Paper Mario TTYD is a Masterclass in Storytelling - Designing For Reaction
Added 2025-06-21 18:26:32 +0000 UTC
Comments
During the prologue, the talk about the "divisiveness" of the paper mario series stems from the fact that after ttyd the games changed a lot. The next game, Super paper mario, still had quite good writing and an excellent story however the gameplay was a vast far cry from previous 2 games. It wasn't awful...but just not as engaging to many. Afterwards tho, the series truly hit the dark ages starting with sticker star (shivers). It was terrible and generally universally hated. The next game, color splash, wasn't much better. Paper jam was a crossover mix with the other rpg series mario and luigi so I wouldn't count it. Far amount of people seem to have enjoyed origami King but it's at least to me still not close to 64 and ttyd.
Rokkettdog
2025-06-22 01:04:58 +0000 UTCAn imperfect story with characters that just grow on you throughout not just this but several games... man, I had that experience with the Mass Effect trilogy. Sure there's a lot to be said about how the binary morality system means you're either a goody two shoes or an absolute cartoon of a human being, about how the story in its final hour took a nosedive so fierce it created precedent for the enitre game industry, about how the gunplay only became good in the third game, how the multiplayer not only impacted your ability to get the best ending in the single player story AND how it is one of the first (if not THE first) game to have lootboxes that give you new powers and characters (why yes, this game was published by EA), how the space exploration segment was never quite good... but I still love these games for the colorful cast of characters, both in your party and the various NPCs you meet, with quite the star-studded cast. Martin Sheen's Illusive Man really is one of the stars of the show here. Too bad this colorful bunch was wasted on a trilogy of games that if you scrounged between them have one truly exceptional game in them, with the rest being two games of meh. Something as basic as the story structure was widly different between the games. Mass Effect 1 had a structure much like Knights of the Old Republic: an extended linear first act, a second act where you could visit four locations in any order to do their standalone segments, and a third act that tied it all together. Then there's Mass Effect 2, which is much more bite-sized and episodic: you can do the episodes in just about any order until you reach the mid-season finale and the final episodes, and you'll be incentivized for doing everything. The downside here is that the individual components never interact with one another a lot, which given the sheer number of choices makes this very time consuming for the devs to perform (between the opening and the midgame there are four missions you can do in any order: this allows for a total of 24 possible paths, and it only gets worse from there). Mass Effect 3 meanwhile is quite linear, but the side paths are good, and some of the side stories are quite good (especially when you get into the DLC territory: Leviathan is the best story in the series bar none). But yes, Paper Mario gives Mario a story unlike he ever had, and will never have in the main platformers. Sure, Super Mario Bros Wonder (of U) is a fine game, but it lacks the pizazz that Paper Mario has. Not that it's necessary: sometimes you just want to bing bing wahoo your way across a game without being hit by an existential crisis. Wonder just hits you with a digital acid trip, that's all. Oh, and I'm 80% sure that Booster is just some kind of Wario. He's not actually Wario, he's just *like* Wario.
Beriorn
2025-06-21 21:34:51 +0000 UTC
