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My first interaction with Super Paper Mario was very similar to totep's. I was home visiting family, picked up my brother's copy after dinner one night and could hardly put it down in time to catch the train back to my place the next morning. Coincidentally, I stopped just as I got to the caveman town, too. I think if I had gotten just a little bit further, though, I could have saved the trouble and the expense of getting the game myself.
I finished the game about a week ago, and, as with Twilight Princess, I ended feeling exhausted and disappointed. Each game, in its own way, overstays its welcome and fails to maintain the excitement and variety of the game's early sections. But where Zelda's neverending dungeons and sorely lacking sidequests make its endgame something of a chore, Super Paper Mario seems to delight in making an otherwise good game tedious. SPM is not a long game, but thanks to some of its puzzles and level designs, it certainly feels long. The worst sections for this--the caveman level and the underworld level--make me wonder if the designers aren't making an ironic comment on the repetitive nature of many RPGs.
At one point in the caveman level, you have to say please to a caveman. At first, this is kind of cute. You talk to him, ask him for something (I forget what), and he wants you to say please. A text window pops up and you have to type in 'please' (by using the d-pad to scroll over each letter and punch it in). But not just once: four times. P-L-E-A-S-E. It's not practice for later, since the text window never comes up again; it's not a riddle or a puzzle of any sort, since you're told directly what to do; it's just needlessly tedious. Unfortunately, far too many of the puzzles are like this.
On top of this, the basic gameplay suffers in the latter half (or maybe third) of the game. At this point, your new pixls (your helpers, each one has a special ability) become much less necessary or helpful, and the game has already exhausted all the ways to put the 2D/3D feature to use.
In my opinion, Super Paper Mario is worth playing for the first half or so, but I doubt I'll ever play it again. |
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