The Good
The paper art-style is really cut and they made clever use of it.

Reaction commands make the combat a little more involved.

Dialogue is well-written and I found myself laughing at some of the lines.

Story as a whole is pretty fun.

The adult jokes are not too frequent or in-your-face.

The Bad
Leveling system is poorly designed.

Combat starts to wear on you after a few days.

Many badges are useless.

Barely any challenge at all.

Only 1 companion at a time.

The Bottom Line
Paper Mario is the spiritual sequel to Super Mario RPG on the Super Nintendo, in the sense that it's a spin-off RPG with a unique art-style. The story goes that Mario and Luigi are both invited by the princess for a party, but upon arrival Bowser shows up and lifts the castle up into the sky. As it turns out, Bowser has stolen the "Star Rod", a magical artifact that grants wishes, with which he is finally able to beat Mario. After his initial failure, Mario sets out to free the imprisoned protectors of the Star Rod and discover a way to beat Bowser.

The large wheel of fortune, or in this case "wheel of quirky art-styles", that I imagine is housed within the Nintendo headquarters, landed on paper this time around, so everything in the game is themed as if it were made out of paper cut-outs. I've never really gotten into the recent yarn craze, but this style is actually pretty neat, since there is a lot of detail to it. One of my favorite touches occurs when characters fall, since they slowly dawdle in the air instead of plummeting straight downwards.

Being that this is an RPG, you of course team up with a variety of party-members. I really appreciate it that the designers chose to team Mario up with a new cast of characters, as opposed to something more predictable like Luigi. Most of these characters are actually pretty entertaining and fun to have around, especially Goombario, whose special ability provides Mario with insight on areas and enemies.

The overall story does tend to be a little dull and it has the same problem as Mario Galaxy, where it's too childish for older players and it has too much exposition for a younger audience. Side-quests are much more entertaining, though, as there is a wide variety of characters to interact with. The writers cleverly decided to imply that races commonly known to serve under Bowser are not all bad, so you get locations like Koopa Town and Goomba Town, where the inhabitants are peaceful and you can do quests for them.

During your travels, you'll often run into enemies that will charge towards you; once you make contact with the enemy, it will teleport you to a battle-screen where you can fight that foe. This allows you to get in a preemptive strike if you hurt the foe upon making contact, but it also works the other way around. Battles are pretty standard; you select your move and Mario does it, however, each attack has a special condition that allows it to do more damage. If you press A before jumping on an enemy, for example, it will have Mario jump a second time. These reaction commands do actually help to make the combat more involved and some special abilities make clever use of them.

There is however one huge problem with the game and that is the fact that it can't really be called an "RPG" in terms of mechanics. Mario can level up, but doing so doesn't necessarily increase his raw power. Instead, you get to pick between leveling up either health, FP (mana), or badge-points (more about those later). As a result, Mario doesn't actually become any stronger throughout the game. You do 1 damage when jumping on an enemy at level 1 and you'll do 1 damage to an enemy when jumping on him at level 10 too, nothing changes in that regard. Your companions don't level up at all, so as a result it never feels like you are progressing as a character.

There is also no equipment to manage, aside from badges; these badges require badge-points and give Mario some special abilities that vary in usefulness. I like to compare them to the perks from Fallout 3, but that would be too kind, since the perks had more creativity and you had more room to use them. Most badges eat so many points that equipping them becomes very costly, especially since leveling up in this game takes forever.

This leaves the combat as the only real "RPG" mechanic, but since there is no progression, the difficulty is completely planned out and geared towards the easy side of things. With no way to change this, the game relies on being an "experience". That's alright, I like experiences, but games like Earthbound (which are also called "experiences") often have the player move from event to event at a pretty fast pace, whereas Paper Mario often bogs the player down with long journeys from one location to another.

So yes, aside from the art-style, which is very nice and detailed, the game has very little to offer. The story, while entertaining, moves to slowly and the gameplay lacks any kind of substance. Super Mario RPG and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga are both a lot better, so if you are interested in playing a Mario RPG, I would recommend either of those two.

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