cycycychris

User Score
7.0

Presentation - 10
Gameplay - 6.0
Value - 8.0

Paper Mario Color Splash is the newest installment in one of Nintendo most beloved series. I have some experience in series, by playing Thousand Year Door at my friend place, but I have never truly played through a Paper Mario game. The Paper Mario series recently took a whole new direction with its last installment, Sticker Star, changing most the mechanics of the series. I skipped Sticker Star since I didn’t hear many positive things about, but I decided to take the plunge with Paper Mario Color Splash, since I didn’t have much else to play on my Wii U.

Paper Mario starts you out with a dramatic cut scene that has a folded colorless toad mailed to Mario’s home, which causes Mario to sail off to Prisma Island to figure out what caused this. He’ll eventually find that Prisma Island has lost its color and it’s up to him to figure out why. While this storyline might not be the strongest, they do try to make it interesting. I say this since a lot of levels follow a more individual story of an NPC. This takes you on a small adventure, most not really having much to do with the main story. While they aren’t very deep, I found them to be very charming.

The one issue I had with the main story is that it really goes nowhere until the very end of the game. They start you out with plenty of interesting details and story bits, but after that, they kind of leave you hanging until just near the end. They try and throw some flash back to what happened but, they tell you very little and could been cut down into a 1 or 2 minute clip. While I do find the main story suitable, the pacing of it was off, but mini side stories more than made up for the pacing.

Forgetting about this story, I must say the level design is delightful. While some of the levels can be a bit basic, the unique setting of each and the overall layout made each a blast to explore. I’m not sure exactly why, but I got some Mario 3D World vibes at times. To give a bit more detail on the levels, I would have to first say they are all very distinct from each other; some will be in the woods, desert, Wild West, carnival, Greek coliseum, haunted mansion, and more.

They also provided a bit of variety in what you do. A few levels didn’t really have much platforming and no combat, but they rather were more for you to talk to NPC’s and to set up some of the other levels. Some of the other levels are there to really hammer down on platforming and combat. I will also add that jumping between 2 platforms is a bit rough since a 2D Mario doesn’t always jump the way you want, so it will cause frustration when you occasionally miss a platform. And other level will take a bigger interest in bringing you around in a themed area along with the characteristics mentioned above.

Through these levels you’ll find a lot of funny …. Toads. Most all NPC’s are Toads and all that’s different about them is the color of their head. But they make snarky jokes and love to break the 4th wall. The writing in this game is some of treehouse’s best work. But the developers did drop the ball at making these NPC unique from one another. They never gave any of the Toad’s true names, a few had a name by their job titles. I really wish they went more in-depth and tried to give some of the main NPC a name and give them a special design, not just put a hat on them. One of them didn’t have a hat and later on in another level I think he showed up again and they made a funny call back to earlier in his part of the story. A fact that it seemed Mario misunderstood, but the issue was they are all generic toads; I still no have idea if that Toad was truly him.

The overall goal of all the levels is to find the big paint star at the end, with most levels have 2 stars, and a few having 1 and 3. This ends up working fine since most levels the main star is at the very end, once you grab a paint star, they take you out of the level and back to the world map. This gets annoying when you see that they put 2 paint stars right next to each other at the end of the level for no reason other than make you do the level all over again. Most level will have the 2 stars spread out at different points, since you will revisit most of the levels at a different time in the story. So the level will probably have part of it locked off. Which this design works perfectly fine, but putting 2 right next to each other is just lazy.

Every level from top down is designed of nothing but paper and I must say the game is stunning. You can see so much detail in all the paper and the lighting is very nice. And the unique environments of each level amplifies the art style. Another stand out would of course be the music and boy is it great. I sat in a few of the levels just to take in the song a little longer. The soundtrack is overall a mixture of remade classic Mario songs, along with all new pieces. My only complaint is that the battle theme gets really old after a while, especially since they don’t change it. So you’ll be in a haunted mansion and then suddenly a happy go lucky battle song suddenly pops in.

All the levels share one thing in common and that of course would be that they have blank spots where the color has been sucked out of the scenery. Paper Mario is given a special paint hammer at the beginning of the game that he must go around and fill in these spots with color. While this may sound a bit lame, it’s actually addicting and it will drive you crazy if you leave a single spot colorless. And they do add a bit of challenge to this by limiting your paint capacity. They let you upgrade your paint capacity through combat. It’s also important to remember though that you also use paint in combat, so you’ll need to level up your hammer at least a few times. But there is not too much to worry about, getting paint color refills is easy, all you need to do is hit some of scenery and they’ll drop you some paint.

There is also an all new feature called ‘cut out’ which you use the gamepad to cut out a predetermined piece of the background.  These areas can typically be easily pointed out since they make the back ground look oddly shaped. But they can at times be hard to line up the command to the cut spot and overall, I saw no point to this mechanic. Felt lame and just something added on so we could use the screen on the gamepad.

And now we get to the combat, which is totally different from classic Paper Mario games, which used a turn base style of combat. While Color Splash still by essence has a turn base system, it’s just very different from tradition. In Color Splash you use cards as your attacks, which you get from either the shop, question blocks, colorless spots, or killing enemies. Obtaining them is easy but I did find myself not getting enough by just collecting. I for the most part didn’t try to avoid battles, but at times it was tempting since it would just wasting your good cards and make you back to town to buy more cards. Luckily, coins are very plentiful.

The overall battle consist of you spending about 30 seconds to a minute planning out your attacks by swiping around your cards on the gamepad to try and pick which one you will use on each enemy. And once you choose them you must color them, you can fill them as much paint as you want, the more paint will result in a more powerful attack. The effectiveness of an attack is determined by a rhythm based system, so a jump attack will show an animation of Mario jumping on the enemy and you must time your button press when Mario hits the enemies head. The system is a bit slow and not the most stream line, but it works and I never found myself to hate. But at the same time, I didn’t exactly love it. It was annoying constantly having to refill your cards, but at the same time it was enjoyable playing something different.

One thing that is a huge negative is ‘Thing Cards’ and boy are they horrible. They almost ruined the whole game for me. Spread-out through the levels you will find some real life items that you’ll squeeze out the color, making them into a card. You will need to use these Thing Cards in every boss battle, and you’re screwed if you don’t bring the correct one. The game does help you out at knowing which cards to bring, since you can talk to a toad in a trash can and he will let you know in a cryptic manner about whether you have the right thing cards. He doesn’t tell you straight out what card you should be looking for. While this all nice to have a second check, you don’t have any idea how annoying it gets going to this dude 40 or so times, sitting through several load screens to just check if they have blessed you with the right Thing Cards.

This whole Thing Card system adds nothing to the game. I had to use a walk through to find a few I missed. Some level you need to perform a specific task with them, but they never give you clear directions, so you’ll find yourself aimlessly wasting them just trying to find what to do. They also ruined boss battles with them being a requirement, since the battles are only won if you have these cards, your doomed if you don’t. This takes all skill from these battles and it makes a relatively easy game, easier.