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Monday 14 January, 2008
GAMEPLAY:
One aspect of the gameplay that I discovered in my second hour of playing is that you can actually play as Peach. This isn't new to the Paper Mario genre, but in the earlier games you controlled her for a brief amount of time during miniature in-between chapters. She also couldn't jump and had no attacks or special abilities. Her chapters consisted of mostly walking around her prison and happening upon certain helpful situations. However, in this game, she is an actual playable character. She has a jump attack and can glide across distances using her parasol, you can access her at any time from the menu and some situations can't be solved without using her.
Another thing I found amusing was that many of the characters display a 4th wall-ish knowledge of the fact they're in a game. At one point, a character was explaining how to do a special attack by pressing the 1 button, and then they commented that the mystic being who watched over everything would understand what that meant. Also many characters throughout the game comment on Mario's magnificent mustache. In fact, some characters will only help him out because of it. Some characters even comment satirically on the earlier Mario games. At one point Luigi states that he's bored and how wonderful it would be if some badguy happened to randomly kidnap Princess Peach.
DESIGN:
This game was extremely innovative because of Mario's new flip ability. He can flip between 2-D and 3-D. The 2-D environment plays out very similar to an early side-scrolling platformer. However, when you flip to 3-D you can avoid enemies, walk around obstacles, find secret paths, and read inscriptions on the other side of things. In one case, there was a giant row of spiked boulders completely blocking the path. Any way across was certain death, but if you flipped into 3-D you could simply walk by all of the boulders because they only existed on one plane. The game relies heavily on this ability and it is the way to solve almost all of the puzzles.
The level design was very clever and borrowed immensely from the earlier Mario games. There is a large number of familiar enemies such as Goombas and Koopas, but there are a fair number of new enemies as well. There are tons of secrets to be found in the 3-D mode and every level has hidden coins or enemy cards that increase your attack power. Some platforms are only accessible in 2-D or 3-D, requiring a bit of thinking to overcome some problems. The music in Super Paper Mario is also very similar to the first NES game. Many of the songs are simply revamped remixes (including the dungeon songs).
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