Paper Mario

What's the deal?

The original Mario RPG was a no-brainer: Couple Mario, the hottest video game character at the time, with Squaresoft, the hottest RPG developer on the planet and--boom!--instant hit.

Well, Squaresoft may be out of the equation now, but Nintendo's N64 follow-up to the Super NES classic promises to be something special nonetheless. The Paper Mario team is making a concentrated effort at getting away from that tired "N64 look" (you know, blurry, low-res 3D models) and going for the same cardboard-cutout style seen in Yoshi's Story.

Nintendo knows that its fans, when they're not drooling over the latest Pokemon product, live to play new Mario adventures. Plus we all know Nintendo would never mess up anything with Mario's name on it, right?

So why is it a must-get game?

Paper Mario is going to appeal to just about everyone, and for good reasons. It's got great, old-school RPG action, unique sprite-based graphics and, welL.it's a new Mario game. How long have you been waiting for a new cartridge starring that pudgy little plumber, anyway?

Throw away all your expectations – this is Mario as you've never seen him before. First shown at Spaceworld two years ago this game was originally titled Super Mario Adventure but has since been given a slightly more appropriate name! Paper Mario abandons all the previous Mario game styles for a completely new (if slightly flatter) experience!

In this latest Mario adventure game the environments are in full 3-D but the characters are as flat as the paper this magazine is printed on! This may sound like a complete cop-out graphics-wise but the flat hand-drawn characters really help to give the game a distinct story-book style. Not unlike that found in Yoshi's Story in fact but not totally the same, because the backgrounds in this game are in full 3-D and you can spin the camera! Of course when you do this you get to see just how thin Mario is but again, this all adds to the game's atmosphere. Mario certainly has lost a lot of weight!

It's not all change though because this being a Mario game, you still get to smash coin blocks, interact with familiar characters and so on. Like any RPG interacting with characters plays a big part in this game and 'making friends' is an important feature. Once you're good chums with a character you can call on them to help you out in certain situations. If your path is blocked for example you may need a Bobomb to come and clear it for you. Unfortunately, this is often considerably more difficult than it sounds, as you often have to make friends with creatures who are more inclined towards tearing poor old Paper Mario to shreds!

These screens may look like they've come straight out of a platformer but Paper Mario is definitely an RPG. As well as the interactivity with the characters you also have turn-based battles in Paper Mario! This may seem a little strange for a Mario game but with the use of menu screens you can select all the usual butt-stomping Mario attacks. With the battle menus you can also select items to use – including a huge hammer!

Fortunately, not all the elements of battle are controlled through constrained menu screens. If you select a turtle shell as a weapon for instance you have to guide it in real time using the analogue stick!

Paper Mario is taking the Mario universe to places it has never been before – it's certainly going to come as a surprise to quite a few gamers! Let's just hope that the RPG elements aren't wasted on a game that's too easy like in Yoshi's Story. The characters may be flat but this game has a lot of depth and the potential is here for an absolutely stunning Mario adventure.

Although Mario has returned to the N64 ready to kick more Bowser backside, this latest incarnation of everyone’s favourite fat plumber is going to surprise a few of you. It seems that this time around, Mario has lost a little bit of weight, but unfortunately, only in one dimension. Has he been the victim of a horrendous steamroller accident, or on the strangest diet ever devised? Either way, he’s as flat as a pancake under a very large anvil, and for the rest of this adventure it looks as though he’s going to stay like that! Strange, we know!

Anyway, apart from the obvious flattening effect, Mario’s latest quest is different in another way too! Instead of using his big wobbly bum to defeat his numerous foes, Mario instead follows in Pokémon’s footsteps. In Paper Mario the battles are done RPG-style, using menu screens and turn-based action to resolve the fights. So, as in Pokémon, you choose the attack you wish to make on your opponent, see how it affects him/her/it and then see how they fight back until only the victor is left standing! During these battles a number of special moves and attacks become available. This means you can still use hammers to bash away at your enemy, or even slam a shell into their surprised little faces. However, there is a degree of strategy involved. Mario can’t simply beat all enemies with the same bottom-bounce tactic used in all the plumber’s previous outings. This may be a Mario game, but there have to be some RPG-style rules!

Meeting friends and learning new tasks is also very important if any progress is to be made. These friends can be collected in Mario’s pocket (pocket monsters, hmm?) and pulled out when the need arises to perform a task that Mario himself cannot do. These tasks might include things like moving heavy boulders, swimming lakes or even taking to the skies and if you don’t find the right creature to help you, you may well end up stuck!

Visually, the game looks fab! Despite the flat, 2D main characters (which many will agree look similar to the old SNES version of Mario), the graphics are still beautifully animated. When Mario turns or spins around, he looks like an envelope against a 3D environment. To be quite honest, it’s a gimmick that is rather a joy to behold! The backgrounds also still manage to invoke the traditional imagery of Mario’s universe, with big, bouncy, crisp images and a colourful palette that would make a rainbow blush! With its interesting mix of unusual visuals and a strong RPG element with bonuses and real-time shenanigans galore, it could turn out that Paper Mario is the genre-busting platformer we’ve been waiting for!

Let’s be honest here – when we heard that the next Mario adventure to reach the N64 was going to be an RPG, we were a little wary. After all, RPGs are very much an acquired taste – not everyone wants to spend 12 hours at a time wandering round huge-yet-sparsely-populated worlds, meeting strange creatures and engaging them in turn-based combat. And then we heard that said Mario RPG was going to use 2D character graphics… well, let’s just say that there were more than a few mutterings around the office that perhaps Nintendo was losing the plot somewhat. Of course, once screenshots and early versions of the code started to emerge, it quickly became clear that Paper Mario (as the game turned out to be called) was looking like being something special, and having finally got hold of the finished game, it’s safe to say that far from having lost the plot, Nintendo is more in touch with what makes a decent game than ever before! However, we’re getting slightly ahead of ourselves…

Cardboard Characters

Our story starts (as Mario stories often tend to) in the Mushroom Kingdom, home to the famous plumbers Mario and Luigi and ruled over by the lovely and not at all inbred Princess Peach. We join Mario as he and his brother receive an invite to a party at the Princess’ castle – something about Peach wanting to thank the media for being nice to her, or something equally daft. However, unbeknown to Mario and the other inhabitants of the Mushroom Kingdom, far, far away beyond the clouds is a place called Star Haven where something rather bad is happening. You see Star Haven is the resting place of the fabled Star Rod, a powerful artifact which is used by seven ancient Star Spirits to watch over the world below and to grant the wishes of everyone of good heart. Unfortunately King Bowser – not being of good heart – has never had his wishes granted by the Star Spirits and he’s finally got to the end of his tether. So while Mario’s putting on his face in preparation for the big soirée and Luigi’s trying to decide which of his 327 green caps would be right for such an auspicious party, Bowser’s leading a black ops rapid-penetration team (or something slightly more cutesy) into Star Haven, and 'liberating' the Star Rod!

Of course, needless to say that once big old Bowser has got his hands on the one thing that can make dreams a reality he sets about fulfilling his every wish – which strangely doesn’t include giving himself a penthouse apartment filled with lots of naked Kelly Brooks. He does however crash the Princess' party in spectacular fashion, kidnapping not just her, but her castle too, and then proceeds to deck Mario and kick him out of a window. Which is where you take over.

Flat Fellows

The aim of the game – in case you haven’t already guessed – is to find and rescue Princess Peach, defeat Bowser and recover the Star Rod, not necessarily in that order. Accomplishing these tasks of course, is far from a simple activity. For starters, Princess Peach is trapped in a castle which is currently doing a decent impersonation of a small moon, and there’s not even a second-hand space shuttle in sight. Then there’s the fact that Bowser’s been making good use of the Star Rod and consequently the Mushroom Kingdom is populated by all sorts of hostile entities. Mario is unperturbed however, and it’s up to you to help him get the girl!

The first thing that you notice about Paper Mario is the graphics – yes, you’re not seeing things, they are two-dimensional. Strangely enough, this isn’t actually mentioned in the background to the game, no: 'Mario and his pals were warped into a strange universe where everything was missing one dimension' kind of thing. However, the overall look of the game is one of a pop-up storybook, right down to the way that the buildings open up when you enter them, so it seems that somebody just thought that this would give a nice look to the game. It also makes for some nice visual gags, Mario drifts into bed when it’s time to sleep and gets his edges stuck in the ground when he falls from a great height – that sort of thing. Don’t get the wrong idea though, Paper Mario doesn’t have substandard graphics – far from it! But more on that in a bit.

Paper Platforms

First of all: the gameplay. Essentially Paper Mario is a cross between a platform game and an RPG. Like an RPG you must wander around the world, chatting to everyone to find clues and to accomplish tasks. Also like an RPG, the combat is turn-based – although with a difference. The look of the game is essentially a platform one though: generally it is side-scrolling, although Mario does have some freedom to move into and out of the screen. He also gets to jump and – once you’ve found a hammer – hit enemies and objects, much as you would in a Mario platformer.

The gameplay revolves around three main attributes – Heart Points (HP), Flower Points (FP) and Badge Points (BP). HP represent how much energy Mario has. Flower Points are a kind of 'special powers' gauge, and depending on how many FP he has, Mario – or one of his companions – can perform special attacks. BP are one of the coolest things in the game. As you wander the Mushroom Kingdom you can find, buy and win a variety of special badges. Wearing these can affect how you perform in battle, for instance, wearing the Quake Hammer badge lets you perform a powerful special hammer attack which can affect many enemies at once.

Two-Dimensional Trauma!

Which brings us onto the combat. As mentioned already, the combat is turn-based, however, it’s not quite the same as in other RPGs. In most games of that ilk, the emphasis is on building a character’s stats and abilities, and once you enter a battle you pretty much just have to hit and hope. You know the sort of thing: 'You attack Green Orc with Sword, you do 13 points of damage. Green Orc attacks you with hammer, you take 356 points of damage, you are dead.' This can be frustrating, even for RPG fans, and as for those who like a little more influence over their combat – well, forget about it! However, while you are encouraged to build your abilities throughout the game in Paper Mario, you do still have more control over the turn-based combat than you might expect. The badges are one example of this, and strategic use of them can mean the difference between a quick win and a potential defeat. The next thing to consider is the choice of attacks. As he finds various objects, Mario gains new abilities and you need to decide which are best against which enemies (jump attacks are not a good idea if the bad guys have spikes on their heads for instance).

The same goes for Mario’s companions, who we’ll come to in second. The major innovation of the turn-based combat in this game though, is the action command. This essentially adds an arcade element to the combat, and basically consists of timing button presses to increase the effectiveness of your attacks or to defend against those of the enemy. Tapping A at the right moment when doing a jump attack for instance, results in a more devastating double jump, and many of the badges give you the opportunity to perform sustained attacks in combination with the action command.

Foolscap Friends

We’ve already mentioned Mario’s companions. These are the individuals that he meets throughout the course of the adventure, who can be persuaded to join him on his quest. Once they’ve joined Mario’s party, the companions can be used to solve puzzles and perform tasks in the main part of the game, and also used as a secondary attacker in the combat sections. The catch is that you can only have one 'active' companion at any one time, and so choosing when to swap between them is an important part of your strategy. Like Mario, the companions all have basic abilities and also special attacks, and at times you get the opportunity to upgrade these.

As you’d expect from a Mario game, there is absolutely loads of stuff to do in Paper Mario, a lot of which you probably won’t discover the first time you play through it. Which is good, because if we have a fault with the game, it’s that it’s perhaps a little too linear and thus a little easy to play through. The game is huge however, so while you probably won’t have much of a problem playing all the way to the end, it should take you quite a while. And then even when you’ve finished the game, there will be plenty of things which you haven’t found, such as the hidden mini-games and all manner of interesting special objects.

Graphically, as we’ve already intimated, Paper Mario is very nice indeed. In fact, the longer you play it, the more you realise just how much work has gone into this title to make it visually one of the most impressive N64 games so far. The characters themselves are two-dimensional, but rather than being just an easier way of depicting them, this is a deliberate device which helps to give the game a 'storybook' feel. When characters turn, for instance, they do it as if they really were printed on a sheet of paper, and the animation on all the characters is superb.

The backgrounds to the game are great, being – on the whole – full 3D. A nice touch is when you enter a building and the walls fold down as if they were made of paper so that you can see the interior. This makes a change from having just a plain black transition screen.

The audio in Paper Mario is equally impressive, managing to sound both modern and retro at the same time (that is to say: the tunes are very reminiscent of the Mario games on older Nintendo consoles, but they have the quality we’ve come to expect recently of N64 titles). Humour is another thing which the game designers haven’t skimped on, and despite the fact that this was originally a Japanese title, there are a lot of very clever references to Western films and culture in general.

Flat But Flawless!

Overall Paper Mario is a game which you find very difficult to fault. It manages to bring RPG gameplay to a much wider (and generally less anal) audience, while hopefully at the same time maybe even introducing RPG-fanatics to some of the benefits of platformers. It looks absolutely gorgeous, and plays like a dream. The range of characters you get to meet and interact with is huge, and there are so many objects to play with that it’d take you about a year to find them all. All in all this is – as we’ve come to expect from Nintendo – one of the most impressive N64 games around today. And the best news is that it’s also one of the few that’s going to make it over to the UK! We’ve only got to wait 'til September...

Don't let the odd title confuse you, this is Nintendo's sequel to the SNES game Super Mario RPG. Much like Voshi's Story before it, Paper Mario uses a mixture of 3D backgrounds and sprite-based characters to create a world which looks like an "animated pop-up book." Otherwise Paper Mario is set to deliver the same turn-based, RPG action of the original SNES game complete with the old time-based attacks. Look for it on store shelves Dec. 26.

Shown as Paper Mario at the show, this game has already been retitled Mario Story for its Japan release. The RPG adventure kicks off after Mario receives an invite to a party at Mushroom Castle. The original name of Paper Mario comes from the fact that all of the well known characters appear in flat 2-D form! They are of course all set in a glorious 3-D world but as shocking as this may be, the game is a side-scroller! Despite this, Nintendo is promising that the game will be bringing a new gameplay experience to the public. The original Mario 64 is still one of the best games on the N64 - who knows, perhaps this could top it?

First Impressions

What on earth is going on in this game? It uses a similar graphic style to Yoshi's Story but puts Mario and all the usual characters (Luigi, Koopa and Peach) from the Mario games into the starring roles - and they're ail ? flat so they virtually disappear I when they turn around! This special look is one that is uniquely Nintendo and although it doesn't exactly make the best use of the N64's graphical power - it is fascinating to watch! The game is a kind of a sequel to Super Mario RPG and uses similar role playing elements - Mario Story will certainly be a game to look forward to!