I really, really love
Paper Mario. Those first two games are some of my favorites of all time and Thousand Year Door was quite possibly the greatest impulse buy of my life. Much like most other fans of the series I hated Sticker Star, but I was still willing to take a chance on Color Splash when it came out in 2016. Compared to the previous game it wasn’t terrible but it just felt so…. so….
Soulless.
By why? What was it about the first two games that made me love them so much that the last two were missing? I want to explore what I loved about those first two games and why they stood out from the mainline Mario series and try to understand the magic of Paper Mario.
I personally feel that a Mario game is at its best when it’s crazy. Before the first Paper Mario came out, we already had a standard template of levels in a Mario game. Grasslands that double as an introduction, a vast desert, an ice world with slippery grounds, water levels that may cause you to head-butt your TV, and a lava world typically near the end. What I find interesting is that the Mario worlds we tend to remember are the ones that don’t adhere to this format. Giant Land from Super Mario 3, Tick-Tock Clock from Mario 64, and pretty much all of Super Mario Sunshine.
What I love about Paper Mario is how much it embraced how crazy a Mario world could be by adding twists on the well known types of levels. The desert level had a market full of thieves, the ice world was defined by a detective section, and they merged the water world and the lava world to make this tropical island full of Yoshis. You also had the places that had no real basis in traditional Mario levels- there was a battlefield of boos and spikes, flower covered fields, and the completely insane Shy Guy playroom.
Thousand Year Door went even crazier. In no mainline Mario game would we have gone adventuring in a floating wrestling arena, a high end express, or a sci-fi laboratory on the moon. These worlds were an absolute delight to explore and experience in a way that was totally different from any other Mario game and gave Paper Mario its own unique feel.
But there’s another element that I think aided these locations: the characters that inhabit them. I love the sidekicks and desperately want them to make a comeback, but I want to focus on the NPCs that Mario would interact with. Diversity in games always helps flush out the world, and Paper Mario is proof. Nintendo created towns and cities with problems directly connected to Mario’s goals, which helped make those goals (typically finding a star shaped MacGuffin) much more personal and heroic. You weren’t just exploring a tree, you were helping small creatures defend their home, you saved a town from a pork-oriented curse, and helped a crew of pirates find a lost treasure. This writing gave way to some crazy and unique bosses that were completely different from other Mario games. There was a dragon scared of crickets, a monster that ate ghosts, and a parasite living inside of a whale. These different types of creatures made this goofy world feel real, and made Mario’s quest feel heroic in a way that rescuing the princess never quite did.
These elements are what I think made the first two Paper Mario games (and to a similar extent Super Paper Mario) so special, and what was missing from the last two. The worlds of Sticker Star and Color Splash felt so standard when compared to the older ones. The locations adhere to the Mario formula, the towns are inhabited almost entirely by toads, and the bosses are either giant enemies or the Koopalings. These games should be crazy and show us people and places that traditional Mario games can’t and that’s what I think has been missing from this franchise.
In the improbable chance that somebody from Nintendo or Intelligent Systems sees this; don’t play it safe. Go crazy. That’s how you’ll bring back the magic of Paper Mario.
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