Paper Mario Review

[Zera]

Greetings, folks. This is my review of Paper Mario, a Nintendo 64 game released in 2001. I will mostly be comparing this to Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (henceforth abbreviated TTYD), so I highly recommend you play that before reading this.

Introduction: As someone who's played all the other Paper Mario games, I decided to pay $10 and get the original on the Wii U Virtual Console. I heard from a lot of people that this is the second best Paper Mario game, with TTYD being the best as a fully upgraded sequel. After finally playing it, I have to say they were right. There are SO many parallels, it's not even funny. It's very strange, looking back at TTYD and realizing that 50% of it's ideas were inspired from or ripped wholesale from this game.

Presentation: Paper Mario looks very good... for a Nintendo 64 game. The special effects and character animations are great. Every once in a while, I found myself forgetting that I wasn't playing TTYD. The music is great, and the battle theme is very catchy. Overall, the presentation is identical to TTYD's, but slightly worse.

Gameplay: The gameplay is almost identical to TTYD. It even has badges, and most of them are identical as well. There are some differences, however -

- Mario can switch turn order with his partner, but not position.

- Partners don't have HP, and instead lose a turn for every point of damage they take.

- Action commands do not fill the Star Power meter. Instead, the meter fills by 1/8 of a point every turn, and 4/8 every time you use the Focus command.

Other than those things, the battle system is exactly the same. In the over world, Mario has a spin maneuver that can be used to move quickly, much like Link's roll in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Setting and Story: Although the game takes place in the Mushroom Kingdom, you'll see a lot of unique locations like Gusty Gulch, Shy Guy's Toy Box, and Crystal Palace. This is in contrast to Paper Mario: Sticker Star, which takes the Mushroom Kingdom setting and adds absolutely nothing to it. The story is somewhat predictable, especially since it parallels that of TTYD, but the original characters and lore in this game make up for it.

Length and Value: Paper Mario is a pretty long game, since it took me over 25 hours to beat. In addition to the main story, there are plenty of sidequests to keep you busy (sadly though, most of them are fetch-quests), and hidden collectibles.

By the way, if you're playing on the Virtual Console, you can be like me and pay Merluvlee lots of money to learn where all the collectibles are hidden..... and then load a restore point to get all your money back. You call it cheating, I call it time travel. Besides, I have to buy ALL the badges... and they're expensive!

Flaws?: Over the course of the game, you can perform up to 20 optional favors for Koopa Koot. Without a guide you will end up revisiting various towns way more often then necessary since you can only do one favor at a time.

Chuck Quizmo appears randomly in towns you've visited. He will ask a trivia question, with a star piece as the prize - and then teleport to another town. At the end of the game, I had twenty star pieces from him. But he has 64. I understand why they did this - but how on earth are you supposed to get them all without spending hours walking between random towns?

The maximum number of Badge Points you can have is 30 (As opposed to 99 in TTYD). On one hand, this does increase the strategy in using badges - you can't just equip them all and become a god. On the other hand, many "utility" badges that have no use in battle still cost BP, such as Money Money. Of course, I would be fine with Money Money costing 7 BP - if not for the fact that I already spent 200 coins just to get it. I want to have my cake, and eat it too. You can't charge for both.

Conclusion: Paper Mario may not be as good as TTYD, but it is a great Paper Mario game and a fantastic RPG in it's own right. It's definitely better than Paper Mario: Sticker Star. I can only hope that the next Paper Mario game improves off of TTYD as much as that game improved off of this one.

8.5/10 Super Great!

Edited June 18, 2016 by Zera