Ok, finally, here t goes about my takes on the lattest article released about paper jam here:
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/...o-n-luigi-paper-jam-bros-3ds-hands-on-preview
which basically had a lot of new stuff and youtube footages IN ENGLISH OMG!!!!
I will NOT spoiler this one because I realised the article was made spoilerless and really, there's not much to spoil.
I won't link the vid, they are all in the articles and I'll jsut go through them.
I am going to stright up say that as the article says, I do think the game starts VERY rough, it's not like there's a prologue, it's very brutal and going tbh, I don't care this much: as long as the writting is solid, it can come as a slap in my fact if it wants, idc.
The only new thing about the mouse chassing is there was apparently leaks on that attic, no not games leaks, real leaks
The tittle screen animation really rocks, it has been much improved since E3 as you realise that all the main characters are there which tbh might mean that Bowser jr might be THAT recurent boss in the game, maybe kamek, but I believe kamek is mroe that guy that does stuff to annoy you outside of battles. Anyway, I really love the tittle screen and notice the shiny textures on the green floor, SS, but looks awsome when applied to actuall environment instead of just stickers and in this game, cards.
Now the peach cs, now we knwo the love story: Peach is jealous of Paper Peach. that's really it because the brothers greet Paper Peach and Peach is like `but.....you don't talk as nice to me like this
![Frown :( :(](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
". Notice the shock animation on peach when Luigi does the heart thing
For the Bowser one, it's actually quite fun. The Bowser Jr as shown in their artwork.....they just like eachother
![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
It's funny because a couple meters near them, the Bowser insults eachother. It's like they are friend and I can't wait to see how it will look in fight with them
Btw, the ONLY thing we know about the books is it can be used the other way around (to send back the paper to the .....pages I guess) and (this was known though) it contains a parallel universe. What i woudl really want to know is what is that book exactly? spm had a dark story that started with one book and it was deeply explained what it does.
Now, let me really talk about the following because I alluded how the following quote made me react so much:
Luigi loses the book that contains the world of Paper Mario and it lands in the hands on Bowser's minions. Our green hero is very saddened and Paper Mario decides to cheer him up by allowing himself to be used as a napkin. It gave me the silliest grin on my face and proved the highlight of the journey so far.
Let me tackle the less interesting part first: this chnages the story because if the book is within bowsers, he can SUMMON paper stuff.......you see the idea here? it means expect paper bosses for sure.
But the most obvious part: I said that if they kept pushing paper mario personality like his intro, the generic feels of enemies and npc would just not matter much.
now the napkin thing. This one is big, throughout the ENTIRE Paper Mario series, NEVER his personality was pushed THIS much. it was very obvious, it was very implied, but it was never shown much. This might be due to the formula on how Paper Mario works because usually, it's too damm obvious to show it explicitly (seriously, the TTYD battle system is the most obvious, I mean if you can't feel a quirkyness in his battle habits if you play TTYD, you are quite blind tbh).
But we have to remember, this is an M&l game with MARIO inside of it, the environment is PARTIALLLY paper and Paper Mario really, he just HAS to differentiate himself by more explicit methods other then looking at him. If he doesn't, then he would jsut look like a paper version of the same mario and that is clearly what the game tries to AVOID.
Doing paper jokes here is actually fine here, it;s jsut shown and tbh, I don't thinkt he text would overkill that anyway so it doesn't go in SS territory.
But why am I gushing so much on this?
Because it follows EXACTLY what i want to see from this game. I view this game from a paper mario perspective as a transition to come back to its root which was essentially what SS shoudl have done (we all know what happened). The logic behind this game is clearly that because I can feel how different paper Mario is from Mario, I really can feel it by how he does stuff, reacts or just phisically doing stuff that Mario does in a drastically different way.
It freaking doesn't matter if 60% of the npc are toads, you have the most developped and silly character playable for 95% of the game! That's the equivalent of a lot of diversed npc here, it really isn't bad at this point. In fact, think about from a dev perspective, it might actually be a good compromise between being able to reuse the SS assets and using them in a way that they feel better. SS never pushed Paper Mario personality and it had bland npc, paper jam pushes it a lot which doesn't make the npc being generic a bad thing overall, it just to me is a compromise of the SS assets which is FINE as i expect this game as a transition, not a revolution.
This is why i am very close to preorder digital: at this point, this was probably relatively to the beginning of the game and again, there is a lot of cs.......
I am going to think about it, but I might preorder by this week after what we learned, though, if I hear another one of these personality pushing that is new, it's going to be instabuy now.
to go back to the article, I feel the actuall story itself hides a lot. Cause if you think about it, what are you trying to do? sure beat bowser, but this is an rpg! It's not your tiopical mario game beat bowser and done, it has to have a story behind it which tbh is very unknown......to be continued.
Now the toad part, again, i am surprised: they look much more interesting. You know that lakitu center? View it more as the trouble center of TTYD, except that the missions are usually kinda separate. They also have an hard mode which to me......sounds really nice if I feel doing them. Basically, it is much more elaborated than i thought and I think you coudl have a good time with these.
Ok, the nabbit, we know his role: he has the duo and trio attacks items and you basically chase him to get them. Let me first tell you: THANK YOU FOR NOT USING THE DT SYSTEM!!! I really didn't liked the pieces from DT......was quite annoying.
This is new, no badges, but that was expected imo. idk how they could make the cards AND badges worlks at the same time. Speaking of cards, you only have a deck of 10 that yes, you can manage and this isn't much considering the game draws randomly 3 cards at a given time. to me, it alsy sounds a lot better than the badges because you ahve an rng merged with a bit of strategy and that strategy part is quite diversed also, THANK GOD THE CHARGING FEATURE IS MUCH BETTER THAN DT!!!! I hated the charge bar, but love the star points system which btw.......is it a refference to the SP in TTYD?.....
That pokey boss btw, he had an SS crown on its head, a paper goomba did had one too so maybe we can expect similar SS bosses? So, maybe we will see gooper blooper with HOPEFULLY a proper world and a proper music (not going to start on how horrible world 3 from SS was).
Also, I want to bring a point that the article said: the environment ARE SS based so yes they are generic, but they are detailed. What it means is the Paper aspect of them are used in a way that you just look at it and it just feels you are in a crossover. Having the paper details for me makes the world much better than SS which is a plus.
now here's a very interesting thing:
One of the earliest examples is how you can jump and dash together with the X-button. This will allow you to walk through the terrain rather quickly and even escape some enemy attacks if you want to. This is also important at special ramps that will launch you to other places on the map, which will make you travel in style.
Very curious about that ramp......and what style?
Btw, the blocks textures changed a lot since E3, idk if you noticed.
The game has an all time save system which idk if new, but i don't think i saw this in M&l, but the heal block is definetely Paper Mario inspired.
So I guess that's it, now the lst thing I am going to say is my opinion on the overall game quite changed.
Remember when I watched E3? the first hours I felt disappointed because I wanted a papper Mario game and then I had this, but then I realised it could just be a transition, but I was still worried cause......SS based.....
But as the footages goes, I realised that altough it is BASED on SS, it is NOT SS. I see similar points where both game do the same thing, but they go differently. in fact so different that I would question if the game is REALLY SS based because a lot of stuff could have gotten wrong from basing the game on SS and so far, all of them are avoided. it's like as if they knew and intentionally avoided to repeat what SS shoudln't have done.
So for the paper Mario aspect, is is a good thing for the series, VERY good thing i might say because of how they distinguis and draw the thick lines between Mario and Paper Mario. In fact, people will now have a muich harder tiem to try to justify how his inclusion in SSB4 woudl be redundant, there is just way too much explicit stuff done on that game and you could say it's comparable or got firther than toon link from wind waker which didn't had a name even.
Now, what about the M&l part?
.......Actually this is hard to answer. I liked DT and I didn't understand why people didn't liked it. I didn't liked superstar saga and a lot liked it......I am not really the person to get this because I jsut don't like the philosophy of m&l in the first place. What I can say however is that it looks smart. the battle system being more complex now offers much more strategy which I found lacking in both m&l game I played. The humor seems to be maintained for both series giving more jokes variety for the m&l side. it seems to expends on the DT system making it feel more fresh, etc.....
Basically, i do think it is good for M&l too, but I can't really accurately define what m&l shoudl do......so yeah.
I expect this game to be a first for Paper Mario to shine tbh, this si fthe first time his identity is acknowledged to the point of having a name and a trademark. hopefully he woudl get more and possibly having his series goes in a better direction than where SS went.....
Thanks for reading, i hope you liked to see my stance change over time
![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)