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I plowed up through finishing off the red streamer, I'm enjoying it so far. The battle system is cool and different, which I actually quite like; I'm a big puzzle fan so that's unsurprising to me. I met the first standard enemy puzzle that I couldn't solve and had to brute force right before the end of the chapter so I'm curious to see how the difficulty ramps in Chapter 2. The boss fights were a nice change of pace, and it's also very good that once you get to a certain power level you can stop really weak enemies with just a hammer/jump in the overworld. Top moments: (The spoilers are both little things from the first hour that were fun little surprises or so but I'm still spoiling them if you haven't started the game yet!) -Is this the first game where we see Mario driving a Kart that isn't a Mario Kart game? I thought opening with Mario and Luigi driving one to visit Peach at the beginning was really cute, especially Luigi's joke about valet at Peach's Castle. -I don't know exactly what has changed in the eyes of Nintendo but this is the third Mario game in this generation that has a full-on musical number in it, and I think that's hilarious. Obviously it's gonna be hard to top Jump Up Superstar! or the Mario/Rabbids opera boss but having an old tree and his tree-daughter backup singers reward you with a little doo-wop number is great, and Olivia-Turtle cheerleading to use his earth powers is similarly very silly. If every Mario game on the Switch has a musical number it will just solidify the Switch as the greatest console of all time. -On that same note, the music is really fantastic. Each screen/area seems to have its own song, and some have multiple versions, and they do a nice job referencing classic Mario tunes (Peach's Castle/the Underground Theme) without over-relying on them. I've already unlocked like 30 songs in the audio test and I'm like a quarter of the way through. -The world that they've crafted is super fun. One of the absolute best things about Luigi's Mansion 3 is that almost every corner seemed to have something hidden or something to interact with, and the entire hotel felt like it was crafted with such care and attention and the big areas in Origami King have that same feeling. It almost reminds me in a way of Breath of the Wild where there are so many hidden things that you can find and most of it is just through exploration and interacting with the world. I thought the Toads were either going to be too esoteric or incredibly easy, but there's so many Toads that there are both easy and hard ones but not too many of either. There are puzzles that genuinely stump me for a minute or so until I figure it out, and it generally just takes some careful observation and if that fails, lots of hammering everything in the room. Only once or twice has it ever been mildly frustrating and all of those times resulted from locked doors that I determined I need to find a Toad somewhere else for. -It's also gorgeous. Nintendo obviously knows that the Switch is never going to compete with other consoles or PC gaming in terms of pure graphical power and so they've taken to adopting real style and trying to out art-design other devs and this is one of the times where it really pays off. It utilizes the extra power of the Switch and the areas like Toad Town or Picnic Road are really big for a Paper Mario game and it does so without sacrificing anything. It feels very alive. I think the Paper Mario games have finally made the transition from representing a storybook (like the first two PM games) to representing a big playset. There might be a little less depth in the characters but the world feels more 3-dimensional (pun absolutely intended)
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Jul 17, 2020 11:12
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 22:50 |
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MonsterEnvy posted:Olivia seems a first for a Mario advice partner in that she actually seems to be kind of dumb. She’s very good at ninja stuff though! I don’t think enough positive things can be said about the soundtrack to this game. The composer clearly had a blast with the variety that this game has, and there are some real nutso moments that might not have played with a lesser score. Ska-wan Lake as a part of the Elastic Entertainer’s Suite was a “wait am I really hearing this!?” moment. You can really hear the energy in the orchestra, switching to live orchestrated scores is easily one of the best decisions Nintendo has ever made and this game might live or die based on how much the music helps you buy into the story, whether it’s goofy or serious or sweet or terrifying or adrenaline-pumping. Also, the whole tower theater thing was a blast, I occasionally have my doubts about how much action they try to have you do in regular walking around mode but that was particularly well done.
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Jul 18, 2020 10:46
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Acerbatus posted:it's not fun. I don't quite wish those were totally gone because I am really getting some enjoyment out of the puzzle elements of the random battles, especially when you solve one in the last second but I definitely think there are too many and I don't like the weapons breaking part of that equation. The weird thing is that once I got into the third chapter of the game (after the cruise ship and Bobby/Bob-omb's sacrifice) there haven't been a lot of fights. The desert gives you a car that you can use to just plow through all of the Boos and Pokeys therein without having to fight them, and there aren't a whole lot of fights in the third temple so there was a good 3-4 hours of gameplay where I had maybe a handful of random fights. IMO the way they should have handled them is instead of having wandering random encounters, all of the enemies in the field should be handled in the field (like all of the Paper Macho enemies, or how they are after you get power bumps) and then all of the puzzles would be at preset locations, like the boss fights but with regular Joes using the ring system and instead of purchasable upgrades that you have to go back and buy again occasionally, just a good old RPG weapon mechanic where you can have a few boots or hammers equipped at once but they never break. Heck, you could even turn the fire/ice flowers or tail or mushrooms into equippables instead of items so you have to choose whether you want to have a heal equipped or more attacks, or if you want only jumps and a basic hammer, or whatever. I think weapon durability was probably the worst game design choice in the game.
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Jul 19, 2020 05:14
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Acerbatus posted:Or they could make a proper paper mario RPG again, but... bold statement: I don't think this game would have been any better if it were a regular turn-based RPG than it is right now, and I think if a few minor changes were made to how the battle system in this game works, it could be even better. I think the writing and world-building in this game is on par with the first two Paper Mario games and fixing the battle mechanics wouldn't have changed that, in the same way that making Sticker Star a traditional turn-based RPG wouldn't have made it on par with those two (although the battle system in that game is a whole lot more broken). I think because the battle system for Sticker Star and Color Splash were so broken a lot of people have just made the connection that the reason the older games were better is because of their battle systems but I don't really think it was ever about that. Honestly I think this game makes an excellent case for Paper Mario games completely excising random encounters entirely and probably being better off as a whole because you can either have a more interesting puzzle mechanic for the bosses like we have in OK or a little more development of the action in the field, ala the super-sized Paper Macho enemies like King Blooper or the giant Pokey. So far all of my favorite moments in this game are when it's functioning more like an adventure game than an RPG. Actually what they really should do is take this engine and format, toss all of the RPG mechanics and turn it into Paper Zelda. This game already takes a lot of cues from BotW and the "silent hero travels around with chatty fairy occasionally giving him advice" is very Ocarina of Time. Switch out the Hammer for a sword, add a few more traversal mechanics like a Hookshot or some Pegasus Boots and you've got Paper Link! I don't think any of the previous formats could have done a Zelda game (unless they too were turn-based, which doesn't seem very Zelda to me IMO) but you could definitely make everything you need with this one.
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Jul 19, 2020 05:45
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Natural 20 posted:I think the most criminal thing about the game is that it's just boring. not that I don't disagree with your overall point (I do wish there was a little more variety in the action commands) but the attack items also have action commands. They don't tell you that but I hit A out of instinct before firing a fireball and I got an "Excellent". mandatory lesbian posted:The boss fight is so fun that I can't honestly give a gently caress that it's "just" a colored pencil case. Yeah all of the streamer bosses are "just" office supplies but it's like when you were playing as a kid with whatever you had handy and had to give them really big outsized personalities to match. Honestly I sort of wish they had withheld those bosses and showed off the Vellumentals instead because while giant fearsome origami beasts are really cool, the surprise of the final bosses being Office Supplies after all of the yelling at you they do would have been hilarious. Der Shovel posted:Well that's good to know, no point in hoarding coins then. I bought all of the accessories ASAP and ran out of coins right as I entered Shroom City because the accessory store has three fairly expensive ones. I've also bought all of the collectables that I've seen, which hasn't been a whole lot but they are pretty expensive (the one in Shogun Studios is like 10k!)
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Jul 20, 2020 01:08
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Waltzing Along posted:I like this game. nah, you're able to get pretty much all of the toads right when you get there. the Toad Radar will help find some of the ones you can't immediately figure out but I think about 95% of toads are obtainable during the course of the story. edit: I'm not quite finished with the game but I definitely think I like it better than PM64. I like how playful the writing is, and even if not every joke lands enough of them do that I'm really charmed by it. Plus any game with multiple musical numbers gets a big boost from me. The Yellow Streamer world is really the high point for the soundtrack, with the J-Pop number that awakens the Fire Vellumental, the regular world music for Sniff City and the hotel, plus the four DJ tracks each being inspired by a different type of club music including one that is an obvious DDR reference. DC Murderverse fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Jul 21, 2020 |
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Jul 21, 2020 00:41
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ThisIsACoolGuy posted:Just a heads up there's a 100% ending if you get absolutely everything. oh boy. :| I spent like 20 minutes getting the Shuriken trophy and I get the feeling getting every coin on the Eddy River will be oh so much worse
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Jul 21, 2020 01:19
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Everything between arriving at Shogun Studios through the end of the Yellow Streamer is the highlight of the game, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way about a Desert World in a game before. Normally they’re overly long, use the same few tropes and the desert you explore is always bigger than I would like but this game subverts it by making the resort town super fun, giving you a method of transportation that is fun and makes travel a breeze (especially because it allows you to skip most random encounters) and mixing the traditional Mario Desert Music sound with lots of dance influences and also has a bunch of straight up J-pop/House/Disco influenced tracks when everything in the tomb takes a hard left into “a weird zombie dance party thrown by the world boss” instead of the usual unearthing of an ancient ruler and fighting them as an angry mummy.
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Jul 23, 2020 08:01
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Amppelix posted:i want to go for 100% but i'm being stopped before i even get going by the knowledge that getting a perfect game of shy guys finish last is one of the trophies lol that's not nearly as hard as getting all the coins on Eddy River honestly I don't think SGFL is all that challenging, maybe I got lucky but I think I played each game once, but the random selector gave me the 50 point level for Math Bath, the Race one and the ring scramble and I got the former two fairly easily so I cleared it rather quickly (although I definitely had some heart palpitations before the Sudden Death round.
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Jul 25, 2020 08:49
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my biggest (little, non completely-changing-the-game-design) wishes for this game were: 1). I wish Ollie came around more often, or you fought him a few times over the course of the game. Between the beginning and the very end you only see him once, and that one scene is incredibly effective, but he's a complete non-presence aside from that. I wish he taunted you a little more. 2). I wish the battle system had a little more transparency. If you're gonna do the turn-based battle thing, at least let me have an idea of what my attack stat is, or what the HP for enemies are, or how much each of the boots/hammers powers me up. Otherwise it's sort of trial and error, and there are some cases where you're really not getting enough battles in to actually figure those things out. literally the only stat you actually see in the game is HP, all of the other increases are just "this is more powerful" or "this is the most powerful" or "you're growing in power".
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Jul 26, 2020 02:46
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Tired: "Origami King would be better if it had 64/TTYD's battle system" Wired: "Origami King would be better if it just embraced being an adventure game and got rid of random battles (but kept boss battles)" Inspired: "Half of these chapters are
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Jul 29, 2020 21:19
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 22:50 |
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Blackbelt Bobman posted:Yeah it was the door on the right in the Lobby. If you talk to the Toad in front of said door they tell you it’s there. they actually just say "the pipe" and do not specify that it's the 5th warp pipe, which I realized when I got to the 6th warp pipe and had not seen it, meaning I had to go all the way up that tower and through the beam of light a second time just to get to the warp pipe. I am dumb
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Aug 1, 2020 06:08
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