one game which has been extremely revealing of his internal thought process and has had echoes across every Mario game period since and we had been seeing signs of beforehand.
I think people crap on Miyamoto too much. He doesn’t seem to hate cool lore and other cool, unique and whatever stuffs, rather he just seems to believe the gameplay to be the most important part of a game and doesn’t want too much story focus to take away from that. While this can sometimes make him act stubborn and maybe questionable, like with Galaxy 2, he certainly doesn’t seem to want to strip down personality and stuff as a whole, and may still be willing to take risks as he is with bringing back old characters they haven’t used in a long while.
I think it should also be remembered that he likely isn’t even really why Paper Mario turned into what it is, or at least not the main reason; he just told the Sticker Star devs not to make it the same as TTYD. He may not have cared what they did as long as it was still a nice game, but what he said didn’t mean “no more unique enemy characters or personalities and kill Bowser’s dialogue blah blah blah!” Rather, just give it cool new gameplay stuff to make it stand out. It’s more likely the current Paper Mario director and/or maybe some stingy creative officer are why it is what it is now, imo, based on some of what the director has said. At least Origami King was good, even if still not quite there (but still with some cool unique characters and Bobby was done excellently imo).
(edit: nvm was wrong about what Miyamoto said to the Sticker Star devs, though I still think he gets too much crap based on what I can tell from other stuff)
Not to mention, Miyamoto was very busy with Super Nintendo World during Origami King’s development and other stuff iirc, it’s likely he wasn’t involved with game stuff at that time at least.
As for your criticism of Mario Odyssey’s trope-y levels, you can take a common trope and give it unique twists and stuff, you know, and that’s exactly what Odyssey did. I don’t get why some people expect developers to be 100% unique, even with common tropes that are cool and could still have unique designs and other ideas for them :/ There’s certainly no harm in cool unique stuff, but there’s a lot of cool common ideas as well, and there’s no problem with using those either; if the reason is “some people don’t like it,” well, some people won’t like the unique stuff either, and it’s a very minor reason given how little most people care, rather finding them cool instead (sorry most of this is just me speaking in general as it reminded me of a Minecraft argument I had and I wanted to get my thoughts out about this trope stuff).
