Color Splash and the Future of Paper Mario
Paper Mario: Color Splash…
…
Can we talk about The Witcher again instead? No? Fine…
When Paper Mario: Color Splash was announced, it filled me with dread because of its resemblance to Sticker Star.
Let’s get one thing out of the way. I don’t hate it just because it isn’t like the original Paper Mario games.
I’d be thrilled if Color Splash looked like The Thousand-Year Door 2. I’d be thrilled if it looked like Super Paper Mario 2. Unfortunately, it looks like Sticker Star 2, and I considered Sticker Star a bad game in general.
Color Splash was one of the games shown by Nintendo Treehouse at E3 this year.
First, I’ll give it some credit. Visually, it’s great. I like Color Splash’s aesthetic.
It also doesn’t look like it has limited inventory space for cards. If you can carry as many cards as you want, that is a major improvement over Sticker Star.
However, the basic Sticker Star elements appear to be in full force: cards & paint work together to take the place of stickers, battles don’t award you experience, there are a lot of Toads instead of original characters, and Thing Cards are the equivalent of Thing Stickers to be used in puzzles and against puzzle bosses.
This doesn’t have to be terrible. Again, if the inventory isn’t limited, it’ll take away a lot of the frustration those puzzles caused. As long as the solutions are intuitive (see, the fire extinguisher makes sense) or at least hinted at, Color Splash could sidestep one of my major issues with Sticker Star.
But what about the others? It is not an RPG. Worse, GameXplain conducted an interview with the assistant producer that suggests Paper Mario will never be an RPG series again.
I don’t understand what’s wrong with having two Mario RPG series. Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi, while similar, have very distinct feels. And since Mario & Luigi has also been handheld, this doesn’t do much for console players who want a Mario RPG…
Now let’s consider the matter of Color Splash’s story. In that interview, she was concerned about giving spoilers. That’s a good sign! …Assuming it’s a legitimate concern, that is. Paper Mario: Color Splash claims to be a mystery, so I’d like to see actual mystery elements in it, along with interesting characters.
(The paint bucket needs to be more than Color Splash’s Kersti, and he can’t be the only character.)
If Color Splash has a decent story and fixes Sticker Star’s gameplay issues, maybe I’ll give it a chance. Maybe. For now, I’m not convinced. Either way, I’ll lament the loss of the Paper Mario series as it once was.
As for a Thousand-Year Door HD remaster, great. Sure. It wouldn’t be the same as a new Paper Mario RPG, which is what I really want, but at least it would be something. And if it sold well, it just might convince Nintendo that there’s room for two Mario RPGs on the market after all.
Based on what we’ve seen so far of Paper Mario: Color Splash, what do you think about the game and the series’ future?
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The post Color Splash and the Future of Paper Mario appeared first on Samantha Lienhard.
