I hope that I have labeled this one properly. Isn't it the first Wii game that I've written about? Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm actually starting to have a large blog, so it's getting to be a little more difficult to keep up with.
So, Super Paper Mario is up. This is a game that I wanted to play for a long time, but I was waiting for its inevitable price drop. I expected that to happen sometime in 2008. Well here it is 2011 already and the game is still priced like brand new if you can find it in a store at all. In fact I looked it up on Amazon today and it's not even in stock anymore. You have to buy it second hand. Luckily I took the easy way out. I let my girlfriend buy it for me for Christmas.
It you've never played any of the Paper Mario games before, they're the ones where Mario is really flat. They are typically RPGs, but this one changes up the formula a little bit. It's actually a hybrid of classic Mario gameplay with RPG elements. The gimmick in this one is that Mario is able to flip the world from side scrolling to 3D whenever you push the A button. This helps you find countless secrets, but it also leads me to my biggest complaint about this game.
I've probably talked about it on here before, but it drives me crazy when a game requires you to keep switching items every five seconds. This makes me think of games like Crystalis and Final Fantasy Adventure where every monster seems to require a different weapon to kill it. This causes otherwise fast paced action games to feel like they're in that old fashioned slow motion mode where your special controller kept automatically hitting pause over and over again. That sure was a pointless controller feature. Maybe I'll talk about that one later.
Super Paper Mario is one of the biggest offenders of menu screen mania that I've ever seen. Remember that 3D feature? Well it only lasts a few seconds at a time. So if you want to find everything you'll be doing that a lot. Also, you've got four characters to chose from. Each one of them has some special skill that makes them a requirement in certain areas. It's not uncommon to switch between them every couple of minutes. So that's a return to a menu screen for each of these plus the changes for when you want to go back over sections of the level with 3D Mario. In addition to this you have all these little things following you around called Pixls. They have their own special skills. One is a bomb, one throws things, and so on. There are close to a dozen of them. Guess how you switch between them? That's right, a menu screen! The menu screen doesn't take very long to get to, but it's still a hassle going back to it over and over. It would've been much better if they would've made the Pixls controller moves instead of selectable characters, or if they would've let you toggle through characters on the game screen, or even let all of your characters turn the world 3D. At least there aren't transformation screens when you switch between characters. This isn't a Final Fantasy X-2 scenario thank goodness.
Besides that one major flaw, however, it's a very good game. It's certainly one of the best early Wii games. The gameplay is certainly very clever, and the reduction in towns to visit make it more acton based than the other games in the series. It also has a storyline with much higher stakes than your usual Mario game. There's no princess to save this time. Mario is trying to stop an entire world from being sucked into oblivion by a crazy count with a romantic past. As you progress the black hole keeps getting bigger and bigger which gives this game a real sense of urgency. I know that the world's not really going to fall into oblivion, but it's done so effectively that it still makes me a little nervous when the ground starts rumbling.
So what surprised me about this game? Well the length was a bit of a surprise. After a quick start I was expecting it to only take about 15 hours, but it ended up almost twice that. I was surprised by the variety of levels. All the advertisements I saw for this game showed a fairly typical SMB1 style level, so I was expecting all the levels to resemble New Super Mario Brothers. Thankfully there was a great amount of variety in both the designs and tasks. There were still puzzles to solve and characters to meat, so this kept the game interesting.
It seems like there are only two categories of Wii games. There are the above average ones which there are probably about 50 and the awful ones which number about 500. Has anyone out there played a Wii game that was just okay? Those games might exist, but I've never seen them. Super Paper Mario is certainly above average. Actually, it's probably one of the better games on the system. If this was a couple years ago it would be a shining beacon among all the crappy Wii games. Luckily the system really came into its own in the last couple years and there are now many very good Wii games to chose from. However, even with all the recent successes this one is still a standout. I just hope you like menu screens.
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