There might be such a thing as
researching a purchase too thoroughly. I
greatly desire to pick up Paper Mario:
Sticker Star, just released for the 3DS last month. Here’s the review link. Much of the reason why I anticipate it is
because of generally positive experiences in the Paper Mario series before.
But money has become tight recently, so rather than just dive in I
decided to research the purchase before hand – a typical action for
gamers. And I came across a couple of
odd references that make me wonder again about my tastes.
The article is a column of Iwata
asks for Paper Mario, visible here. In the article, President Iwata interviews
his development team, with the notable absence of Mr. Miyamoto, about their
roles in the development of Paper Mario:
Sticker Star. Most notable for me
was the part where Kensuke Tanabe commented on the value of story in a Mario
RPG:
With regard to the story, we did a survey
over the Super Paper Mario (April 2007 Wii) game in Club Nintendo, and not even
1% said the story was interesting. A lot of people said that the Flip move for
switching between the 3D and 2D dimensions was fun.
-Kensuke Tanabe, from the Iwata Asks column
This quote implies an authority,
specifically the surveys available on Club Nintendo, to claim that story is the
least valuable part of the Super Paper
Mario experience. While that
certainly is one way to interpret the data, another might be that Nintendo and
Intelligent Systems didn’t find the right story to work with.
I’ve always liked the Paper Mario Series, but in full honesty
I loved Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (2004 Gamecube) much
more than the 2007 Super Paper Mario. This I always put down to personal tastes,
but I guess a lot of people didn’t like the story of SPM07. Qualifying what everyone has so much trouble
with is beyond me, but as for my preferences, I found Thousand Year Door stretched the old Mario classic story: Peach is
kidnapped by the X-Nauts and feeds clues to Mario to lead him to the lost
treasures needed to find her, a much more enjoyable tale than SPM. In fact, I really don’t know how to summarize
that story.
Considering the story from its
components, SPM featured a forgettable cast of powers masquerading as
characters; they each mutter quirkly one liners, then join the group and never
say another word. The focus moves from
the full cast to a subset, one that features Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Bowser,
together with four original characters intended to add drama to the mix and
serve as antagonists. Thousand Year Door for contrast includes
new antagonists in the X-Nauts and Shadow Sirens, but these enemies aren’t
intended to be matched opposites of the heroes, and the heroes themselves are
much more full of character, a koopa with a bandage on his nose, an old
sea-bomb (a bomb-omp dressed up like an old sailor), and a pink goomba with a
miner’s helmet telling all of the monsters weak points. They seem to fit their surroundings better,
as though they had real lives in Rogue’s Port, rather than simply living in
boxes until the heroes come to collect them.
Thousand Year Door had its
weaknesses story wise, but I found it a nice lurch forward for Nintendo, a
company with deep roots in shallow story telling.
I’m probably reading too much
into these things, for after all, Mr. Miyamoto is famous for his claims that
Mario’s stories should be kept spare.
There’s a good editorial on that opinion here. But the Iwata Asks feature suggests a future
focus on gameplay without the story.
While I love Mario games for their gameplay, I found the push for
platforming aesthetics with flat characters (literally and figuratively)
interrupting me to talk about the weather less than enjoyable. Paper
Mario suits the need for a deeper story about the characters of the Super
Mario universe, and it works better as a deeper narrative exploration. While I still plan to give it a play through
early in the New Year, I hope my deep memory with the franchise is not going to
work against me.
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