Plaidophile

This is the first time in a long time that I've had to force myself to stop playing just so I could get to sleep, usually prompted by Mario dying two or three times in a row (making me realize I'm making bad decisions). Darwinia was also this captivating but it was also much, much shorter.

BEST. GAME. EVER.

I also don't normally like RPGs. I certainly didn't like the original Mario RPG. I have utterly devoured this game though. I'm already on Chapter 7.

It does feel like it's more or less on-rails though, except for things like weapon/character upgrades and so on. Also I found it interesting that when I found the winter area before finding out that I needed to do such, it didn't give me a chapter title, but when I went back, talked to someone, and found out that's what I needed to do next anyway, it did. But on the other hand, the dialog did conform to the fact that I'd already done the prerequisite tasks. Very cool how much detail was obviously put into making sure all the dialog makes sense.

I also appreciate how the conversations change based on who's your active party member. I actually find myself selecting my ally based on whose conversations are the most pleasant (Vivian).

(Well, it also helps that Vivian is a very cute living-shadow creature.)

I suppose that's a potential spoiler to anyone who hasn't played it, but it's been out for several years now. I only even bought it because it was in the bargain bin.

Oh, also, BOO! HISS! to the crappy Mad Catz wireless gamepad I got. After only a few days of (admittedly heavy!) play the Y axis of the analog stick has already gotten severely jacked-up, in that it randomly sticks up or down even when the stick is completely centered. Paper Mario's navigation is already pretty sensitive and this made it completely unplayable. Too bad I already threw out the packaging or I'd return it to Target. Meh.

Does anyone know of any GOOD wireless controllers which don't eat up batteries for brunch, or should I just get some extension cables for the official Nintendo controllers? (Which, as it turns out, are WAY more comfortable anyway, though I didn't realize how different the button positioning was on the Mad Catz one. I had to relearn how to do Vivian's actions, because they all involve rapidly responding to buttons flashed on the screen.)

Anyway. Paper Mario takes away most of the things I hate about RPGs and replaces them with AWESOME. The dialog never takes itself seriously, and is often genuinely funny (not just forced). There are so many fun little details, like background conversations which pop up, or little references to other Nintendo games (especially other Mario games; at one point a background character blurts out JUMP MAN!!! when cheering Mario on). It's also one of those games where you just know that no matter how much you do, you'll never see all of the dialog with one play-through (because of the aforementioned flexible dialog), and there's a bunch of stuff which is obviously intended to make the obsessive play through many many times (since it's impossible to, say, collect all the items in a single game walkthrough), and there's always at least a few diversionary things you can do to keep from getting bored with the main gameplay.

It's also got a lot of self-referentiality and fourth-wall violations which are actually integral to the gameplay (for example, a lot of the battle system is based on the characters all being on a stage, and interacting with the audience is a vital part of the battle — and sometimes the enemy eats the audience).

Paper Mario obviously had a LOT of love and work put into it, and while I play it I keep having these little moments where I wish that when I was in the game industry I could have worked on games like that. (Incidentally, some of the things I love so much about Paper Mario are things which were in the original design goals for Sprung but never made it in due to the lack of budget or time or faith or planning. Basically we implemented only a very small part of an awesome game and we even messed THAT up. Sigh.)

(Further sidebar: on Sprung we never even had anyone play through the whole game, not even once, to make sure the story made any sense. After we shipped the gold master, James played through to see if he could unlock all the items and artwork — and one of the artworks wasn't unlockable — but when the fairly arbitrary master date was encroaching, The Powers That Be only cared about getting product out the door, rather than making sure it was even complete by its own standards. Somewhere along the development process the writers gave up on even trying to maintain any sense of consistency and had this big long running joke about making the story as self-contradictory as possible without it being obvious that it was on purpose, which of course only made it seem even sloppier than it already was in the end. And don't even get me started on the music... what a gigantic clusterfuck that whole ordeal was.)

Crap, now I'm all depressed, and I'm not sure if my dreams will be about Paper Mario or life at UbiSoft. I kind of liked my dream last night, where I was Zess T (one of the minor characters in Paper Mario) and I was playing a hybrid RPG/RTS game which was a strange crossover between Darwinia and SimCity, about being at a girls' boarding school for gnomes. You had to build the boarding school while helping the girl students to sneak their boyfriends in (or else they'd get sniped by the laser turrets and their digital souls would float away into the aether), and also had to take a role at the school. I was the chef (in keeping with being Zess T), and things were going great until the inspectors came to ensure that I was designing the buildings with regard to proper Feng Shui.