5/29/07

Super Paper Mario Complaints and Impressions

OK, so I may be late to the party here with Super Paper Mario but I was holding out on buying the game so I could potentially get it for my birthday. But enough about that, on to my impressions and complaints. Also, if any of you have not played this game THERE WILL BE SOME MINOR SPOILERS so be weary of that.

So let me get started by saying I am only through the first three chapters, which could actually be looked at as a bad thing since I have a few complaints already and I am still early in the game. The first thing that really disappointed me was the part in the second chapter when you have to earn a million Rubees to escape from the castle. Now it would have been extremely poor design if you actually had to earn all those Rubees but at least the developers spared us that. But what they didn't spare us was the fact that you are forced to get at least 10,000 Rubees in order to get the password for the vault containing a million Rubees. You can obtain Rubees in different ways but they all involve repetitive motions that are in no way fun. The most effective and easiest way is to make a quick buck is to unlock the first password-protected room with the gerbil running-wheel. The only issue here is that running is as simple as pressing left or right on the d-pad and letting the game sit there as you run in circles (obviously not an enjoyable experience). What I ended up doing was switching the input on my TV to watch a few minutes of DISH Network while my paper Mario racked up some money. This is not the way you are suppose to play games, holding a button on a controller while you watch TV. I expect much better from Nintendo.

My other major gripe has to do with the bosses. So there is one dragon boss at the end of the first chapter and then at the end of the Pit of 100 Trials there is another dragon. Now I am a man who loves himself some dragons so having multiple dragon bosses is fine by me. But I am also a man who does not like repetitive gameplay, so having the dragons act the exact same way is complete crap. But to Nintendo's defense here, the dragons are different colors. [/sarcasm]

All in all though, with those gripes aside, I am enjoying the parts of Super Paper Mario that you actually control. The story isn't all that exciting to me but the gameplay is fun. More details as I get deeper into the game.

2 comments:

mndrix said...

Good point. Just putting 1,000 monkeys on 1,000 controllers shouldn't beat a game level for you.

Travis Hendricks said...

Your comment reminds me a lot of some PS3 and 360 games that came along early in their generation. They were like, "we can put over 400 enemies on screen at once." That was cool and all but it does no good for making the game fun to play.