Here we are again, Mario and the green guy, Luigi, saving the princess from bowser who kidnapped her. But this time, they meet paper Mario. And Bowser met Paper bowser. Sounds like an exciting concept for a mario game, right? Well. Hmm...
GAMEPLAY
Excellent combat
Let's start with the good. For my first playthrough, I played this game for a whopping 58 hours, most of it from level grinding, repeating battles, and collecting rare loot, because i enjoyed the combat so much.
I love how each enemy has their own unique attack pattern and have an opportunity to counter attack their attacks. To read their patterns well, you need to memorize their pattern and see how they attack so you can stomp or hammer them just before they hit mario or luigi.
In this game, they also added a whole new layer of strategy. Every time you successfully execute a combo, you gain points. Use these points to use cards with special abilities. Each card can change the tide of battle dramatically. Temporary 35% POW up, Revive all your team members, turn all the enemies into mushrooms are some of these awesome abilities. the best part? they don't take a turn to use! You can use a card first and attack the enemy in the SAME turn. As the game progresses, you can collect more cards by buying them in shops, by collecting them from enemy loot, and getting rare shiny cards dropped from enemies. I must have spent a few hours just looking for enemies to collect the rare shiny cards. Shiny cards are worth finding because they reduce the number of points needed to do an ability by half! What's interesting about this game is that if you have a NEW 3DS, you can use amiibo's to get exclusive ability cards. but since i dont own a single amiibo, i coudn't get a special card.
Next, Special attacks are back and they are REALLY fun. I was a tad disappointing that they reused some of the special attacks from previous games, though. But now paper mario is in the game, he has his own set of special attacks and i found his specials were really fun to master. Because the better you do the special attacks, the more damage you put out.
The difficulty of some bosses were surprisingly harder than i thought it would be. So much so that i went back and level grinded for a good couple hours before trying again. It's great. Every boss battle was a real treat and learning to dodge their crazy attacks was a real highlight in this game for me.
After every 10 levels or so, you get a very special perk. These range from an extra counterattack damage increase to unlimited MP points. I liked that extra perk because it gave another incentive to level grind.
One thing i did miss that Nintendo took out in this game was the opportunity to increase a random stat such as HP, or MP a little bit every time you level up. In the past mario and luigi games, they had a wheel minigame that would appear every time you level up for extra stat increases. Now everyone levels up exactly the same way.
OK story
The story has sooo many missed opportunities! Paper mario and 3D mario and luigi joining forces i thought would be really cool. but instead, we get a cookie cutter plot of saving the princess and going through bowser and his goons. The story's plot was pretty predictable from start to end. The way each characters acted were very predictable. Sure we also meet paper princess, paper bowser Jr., and paper kamek, but when they met their 3D twin for the first time, it actually turned out incredibly dull and unexciting. I liked the jokes here and there, though. examples are paper mario being made of paper and getting wet, or enemies having an ugly crease due to mario jumping on them. I like the jokes of how luigi is just a lowly sidekick, and many more like that.
Terribad minigames!
I really hated the giant papercraft minigames. They were soooo slow. You are in a giant tank-like cardboard character and you kill giant enemy cardboard papers. Dodge their attack, Bash them to trip them, and stomp on them. Repeat. You need to collect energy to have do these attacks though. To collect energy, you must do a lame rythm minigame. Just press the A button at the same beat as the rythm. Sure, each boss papercraft enemy has a unique attack youll need to doge but still, 90% of that is what was described above. THere are at least 5 of these minigames.
The worst minigame of all is finding paper toads. Basically a hide and seek game. You need to look into towns to find out where paper toads are hiding. They could be behind a counter, maybe they shifted into a fence post? how exciting. Now find 20 of them. They are a lot of minigames in this game. About 1/3 of this game are lame minigames. You'd be either collecting toads , playing hide and seek with toads, chasing toads, simple sneaking obstacles, and much more of that nature.
GRAPHICS
The level design was alright. We got the usual desert, ice, forest, bowser lava castle levels. Nothing special, really.
SOUND
The music does it job. It gave the right mood needed for the level. Some arabian-like music for the desert? Got it. Sinister music for bowser's castle? Yup. It's just...there in all it's synthetic, electronic sounding background music glory.
REPLAYABILITY
After you finished the game or anytime in the middle of the game, there are extra minigames where you can replay stuff in the Lakitu center. One is to replay boss batles. Next one is to master your special moves by replaying them. Replay minigames you played before and try hard mode with fewer retries. The last one is to replay papercraft battles. Mastering them all takes a LOT of time. Personally, I really liked the special move minigames, and replaying the boss battles. I barely touched the papercraft battles, they were not very fun.
OVERALL FUN FACTOR
If you can look past the VERY lame minigames and its mediocre, cookie-cutter predictable plot of a story and characters, the game can be fun. its fun combat and shiny card item collecting are addicting. i liked practicing every special attack till perfection and trying to reading a new enemy's attacks. Card collecting from enemy loot and strategizing my card deck was actually enjoyable because great, strategically made card decks felt rewarding. Every boss i met was surprisingly fun to defeat and i looked forward to finding the next one. Replaying stuff in the lakitu centre was very fun and i spent many gameplay hours there. This game was fun enough to push my gameplay finish time towards 58 hours and i didnt even feel it was THAT long