Game Debate #120: Paper Mario - The Thousand Year Door

[Link | 2,715]

13 hours ago, Brickman said:

TTYD is a great game though, I felt it dragged a little at times and there is a lot of back tracking and sometimes I felt the characters said so much without ever saying anything. It’s like the writer was paid per word or something. 

Don't play Super Paper Mario, it got even worse. I like it but the dialogue is just ridiculous! 

[Brickman | 3,996]

6 minutes ago, Link said:

Don't play Super Paper Mario, it got even worse. I like it but the dialogue is just ridiculous! 

Yeah I did play that too. It was ok but didn’t find it very interesting.

I’ve started Oragami King and that hasn’t been too bad so far, the combat is very different but I don’t mind it so far.

[DoctorEncore | 3,691]

It seems everyone is always heaping praise on this game and I'd like to play it, but it's way down my backlog list at this point.

Outside of Super Mario RPG, the only Paper Mario games I've played are Origami King and Sticker Star, both of which were extremely disappointing.

[RH | 4,924]

I've only played Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario.  I get that everyone loves this one but why does everyone seem to hate the Wii one?  What did it get wrong?

I found the first two games charming but nothing amazing.  I'm glad I played them, but I doubt I'll go back to them.  I might give this one a try some day since I know it seems to be the most beloved in the series, but I doubt it.  My back log is too big too.

[Lynda Monica | 350]

I might make a blog post about this as I have things to say about this game, but I rated it a four. There are many better alternatives, and I think Thousand Year Door compares very poorly to the original. If I were to give an incredibly brief version of my complaints though, it'd be the following.

• I hate the game's edgy tone.
• The level design is horrendous

[TDIRunner | 2,744]

25 minutes ago, RH said:

I've only played Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario.  I get that everyone loves this one but why does everyone seem to hate the Wii one?  What did it get wrong?

I found the first two games charming but nothing amazing.  I'm glad I played them, but I doubt I'll go back to them.  I might give this one a try some day since I know it seems to be the most beloved in the series, but I doubt it.  My back log is too big too.

I enjoyed Super Paper Mario a lot.  I still prefer the original Paper Mario and TTYD over Super, but I still recommend it and consider it playable.  Super Paper Mario is great, but because it's such a departure from the first two games, many people tend to baulk at it.  I either haven't tried or haven't been able to get into the Paper Mario games since, but I still want to try them all.  

 

[MagusSmurf | 577]

3 hours ago, DoctorEncore said:

It seems everyone is always heaping praise on this game and I'd like to play it, but it's way down my backlog list at this point.

Outside of Super Mario RPG, the only Paper Mario games I've played are Origami King and Sticker Star, both of which were extremely disappointing.

Most of the fans who really liked Paper Mario and TTYD have spent the 15 years since Super Paper Mario hoping the series would get back on track and continue on in the vein of the first two games (optimally it would improve on them and be even better!) but the series never really did (to considerable disappointment and complaining) so rest assured that at the very least you're in good company with the fanbase on the matter of the later games.

@RH With all of the times people have been disappointed in Paper Mario since Super Paper Mario on Wii, the game doesn't stand out as particularly hated at this point. Back in the day by some, sure, but I think the anger has cooled. That said, it certainly wasn't what people wanted regardless.

It has maybe the best and funniest dialogue among the first three games (presumably the entire series; I was scared off from playing later games when I saw the reaction to Sticker Star). But it scrapped the established Mario JRPG "timed hits" battles for a sidescroller action-adventure world and combat which is functional but just doesn't have much "oomph" to it. They have some creative sections and ideas and the game sorta works as an "experience." MAYBE it could be said to have decent boss fights (I haven't touched it since back in the day). But overall it just doesn't really work as an action game. It kind of leaves the question of "well if you guys weren't going to be that serious with the new combat, what was so wrong with the old combat?"

And while most of the game is 2D, Mario has the ability to "flip" the level from 2D into 3D and it's a neat idea. The 3D world isn't great though, it generally has to correspond to the 2D level so it's stuck with pretty straightforward layouts and is kinda dull-looking and I recall it's main function generally being to have hidden stuff that's not there in the 2D world or allow you to go around 2D obstacles. Your access to the 3rd dimension also depletes a meter that I recall being annoyingly slow to recharge but I might just been annoyed that the meter existed at all when they should have just given you free access from the beginning (I think there might have been something postgame that allows this? I forget).

If they had gone with any of old-style Paper Mario combat, focused on making it a legitimately good action game (maybe with more influence from a long-lasting sidescrolling series like, I dunno, THE MARIO FRANCHISE), or went really hard after the 2D/3D gimmick to the exclusion of everything else (because you'd probably have to for it to really shine), it probably would have been a better game. As is, it's kind of stuck as a decent-to-good oddity whose failure to really nail down its gameplay makes it hard to recommend to any particular audience other than Paper Mario fans craving more of the first two games' sense of humor and vibe.

[DoctorEncore | 3,691]

10 minutes ago, MagusSmurf said:

Most of the fans who really liked Paper Mario and TTYD have spent the 15 years since Super Paper Mario hoping the series would get back on track and continue on in the vein of the first two games (optimally it would improve on them and be even better!) but the series never really did (to considerable disappointment and complaining) so rest assured that at the very least you're in good company with the fanbase on the matter of the later games.

@RH With all of the times people have been disappointed in Paper Mario since Super Paper Mario on Wii, the game doesn't stand out as particularly hated at this point. Back in the day by some, sure, but I think the anger has cooled. That said, it certainly wasn't what people wanted regardless.

It has maybe the best and funniest dialogue among the first three games (presumably the entire series; I was scared off from playing later games when I saw the reaction to Sticker Star). But it scrapped the established Mario JRPG "timed hits" battles for a sidescroller action-adventure world and combat which is functional but just doesn't have much "oomph" to it. They have some creative sections and ideas and the game sorta works as an "experience." MAYBE it could be said to have decent boss fights (I haven't touched it since back in the day). But overall it just doesn't really work as an action game. It kind of leaves the question of "well if you guys weren't going to be that serious with the new combat, what was so wrong with the old combat?"

And while most of the game is 2D, Mario has the ability to "flip" the level from 2D into 3D and it's a neat idea. The 3D world isn't great though, it generally has to correspond to the 2D level so it's stuck with pretty straightforward layouts and is kinda dull-looking and I recall it's main function generally being to have hidden stuff that's not there in the 2D world or allow you to go around 2D obstacles. Your access to the 3rd dimension also depletes a meter that I recall being annoyingly slow to recharge but I might just been annoyed that the meter existed at all when they should have just given you free access from the beginning (I think there might have been something postgame that allows this? I forget).

If they had gone with any of old-style Paper Mario combat, focused on making it a legitimately good action game (maybe with more influence from a long-lasting sidescrolling series like, I dunno, THE MARIO FRANCHISE), or went really hard after the 2D/3D gimmick to the exclusion of everything else (because you'd probably have to for it to really shine), it probably would have been a better game. As is, it's kind of stuck as a decent-to-good oddity whose failure to really nail down its gameplay makes it hard to recommend to any particular audience other than Paper Mario fans craving more of the first two games' sense of humor and vibe.

I read an interview with the director of the franchise and he said they will only make new Paper Mario games if they have an interesting or creative idea for a new battle system. This sounds great in theory, but reinventing the wheel is impossibly hard because the wheel is already perfect. The goal is innovation, but instead we get a new painful, gimmicky combat system every game. Sometimes iteration is okay! It's a damn shame too because everything outside of the combat in Origami King is fantastic. Change simply for the sake of change is one of Nintendo's longest running and most detestable policies.

I don't know if this was the specific interview I am remembering, but he says essentially the same thing here. He specifically notes that he doesn't want to just give people what they want. Ugh.

 https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/08/paper_mario_producer_says_hes_not_opposed_to_the_fans_opinions

[TDIRunner | 2,744]

26 minutes ago, DoctorEncore said:

Change simply for the sake of change is one of Nintendo's longest running and most detestable policies.

 

Replace Nintendo with any place at all and this statement is still true.  

 

For the record, I understand what they are TRYING to do, but under this philosophy, three games in a row have not worked out.  At a certain point, you have to acknowledge that maybe going back to the original formula is the right move.  

Edited September 22, 2022 by TDIRunner

[RH | 4,924]

37 minutes ago, TDIRunner said:

At a certain point, you have to acknowledge that maybe going back to the original formula is the right move.  

But you almost never see companies do that.  Instead (and I've seen companies say this exactly, in their own words) they companies think that if sequels 2 and 3 didn't sell well, the "fans must be over the series".

What gets me the most is how out of touch some companies can be with their fan bases.  I think this has changed a lot wit the advent of social media and influencers, but you look at games look Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross.  That's one specific example where I read once a Square Enix exec explicitly said "Chrono Cross sold so poorly, we never went back to the series".

Ugh, people LOVED the first and probably wrote many letters (for an RPG company) requesting more games.  Do we see them?  No, but it's because they value metric data over the mass opinions of the people who loved their games.

And Nintendo is probably the king of this.  Just in the last couple of years, my mind has been blown away at how short-sighted they've been about how rabid their fans could be.   Remember the limited edition, 30th Anniversary Mario pins that sold out in basically minutes?  I'm not surprised that happened, but Nintendo was!  Own, and then there was the NES Classic!  Regi Fil-Aimes came also stated that it was a niche item that they thought a very-small niche of super fans would like and it was kind of a "thank you" to them--they had no clue it'd be a break-away smash so they had a whole production snafu finding a way to make 3-4x what they initially planned!

I don't get it.  Some of these mega companies can just be soooo disconnected from their fans, it amazes me they can consistently keep them for decades.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,551]

So, in my head the "Mario & Luigi" was Nintendo's designed safer route option for Mario RPGs.  Where they kept the same core gameplay for all 5 games.

Whereas Paper Mario became the alternate avenue for experimentation.

[Tanooki | 4,940]

I'd agree and outside of the gamecube they're experiments, varying levels of failed ones which is a real shame.  It saddens and sickens me that in the 90s Square got so high on sniffing their own farts they cut all ties and for years.  I get they wanted to have everyone kissing their ring because of what they could do with more storage for more eye candy attention whoring in games that PS1 allowed vs N64, but still, it wasn't that black and white.  They still bothered, GBA and Gamecube, neither were the big piece of harware or big share(cube) but they did.  Mario RPG could have had a sequel if arrogance and corporate politics hadn't ruined things.

Instead we got Paper Disaster, where as Nintendo kind of caught on and M&L popped up on GBA and was largely a much more nicely done package with less anally retentive timing nazi like tactics with attack/defense per turn to survive, and you could keep playing an area like a RPG to level up without getting knee capped.   The Cube game of the sad Paper series is a stand out, and stupid they didn't keep with that high bar which is odd for them, but it is what it is.

[RH | 4,924]

2 hours ago, Tanooki said:

I'd agree and outside of the gamecube they're experiments, varying levels of failed ones which is a real shame.  It saddens and sickens me that in the 90s Square got so high on sniffing their own farts they cut all ties and for years.  I get they wanted to have everyone kissing their ring because of what they could do with more storage for more eye candy attention whoring in games that PS1 allowed vs N64, but still, it wasn't that black and white.  They still bothered, GBA and Gamecube, neither were the big piece of harware or big share(cube) but they did.  Mario RPG could have had a sequel if arrogance and corporate politics hadn't ruined things.

Instead we got Paper Disaster, where as Nintendo kind of caught on and M&L popped up on GBA and was largely a much more nicely done package with less anally retentive timing nazi like tactics with attack/defense per turn to survive, and you could keep playing an area like a RPG to level up without getting knee capped.   The Cube game of the sad Paper series is a stand out, and stupid they didn't keep with that high bar which is odd for them, but it is what it is.

To my knowledge, Squaresoft never released any GBA or GameCube games, SquareEnix did.  There's a big reason for that distinction because around that time they also went public.

For whatever the reasons may really be of why Squaresoft dropped Nintendo for SONY with no intention of looking back, it's around the time they went public and merged with Enix that they became more "corporate" and started making multi-platform titles.  Being run by a core business leadership with their own goals and desires is quite different than being run by a board where the shareholders investments are their #1 concern over internal opinions.

[Tanooki | 4,940]

4 hours ago, RH said:

To my knowledge, Squaresoft never released any GBA or GameCube games, SquareEnix did.  There's a big reason for that distinction because around that time they also went public.

For whatever the reasons may really be of why Squaresoft dropped Nintendo for SONY with no intention of looking back, it's around the time they went public and merged with Enix that they became more "corporate" and started making multi-platform titles.  Being run by a core business leadership with their own goals and desires is quite different than being run by a board where the shareholders investments are their #1 concern over internal opinions.

Probably.  2003 was Crystal Chronicles and that's post merger, same with the lame Mana rehash, the FF trilogy (SNES) and 1+2 pack, and FF Tactics, all S-E, sometimes Nintendo publishing even I think.  Squaresoft had some bug up their butt we will probably never know.  Nintendo had treated them pretty well among publishers before the break to CD so it kind of makes you wonder as it went as far a preferential treatment too that few got.

[RH | 4,924]

6 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Probably.  2003 was Crystal Chronicles and that's post merger, same with the lame Mana rehash, the FF trilogy (SNES) and 1+2 pack, and FF Tactics, all S-E, sometimes Nintendo publishing even I think.  Squaresoft had some bug up their butt we will probably never know.  Nintendo had treated them pretty well among publishers before the break to CD so it kind of makes you wonder as it went as far a preferential treatment too that few got.

My honest guess is that Sony probably gave them a sweetheart deal but also told them they wanted them to be an exclusive company. Square probably considered the value of the extra space on a CD for FMVs (which they may have even been hyped about because Nintendo was working on the Nintendo PlayStation, anyway) and Square just went with the Sony deal.

I mean, I hear your complaint but I also bet Nintendo did Sqaure wrong. They probably requested Square make a demo for the Nintendo PS and probably scrubbed the project without telling them too.  Yeah, I’d be agitated with that too!

There are two sides to every story. I really hated that Square moved but I honestly think Nintendo was probably part of the problem too.

Edited September 24, 2022 by RH

[Tanooki | 4,940]

I think the only part of the problem on the Nintendo side was their (depending on your feeling) dumb choice of dumping CDs because Sony tried to screw them hard on the contract and the Philips device side came up short so they quit.  Maybe had they decided to keep in on that and go with Panasonic (as they did with the Q/Gamecube) might have gone another way.  Lot's of what if... there.

[G-type | 2,484]

I was a PS2 guy so I missed most of the gamecube games, but this one seems interesting.