Thread bump.
I've wanted to get this off my chest for a while: While I don't agree with the overcorrective restrictions imposed on the Paper Mario series (and possibly the entire franchise's spin-off material) since Sticker Star, I agree with
WHY they did it: they felt that Super Paper Mario was too far removed from the Mario universe.
I loved Super Paper Mario's story at first, initially agreeing with the sentiment that it was the best story ever told in the Mario franchise. But looking at the game again, Super Paper Mario feels like it never should have been part of the Mario franchise to begin with. The Mario elements and even characters, IMO, feel tacked on to a story about multiversal hopping and of a villain whose loss of his love left him with nothing left to live for. The story as a whole feels like something that doesn't take place in the Mario universe, and the fact that it
literally doesn't take place in the Mario universe feels like it proves my point.
While the post-SPM Paper Mario games feel like they hew too closely to mainline Mario elements, Super Paper Mario goes too far in the other direction. I have a hypothesis that if Super Paper Mario was its own IP, Miyamoto would not have such a negative reaction to its story and would not have convinced Nintendo to impose those mandates on the franchise. In that alt timeline, we could have stuck with the balanced approach of the first two Paper Mario games.
My personal take on the Mario RPG series has always been that they were good
because they veered so far away from the standard Mario games and let stories be explored where Mario and co. had to deal with things outside of their comfort zone, in a 'now you see how harmless Bowser's usual antics really are' sort of way. I've always felt there was something simple but meaningful in showing that Mario - when faced with ancient demons and witches, aliens and even multiverse-eating voids - just tackles them head on in much the same way as always, jumping and shouting cheerfully, and typically arming himself with nothing more than his boots (and whatever hammers he picked up on the way).
I suppose I also felt that it brought a different sort of picture of Mario's character, or lack thereof - that he wasn't just a bland 'guy who jumps on things', but suddenly he was radiating
constancy. He didn't have any big personal stakes in things as an individual, or dramatic character arcs to undergo, but no matter how big the problem was you knew you could
always count on Mario to just get the job done, and then quietly go home until he was needed again. I felt there was something there calling back to his origins as a humble worker type, that you could call on him when your basement was flooded or when your whole world was shattering and he'd get the problem sorted out both times just because it was the right thing to do.
But yeah, I can also understand feeling that SPM in particular went a bit
too far outside the usual style. The total lack of the Mushroom Kingdom - and the whole Mushroom World, or whatever the planet's being called these days - I feel might have been a part of that problem. I feel like the same kind of story could've probably been told had the problem just come to the Mario setting as usual, rather than a handful of Mario characters getting dragged into another universe's crisis.
But another thing that I think had a role to play in all of this?
Timing. Unless I've gotten my dates mixed, Super Paper Mario came to the Wii at a time when it would be the only big Mario title for the console. Galaxy was still a ways off, and so was NSMBWii. I think that on top of being so distanced from the standard Mario universe, it had the misfortune of being thrust into the spotlight as the Mario representative, which only highlighted those differences. You expect to buy the new Nintendo for your kid, and a Mario to go with it, right? But suddenly here's this thing that looks like Mario but doesn't play like Mario, and has tons and tons of text that a younger child might struggle with, especially if you got it for them as their first Mario, thinking that it'd be a simple jump-on-koopas deal.
Suddenly, all of those elements the RPG series was known for began to
stick out rather than
stand out. And we all know how Nintendo loves overcorrecting what they see as a problem. If I'm not mistaken, didn't SPM begin life as a late Gamecube title before being bumped to the Wii? I feel like the timing might've played a pretty big role in things. It's as if the whole landscape could've been different, but I just feel a kind of quiet sadness more than anything else when I think about how things could've gone differently.
