Paper Mario

System: N64
Release Date: 2001
Published By: Nintendo
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

A fun game with high visual appeal, Paper Mario comes highly recommended to any RPG fan with an N64, and not least because it's the only RPG on the N64.

Like the rest of the Mario RPG series, and unlike nearly every other RPG, Paper Mario contains a fair amount of platforming and rewards the player for good reflexes and timing; throughout the adventure there will be plenty of platforms to jump on and over and across, and combat will go much smoother if you time your attacks correctly. The level of coordination required is not high, however, so pretty much everybody should be able to develop the skills needed to succeed here. The platforming aside, Paper Mario is something of a "minimalist" RPG, with none of the number-inflation you may be used to. All characters and mobs in the game have HP values not larger than two digits, and most attacks do single digits of damage. The number of stats is also very small, which will be unappealing to the hardcore min-max crowd but nice for those of us who didn't think we had purchased Mario's Crazy Spreadsheet Adventure 64.

The world is lively and colourful, filled with many amusing visual effects and attractive models. The only real downside to the world design is that very few of the characters have distinct personalities, and so talking to them (which is a fairly large portion of most RPGs) gets rather dull after a while. However, those characters who do have personality have a lot of it - Bowser is absolutely teriffic here, with a number of lines capable of drawing laughs. Par for the course for the series, Paper Mario doesn't take itself very seriously, and is full of jokes, sight gags, and other tomfoolery. I guess it's hard for the people who write Mario games to treat "save the princess from Bowser" as a serious plot after so many years. Umm, spoiler.

The level design is unfortunately fairly bland, with most levels being totally linear with extremely short digressions leading to items. The actual content - battles and puzzles - is interesting enough that the sameness of the layouts doesn't get to you too much, though, and the ambience is always entertaining. The game never forces you to fight the same mobs over and over until you're completely sick of them, either - areas tend to be short enough that before the mobs get completely boring you've moved on past them. As for secrets, there basically aren't any. There are a few optional (and very hard) battles scattered around the game that are basically just for fun, since they give no rewards. There are some hidden items, but none of them are especially interesting. There are no hidden characters or dungeons at all, and only one ending. That said, the game is fun for one playthrough but exactly and completely the same on a second playthrough, and therefore probably not good replay value.

Altogether, Paper Mario is a fun game that will entertain you for twenty hours or so. If you're an N64 owner really desperate for a good RPG it's not like you have any other choices anyhow.

Buy this game from Amazon.com!