Review: (What’s wrong with) Super Paper Mario

Just like my impressions of The Mist, this is going to be riddled with things that may constitute spoilers. The difference is that here it doesn’t matter because the story is pointless. I give this game a don’t bother/10.

I liked the first Paper Mario on the N64 when I played it last year. It was a light, fun Mario RPG, much better than Square’s effort on the SNES. For the Wii outing they switched the genre to action RPG, which works well considering the source material. So instead of going to a separate battle screen you just jump on the heads of the enemies, or occasionally whack them with a hammer. Fair enough.

You get the feeling when playing this game that it’s a joke, not on the conventions of the genre, but on the player that bothers to sit through them. The game is broken up into chapters in true DQ style RPG fashion. Each chapter is the next villiage and each villiage has a problem which needs to be solved to proceed. With this sort of story the game lives and dies on how much you give a damn about each sub story. There were some that stood out, but on the whole I can’t really remember what happened in most of them. Chapter 7 stands out, but that was tarnished by the meaningless padding you had to trudge through to finish the thing.

The padding is another joke on the player. It seems that Intelligent Systems ran out of ideas by Chapter 2 (of 8 of course) because by mid chapter 2 you’re forced to do a series of repetitive tasks in order to end the level. This is obviously a joke on grinding in RPGs, but you still have to sit through it, so never becomes funny.

Then later in Chapter 7 you’re forced to do some horrendous backtracking as part of a meaningless fetch quest. I get it. It’s still not fun to do. In that same chapter, in fact in the same room they make fun of pointless reams of dialogue, which would be funny if Super Papr Mario wasn’t the worst offender on this I’ve come across in a while. So thats another joke on the player: all the pointless, unintersting dialogue.

The final joke is the game itself. It’s the dialogue, it’s the level layouts, it’s the gimmicky 2D-3D mechanic that has been better implimented elsewhere, it’s everything. I can see the guys over there at Intelligent Systems having a chuckle as they think of all the poor suckers that sit through their game, because thats what we do as gamers. Laugh it up guys.

By Lance Roger.