characters see the Paper Mario characters as flat paper versions of themselves, or do they see them as looking just like them (as in fully three dimensional people)? I've been trying to figure that one out for a while now.
  • Considering that Luigi mistook Paper Mario for the real Mario, they must look 3D.
  • The game outright states that the Paper characters look flat to the "real world" characters. (And, conversely, the Paper characters find the three dimensionality of the "real world" characters odd, to the point that some Paper Toads can't even recognize Mario as Mario till they get a good long look at him.)
• One major thing this game does is turn the Paper Mario series into a book in the Mario and Luigi series yet this raise an issue Starlow the recurring Mario and Luigi character is a representative of the Star Sprites which is the race of Stars ruled by the Star Spirits from Paper Mario while originally a callback now doesn't make sense since the Star Sprites are apparently from the book and not "real"
  • It may have never been intended to be a callback in the first place, since the Star Sprites relation to the Star Spirits is never made clear. But even so, the game basically implies that most things have a Paper counterpart, and vice versa, there's no reason to assume the Star Spirits only exist in the Paper world.
  • The claim that the Paper Mario and Mario and Luigi are separate universes is pure Fan Wank to begin with: Quoth Mariowiki's stance on the matter:/ "Paper Jam having a cast of Mario alternate universe characters who just so happen to live in a literal world of paper because of their dimension existing within a storybook does not retroactively make the previous Paper Mario games and their characters and settings not exist in the same universe/dimension as the 2D and 3D Mario platforming games and the Party game franchise. Paper Mario itself has Luigi's Diary make specific mention to the Mario Party, Mario Tennis, Mario Golf, and Mario Kart games as well as has background setup for Luigi's Mansion as well as his future characterization as being cowardly and afraid of ghosts in later games. That's a direct link and continuity nod between the Paper Mario games and the 3D games which proves that the Paper Mario games aren't a literal world of paper but just an art style that resembles paper that take place and exist within the normal Mario world. It's all just an art style. Paper Mario no more takes place in a different world made of paper not connected to the world of the 3D games than the 2D Mario games take place in a 2 dimensional sprite based world not connected to the world of the 3D games. Paper Jam is the exception to the rule, not the standard"/ Unquote
  • In simpler terms: The "Paper Mario" in this game is not the Mario from the Paper Mario games, that was just real Mario with an Art Shift (Yeah, I know in Sticker Star they comment about being paper alot, but that means little considering all the other times the franchise breaks the fourth wall, it's no different than any other game acknowledging being made of pixels). If hypothetically, there was a 3D game where Mario teamed up with the blocky looking model from Super Mario 64, that wouldn't retroactively make Mario 64 an Alternate Continuity either. And above all, there also the franchise's official Negative Continuity, even if they WERE separate, it would only apply to this game and this game alone: repeat, "Paper Jam is the exception to the rule, not the standard".
    • However, cases like 8-bit or blocky N64 Mario were hardware limitations, not deliberate design choices like the Paper Mario games. (Yeah, the first game was technically a fun way to save on polygons or whatever, but every game that came after that was intentionally done that way.) And I've never heard of a game poking fun at how it was pixel-y before. The Paper Mario games have always made jokes about how not just the characters, but the world they live in is made entirely out of paper, not that it looks like it's made out of paper.
    • The reason for the artstyle/ fourth wall breaking doesn't change anything, the question of "Would Mario teaming up with version of himself in a different artstyle make the game that with artstyle non-canon?" remains the same, as does the answer of "No". And that last part is an outright lie: The first game only made paper jokes in the marketing. The second game only had the curses where Mario could turn into paper (implying he wasn't paper for the rest of the game, the second curse in particular could only ever make sense if he wasn't). The third had the 2d-3d switch which was more of a sidescroller joke than a paper one. And lets not forget the myriad Continuity Nods and Call Backs to and from the non-paper games. I'm not saying you can't believe Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario exist in separate universes; everyone has a right to their own Fanon. But as it stands, this is "official" as Bowser having a wife named Clawdia.
  • But then there's the flipping mechanic in Super Paper Mario. When Mario is in 3D, all the 2D characters are shown to be completely flat — there's even a character who gets stuck in 3D because he's so paper-thin that no one can see him. To add to that, both the Black Chest Demon and the Pixl Slim tell you that they specifically allow you to turn sideways, not make you paper-thin. And your question about teaming up with a Mario of a different artstyle kind of works against you, because they've never done that except with Paper Mario — which kind of pushes the idea that he's from his own separate universe.
  • The real Fan Wank is to assume that there's such a thing as "Mario continuity" or real canon. Even leaving aside the games' Negative Continuity, when asked about the series' continuity, Miyamoto himself stated that he thinks of the Mario cast as a kind of troupe of actors playing roles in different games, which is why some games have Mario as a medical doctor and Peach as a nurse. And a random person posting the quoted part in a talk page in the Mariowiki doesn't make it "Mariowiki's stance on the matter". In fact, the first response to it was someone stating that the wiki rejects such canonicity arguments.
    • That was actually one of many Mariowiki discussions on whether Paper Mario should be considered an AU, all of which leaned more toward the "No" side. But I digress, I think we can all agree that calling something an alternate canon in a series that officially has no canon is silly.
• You can collect money to buy items like any other RPG, while the Mario & Luigi universe has the standard gold coins, Paper Mario has coins made out of cardboard which the shops accept.