Maybe it’s just nostalgia but neither paper Mario nor Mario & Luigi come a light year away from SMRPG for me. They feel just like bland superficial attempts at a formula when the formula is actually the least important part of SMRPG. The apparent weirdness that the reviewer mentioned is for me exactly why I love it: the characters just are what they are; you don’t have to understand, their unexplainable weirdness makes them (and the game) so unique.
Game design from the 80s and 90s has an aspect that will never come back again: players could be expected to spend actual time with a game, play it without rushing, explore and find things out on their own. The world has changed and I will not say what is right or wrong, but this expectation and design will never come back.
Paper Mario was initially fine IMO. It laserfocused into a very different niche; because it made stat logic simple math puzzles, the developers were able to build out the interactive element to SMRPGs fights into something that feels appropriate, yet not too obtrusive (something which the franchise would end up losing by the time Sticker Star came rolling around). A lot of attacks in SMRPG just have one button you press to make them stronger; by contrast Paper Mario would introduce things like stick flicking, holding moves or inserting certain button combinations to make them stronger.
Tonally I'd say 64, TTYD and Super manage to stick close enough to being "quirky, yet funny" with all of them having some emotional beats that they don't undercut. Sticker Star, Color Splash and Origami King all veer into self-parody levels when it comes to the writing and it just... sucks really. It's hard to take the entire thing seriously when everything you interact with makes a joke about how everything is made of paper every other sentence.
Mario & Luigi for the most part isn't really based on SMRPG. Most of it's DNA comes from a game called Tomato Adventure instead. That said, it did end up borrowing the more superficial RPG elements. Superstar Saga and Partners in Time probably fare the best in terms of mixing more RPG-like elements, while the games after would rapidly swing between "way too easy" and "absurdly difficult" when it came to the interactive component.
I'd say that last bit about game design only really started to fade away in... around the early-to-mid-2010s really. It was falling out of favor before that with Xbox and Playstation's approach to game design but the whole "everything is online now" means that games are trying to fight with their players against the inevitable deluge of other games out there.
Cool, thanks for the analysis, you obviously have played much more Paper Mario and M&L than I have. :)
Yes, it's inevitable, I understand and that's why I said that I don't want to step into right vs. wrong territory. It is what it is, but personally I find it exhilarating to step into a world like the ones from King's Field or Shadow Tower (early From Software games) and realize I have absolutely no frigging clue of what's going on around me, and then slowly learning how to handle the crushing difficulty until I master it. By coincidence the commenter below mentioned From Software which was exactly what I was thinking of when I commented. Early Souls games are also good examples, but even they have become basically arcade-fighting games by now.
I don't know, maybe. I'd certainly agree that at least the King's Field and Shadow Tower games are like that, perfect examples of how you can start a game in a complete state of WTF and slowly get better and better until in the end you feel like Superman. And Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 and 2 might fit that too, but from then on (DS3, Bloodborne, Sekiro) it became more of a question of combat challenge than actual discovery/exploration itself.
I'm currently doing a sweep of the From catalogue in release order, and I have to say, wow I love their early approach to game design with King's Field and Shadow Tower. (Armored Core is fun but not really my cup of tea)
Game design from the 80s and 90s has an aspect that will never come back again: players could be expected to spend actual time with a game, play it without rushing, explore and find things out on their own. The world has changed and I will not say what is right or wrong, but this expectation and design will never come back.