A Mario game without the other 5 main characters and Koopa Troop?

I think the closest thing that fits Winstein's criterion is the original SML, I can't think of any other Mario game like that
 
To shorten the whole canon topic (sorry not able to follow up), the biggest problem is that not everyone can buy every single RPG disk, and they're mostly indepedent in each title. Mario series is targeted at all ages, opposite to Metroid. Such as, they don't want a kid to buy the newest Paper Mario Switch title, realize that s/he missed the previous five or six stories and now have huge difficulty in reading the current story.

For mainstream titles like Galaxy or Sunshine, I think they provide "references" more than real story. We only need to know who EGadd, Nabbit and Rosalina are and where did they come from. The references make up the "canon", not really the story of each title. Continuity works when you can keep seeing those characters and references (event stage, item, enemy etc) repeat appearing in various games.

Of course I don't think NIntendo can just kill all the references and stories from RPG titles, it would sure be nice if they also leave abit continuity.
 
That makes sense, I think it would be fine as long as they just reintroduced the elements that they were reusing effectively in the next game, which they don't do very well with Starlow, but I feel they do a pretty good job with E. Gadd.
 
Revenant Archagent said:
That makes sense, I think it would be fine as long as they just reintroduced the elements that they were reusing effectively in the next game, which they don't do very well with Starlow, but I feel they do a pretty good job with E. Gadd.
I'd say Starlow actually felt as integral to Dream Team as she did to Inside Story.

Meanwhile she just felt shoehorned into Paper Jam and it would have been better off without her.
 
I'm not saying she didn't feel integral in M&LDT, I'm saying I feel like they didn't reintroduce her very well.
 
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