PM's Opinion Piece #1

The real reason Paper Jam sucks isn't because of the Luigi hate or the flanderization of Starlow but because the game completely forgets all prior character growth from the previous games. For example, at the end of Dream Team, Luigi has become so confident that Giant Bowser and Antasma don't scare him. Yet in PJ, all that growth is gone and Luigi goes back to cowering behind Mario and Starlow like in Bowser's Inside Story. This can't simply be explained away as "ok because of a 'sequel reset'" because Brothership subtly continues his character arc by having him throw out crazy ideas with full confidence and being able to go along with ideas he doesn't like. Like you can choose to have him be kidnapped and although he still has some fear inside him and doesn't want to do it, he ultimately goes with the plan because he has become fully confident in himself and his brother as established by Dream Team. And no, I'm not looking too deeply into things because Bowser Jr.'s arc from the Jr.s Journey mode that like 2 people completed where he has to become a better leader and friend continues in Brothership. That's my big reason for why Paper Jam is ultimately garbage.

These games typically don't have the structure or even the slightest bit of developer consciousness to allow any real character development especially having these carry over to the next game. For instance, Superstar Saga had a moment where Luigi had to pretend to be Mario to try to rescue Mario, and he's back to being a gibbering klutz in Partners in Time who cowers behind Baby Luigi.

I don't think Paper Jam should be singled out for its lack of character development nor should an apparent lack of tank these games. Mario has never been trying to be in-depth with story-telling and continuity, and every new game is a big reset anyway. Why do Mario and Luigi get reverted to their older clothes and lower levels with lower stats? Why do their experience points reset???

It may be true past games had continuious development, but at this day since Mario RPGs tend to have independent stories for each game things change for sure, Honestly, consider not all young gamers start with the first game, I think it's agreeable in long future. Unless Nintendo can keep porting the remakes of early games.

What I personally don't like about Paper Jam specifically is that it doesn't feel like a full crossover between M&L and Paper casts. Before we blame the lack of other main cast like Yoshi and Daisy, this crossover doesn't even have Paper Starlow, Luigi and Toadette present along with their counterpartners from this world, which is really lame, and NIntendo don't really have excuse for not doing so.

Second is the story is kinda bland without the participation with new OCs. Having two main cast fight is still basically same as a normal SMB story in its core. Brothership can easily beat down this game even if its storytelling wasn't as good as we have now. I think the crossover idea could had been fun if there is an original boss who try to mess up with the dimensions so all Marios and Bowsers agree to work together.

Dorayaki said:

It may be true past games had continuious development, but at this day since Mario RPGs tend to have independent stories for each game things change for sure, Honestly, consider not all young gamers start with the first game, I think it's agreeable in long future. Unless Nintendo can keep porting the remakes of early games.

What I personally don't like about Paper Jam specifically is that it doesn't feel like a full crossover between M&L and Paper casts. Before we blame the lack of other main cast like Yoshi and Daisy, this crossover doesn't even have Paper Starlow, Luigi and Toadette present along with their counterpartners from this world, which is really lame, and NIntendo don't really have excuse for not doing so.

Second is the story is kinda bland without the participation with new OCs. Having two main cast fight is still basically same as a normal SMB story in its core. Brothership can easily beat down this game even if its storytelling wasn't as good as we have now. I think the crossover idea could had been fun if there is an original boss who try to mess up with the dimensions so all Marios and Bowsers agree to work together.

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I totally agree with you on this - the fact that they completely omitted not just any original Paper Mario characters (which was a given in all honesty, considering we were in the era of Sticker Star & Color Splash) but also any original Mario & Luigi characters despite them being a core part of what makes the series unique really brings down the experience. Seriously, the only M&L exclusive character to appear is Starlow?! She's great, don't get me wrong, but even here in Paper Jam she's flanderized to a ridiculous degree. Part of me wishes this crossover happened in a time where Nintendo would have been willing to experiment with something like original characters from both the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi series to clash with each other, as I think it would've made Paper Jam a 100% more interesting and compelling game even if everything else about it and the gameplay stayed the same.

LeftyGreenMario said:

I don't think Paper Jam should be singled out for its lack of character development nor should an apparent lack of tank these games. Mario has never been trying to be in-depth with story-telling and continuity, and every new game is a big reset anyway. Why do Mario and Luigi get reverted to their older clothes and lower levels with lower stats? Why do their experience points reset???

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Because one it would make it too easy, taking away from the development of your characters and any challenge being in the game at all, and secondly, each game is separate on a separate game card just like every single game out there is a separate copy from every other game no matter what consecutive series it is in and what things happened in previous installments, so stuff doesn't carry over. Why would anyone bother to do that? I don't to my knowledge think there is any game or RPG game series where that was done, unless I'm wrong. Like, if it's never been done with any other games, why would Nintendo do it with Mario and Luigi? And if everyone does it, why would it be an issue if Nintendo does it? I mean technically if you had your high levels and your items and clothes from the previous Mario and Luigi games, then new players would not have the fun experience of starting from scratch and growing and leveling up their character, and things would be too easy, like I said. In addition, it wouldn't really feel like you were "just starting out" at all-it wouldn't feel like a new experience-it would feel like you've already had a lot of experience and if you're a new player it would ruin the experience of playing for the first time. These games are supposed to be challenging and without having to (if you have played before) start all over again, it wouldn't be challenging, and would miss the whole point of these games. And it's also impossible for companies that make games to keep track of what players have previously played games in the series and new players and individualize their experiences accordingly, especially since every cartridge, game card, etc. is owned by a different individual and everyone is different. And besides that there's no way to keep track of all the stats and items from previous games that I know of. And I do not know of any games that do that, although I may be wrong. I don't think there are any game series that do that, but I could be wrong about that too. I mean for example of how I don't think any game does this I remember when I played all three "Legend of Spyro" games on the PS2, with each game you had to relearn all your magical breaths and abilities. So-in respect to not having your items and clothing and stats-I think that's excusable. But keeping track of character development and traits is something that should be done-I mean they did it with Brothership. I think issues like that arise not from laziness or lack of imagination or consistency but just because like with a lot of things, it's difficult to keep track of everything and continuity errors are bound to be made because basically ALL fictional media has them in some form or another. You can't keep track of everything. So yeah respect your opinions LeftyGreenMario but I don't think the EXP and clothes and everything resetting is a problem in and of itself, but I can still see why it can be annoying for players who have played previous games in the series. I mean it would be somewhat annoying for me personally too. It's like "Oh man, I have to start ALL over!". Sorry this reply was so long but I wanted to get all my opinions and thought processes out on this.

My question was rhetorical. The primary complaint in the thread was about a lack of carry over to the next game when I counter that almost nothing carries over anyway, not even continuity very much, and it shouldn't be a point against Paper Jam.

As for Paper Jam's story, they salvaged it out of a bad premise (trying to cross over Mario & Luigi with Paper Mario is a novel and gimmicky idea that didn't work out in practice). It could've easily been this outrageous mess, a complete dumping ground for the past games, but it chose to minimize all these elements to tell a coherent story that's in-line for a Mario game. Perhaps it cut itself a bit too short, especially considering the declining finances of AlphaDream, but it could be much much worse.

Unlike Super Paper Mario and parts of Brothership, there isn't much about the script and characters for me to ridicule or roll my eyes at. I do personally think that makes Paper Jam a better story for me than either of those two games. Story in Mario games is not much of a high standard but I very rather prefer they do a standard Mario story than a bad story.

It's really hard for me to take the "they forget about character development and growth" when practically all Mario RPGs start from square zero every single new entry. Honestly, I think that's probably why almost every other JRPG series has a rotating cast, because you would need to explain how these characters suddenly lost all of their acquired equipment and experience moving on to the next story with new ideas. The only way continuity would work in a Mario RPG is if it starred completely original characters that met the Mario characters as a sequel for any game, and they can join you as party members later in the story or whatever.

Honestly if there was a Mario RPG that starred an original character with Mario characters as party members? I think that would be a bold and interesting choice.

Personally I would be ok with losing abilities and new equipment and clothing and stuff in between Mario and Luigi RPG games but character traits of the characters that changed in last entry or entries would be changed too.

To be fair, there's a big difference between character development getting rolled back with no explanation and characters getting their stats reset in a new game. The latter is a gameplay contrivance that most players would be willing to overlook, the former is frankly a failure on the writers' part if a series is meant to have an established continuity. (And you can't argue that Mario & Luigi, at least earlier on, isn't that - Fawful being a consistent thread running through the first 3 games is probably the biggest example.)

Even then, stat resets are something you could write around, but a scene where Mario runs face-first into a wall and drops his entire equipment set from the last game down a hole or a lore explanation for why Goombas suddenly aren't getting one-shot anymore isn't really something that a Mario & Luigi game needs. (Or if equipment carries over because the bros. are facing entirely new and stronger foes, how do you decide what carries over? Is it the "best" gear? Everything? Did Mario and Luigi canonically beat that one secret boss?) On the other hand, I do think that ignoring character development is objectively a shortcoming (again, if the developers are trying to get us to believe there's an established continuity going here), even if it's not something you personally care about in a game. If you don't want to commit to character development, either don't do it or at least come up with an excuse for why they're back to their old self.

Point being, I think this is a false equivalency that's just trying to sweep a particular criticism of the game under the rug.

I don't think my point was made clear. The points here are not necessarily invalid but I think it's unfair to single out Paper Jam for a lack of continuity when such a thing is by design and a component of the Mario games. It doesn't necessarily make it fine and dandy that it's designed this way, but a meta-criticism on the entire Mario franchise is, IMO, a better approach. There's plenty of criticism to be made for why the games are designed this way and *should* they even be designed this way; why squeeze in character development to a 20 hour game. Why rely so much on Mario and Luigi talking in gibberish and reveal nothing about them and have the companion just obviously point out what they just said. Why rely on foreign accents as a crutch for character personality. Why aren't we seeing growth in recurring characters' experiences with these plots? Shouldn't something crystallize? And so on.

I just find the criticism odd when it's about one game, and it's about Luigi's portrayal of being an easily frightened character (such a personality has been Luigi's primary trait) when Superstar Saga has done this sort of "Luigi fights his fears to help his friends" with the follow-up game, Partners in Time having him be a scaredy-cat again who cowers behind his own baby self.

I could come up with plenty of counterexamples to also back up the notion that there's little continuity (I didn't say none, just not very significant; Fawful barely appears in Partners in Time and he's not fundamentally changed in Bowser's Inside Story, barely even referencing Cackletta, which the Superstar Saga makes clear they have established and loyal camardice; it's not like Bowser's Inside Story reveals more about this relationship or that Superstar Saga played much part in setting the wheels in motion for Bowser's Inside Story; that sort of continuity could provide actually interesting, even sympathetic background to why Fawful wants revenge), and the stat reset after every game is just the most obvious one, so I'm not sure why that's being focused here, but to say I'm making a false equivalency to dismiss a criticism is a misreading of my argument.

I should have explained my position better but like Waluigi Time pointed out, the first 4 Mario & Luigi games have some consistent continuity between them. Yes, Luigi does go back to being cowardly in PIT but the hypnosis Luigi goes through was evidently not permanent as there are moments later on in Superstar Saga where he's scared like when Bowletta discovers she was duped by Luigi pretending to be the princess and Luigi dashes away quickly rather than fighting her and Fawful. Yes, Luigi is somewhat scared in Brothership at times too but still is more confident in that than he's ever been in other M & L titles. Additionally, I'm aware that most Mario games lack a shared continuity but the M & L games were an exception that had some consistent continuity before Paper Jam and it should've stayed that way. Also there are more examples of the continuity in the first 4 having some consistency like Dream Team featuring Bowser using the Vacuum command to inhale the dust of the Dream Stone and the beanish people showing up on the island including Popple. (who briefly mentions how Mario and Luigi look just like two red and green 'palookas' that got in his way)
That said, I agree with the other criticisms brought up here about Paper Jam and believe they are also contributing factors to its awfulness.