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« on: November 29, 2023, 08:53:46 am »
Game 21 - Paper Mario (Wii U) - 24 Hours
The first Paper Mario to me seems to be overlooked considerably compared to it's bigger brother, The Thousand-Year Door. And while TTYD is almost a direct upgrade to the original in pretty much every way, that shouldn't mean that the first entry isn't worth playing.
It's worth recognizing the groundwork that Paper Mario 1 laid out for future games in the series, and it's really quite an impressive game. The visuals in particular are some of the most striking on the N64, and still hold up even to this day. I'd say Paper Mario is the best looking game on the entire system. It has gorgeous environments and beautiful animations that build a colorful and imaginative world. The gameplay set the standard for future games, implementing a fun turn-based system with action commands to either increase or take less damage, as well as an interesting badge system to customize Mario's abilities. Mario is also paired with a cast of colorful characters that help you both in battle and while exploring the world. The story, while standard and a little bland, does enough to move you along through the game and is overall pretty well done.
There were some aspects of Paper Mario that I thought could have been better. For one, I kind of despise most of the music. It all felt very superficial and oftentimes annoying. There were some good tracks though. For all of the whopping 8 characters that join you during your journey, they only have a small moment of character development when they join your party and then they never speak or do anything meaningful for the rest of the game. Limiting your progression to only 30 BP really stunted any chance at meaningful experimentation with your badges, which was disappointing.
Playing on the Wii U, I also really didn't like that the C-stick menu commands were mapped to the right stick. While this matches up with the N64's button layout, I was constantly moving the stick in the wrong direction on accident since you need to press the stick in an exact cardinal direction to make the right menu come up, and I would constantly mess up and pick the wrong menu because the Wii U analog stick isn't precise enough.