52 dialog boxes. After defeating Mimi at the end of Chapter 2-4, the player has to read, (skip,) through 52 seperate dialog boxes before he gets control back and is "playing" again. I use the term "playing" loosley, because the next sequence is the player controlling Luigi as he "escapes" from the black castle. This "escape" barely qualifies as game play as it consists solely of pushing left on the D-Pad until he gets to the door at the end, after which he's treated to more dialog box skipping in Flipside. I did not take a count of the dialog boxes that must be skipped through immediately preceding the Mimi fight, but including the Merlee gameshow sequence, I'd wager it was another good 40 odd dialogs, conservatively.
I have to wonder how much oversight, if any, Miyamoto had on this game. I think it really started to dawn me how much fun I wasn't having during the hamster wheel portion of the previous chapter. How something so unfun, so ungame-y, and thusly so un-mario made its way into a game with "Mario" in the title is surprising. I was literally falling asleep as I was running on the wheel. I ended up getting out the vice grips and gently locking the D-Pad of the Wiimote down so I could go off and do other things for 20 minutes as I racked up my 10k to buy the code to the vault.
This is not a Mario game. I suppose one could argue that I should have known this seeing as it has "Paper" in the title, and therefore is a member of the RPG bloodline of Mario games, but in my defense, every time I saw the game in motion, the action/platforming aspect of the game was being highlighted.
I have a few other issues with the game as well, but the dialog boxes were the final straw. I just can't see myself mindlessly skipping through a couple hundred blocks of text to get to another hamster wheel type experience.
I'll not play this again.
Score:1
5.06.2007
Super Paper Mario. [minor spoilers]
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2 COMMENTS:
I've enjoyed what I've played of Paper Mario, but I was expecting much greater emphasis on platforming. As far as the RPG aspect goes, the GameCube Paper Mario was much stronger.
The thing is, Miyamoto only supervised the production of this game (most likely to make sure too many liberties weren't taken with his characters). Anyway, I find that SPM is one of the better games currently available on the Wii (mind you, I haven't played more than two minutes of Galaxy). Of course, that will all change when Brawl finally appears.
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