Paper Mario General

Shrowser.

The first three Mario & Luigi games had a sort of running thing where some form of Bowser would be the final boss without pulling a Hijacked by Ganon. All of the recent RPGs just have Bowser as the main antagonist so of course he's been the final boss. Olly is the first non-Bowser antagonist in a long time and I hope he stays the main antagonist.

In Dream Team Bowser betraying Antasma and becoming the Big Bad was a twist because the established pattern in Mario & Luigi is for Bowser to always play second fiddle to the newest antagonist. But the fact that in the RPGs as a whole Bowser has been the Big Bad for four games in a row, it gets boring.

All true. Bowser did make an attempt to hijack Thousand Year Door from Grodus and the Shadow Queen, but Grodus took advantage of Mario and Bowser's fight to grab Peach and get to the demon's chamber. It's also a little ironic because when Bowser shows up, Grodus was in a position to end Mario's game outright.

I bet Bowser will be a partner in the final battle.

No matter what camp you are in, i think everyone will win, people who want a new villain get the Origami King, while people who want Bowser get Bowser and his minions as party members.

The biggest mystery is how colored pencils can talk without mouths. XD

I noted this during my playthrough of the game, but while I agree that Bowser being the final villain can come across as lazy and uncreative (especially since they've defaulted to it now), I felt Thousand Year Door having the X-Nauts be the villains instead was more of a detriment than anything since they were mostly pretty boring and just made me miss Kammy and Bowser from 64 because they had actual personalities beyond "generic evil guys who want to take over the world".

You missed them despite them being in the game more...

Going by the second trailer showing him summoning a giant boulder it seems Olly will be more proactive than some of Mario's other foes. i wonder what his personality is like.

So a bit off-topic but would any of you trust Masahiro Sakurai to direct a Paper Mario game?

I’d personally be fine with it. If he wanted to make it a Spiritual Antithesis to modern Paper Mario as a whole, that’s fine. Plus I do think he could pull off a good story considering he was the writer for Kid Icarus: Uprising

Edited by MisterZygarde64 on Jun 15th 2020 at 8:43:29 AM

i mean isnt he the reason why sticker star had like 2 lines of story

Sakurai's the Super Smash Bros. guy. No involvement with Mario's own games AFAIK.

I'll admit, I'm curious as to how that would play out.

Edited by ShinyCottonCandy on Jun 15th 2020 at 2:44:28 PM

...thought he said miyamoto, my b

Good old Shigeru mothertrucking Miyamoto...

Miyamoto restricted the characters and suggested a simpler story compared to, say, SPM, but that could've been anything from what we got to something like Paper Mario 64, which was simple but had a lot of character.

I get the feeling none of them were particularly happy about the direction SPM took and with SS they overcorrected.

This interview has the details.

" Aside from wanting us to change the atmosphere a lot, there were two main things that Miyamoto-san said from the start of the project—"It's fine without a story, so do we really need one?" and "As much as possible, complete it with only characters from the Super Mario world."

That's a difficult task. In some ways that would be the exact opposite direction from recent games in the series.

Yeah. With regard to the story, we did a survey over the Super Paper Mario game in Club Nintendo, and not even 1% said the story was interesting. A lot of people said that the Flip move for switching between the 3D and 2D dimensions was fun."

Edited by lalalei2001 on Jun 15th 2020 at 12:21:28 PM

I feel like there had to have been some sampling bias for so few of the surveyed people to say SPM had an interesting story. It might just be the corners of the internet I frequent, but while the opinion isn’t universal, it’s easy enough to find praise for that story.

This NintendoLife Sticker Star interview is neat too! I hadn't seen this one before. it hints at Color Splash towards the end, too.

"Mr Taro Kudo: This is the first time I've been fully involved on a Paper Mario game and seeing as none of the characters from those games will appear in this title I specifically decided not to bring in elements from previous Paper Mario games. However, I did work on the SNES Super Mario RPG and I wrote a lot of Toad dialogue for it, so I think that some of the essence of that project must have found its way naturally into Sticker Star."

Edited by lalalei2001 on Jun 15th 2020 at 12:35:09 PM

I do hope that Nintendo overall understands purpose of story in games even if Miyamoto doesn't I'm mostly saying that since I spent two years writing my thesis on that subject so i know for fact that game devs do actually understand purpose of story, at least everyone who bothers writing game design book seems to understand it

Its kinda weird btw to be somewhat aware of what Japanese business culture is like and then trying to imagine japanese video game companies doing it in exact same way. Then you also realize it does explain some things

Edited by SpookyMask on Jun 15th 2020 at 8:42:44 PM

What really bugs me is that they just stick to the 2D NSMB games for characters, even though the 3D ones are mainline too. We don't get any of the interesting stuff from the 3D games in spinoffs.

Kinda unfair to treat him like the bad guy.

Edited by Cortez on Jun 16th 2020 at 2:10:43 PM

just because he created mario doesnt mean we cant criticize his recent decisions

Not if it's over something that's isn't actually his fault. This site has pinning all this on him under Misblamed.

So still trying to say it's all his fault is just wrong.

Edited by Cortez on Jun 16th 2020 at 2:39:26 PM

I'm gonna avoid the thread for a while to avoid potential spoilers. Later!

While not everything is his fault, Shigeru Miyamoto's seniority combined with how Japanese Business culture functions essentially meant that people would take his suggestions as absolute commands, so he was going to get some of the blame regardless of how wrong people would be in doing so. Never mind the fact that Yoshiaki Koizumi essentially created the backstory for The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening behind Miyamoto's back. Of course, this is just me going off of memory from a video that Arlo made, so I could be entirely wrong, but Koizumi creating the story of Link's Awakening is a fact.

Edited by CybranGeneralSturm on Jun 16th 2020 at 1:31:24 AM

if true that wouldn't be the last time that happened. Rosalina's backstory in Super Mario Galaxy also had to be sneaked in behind Miyamoto's back iirc.

Edited by I-M-THE-Jetyl-1 on Jun 16th 2020 at 6:09:26 AM