The first Paper Mario game is personally my favorite Mario game and in my top 5 favorite video games ever. As such I got excited when I heard a new Paper Mario game was coming out and to my delight the game is excellent. Like should be excepted from the Paper Mario series, this game excels at storytelling and humor. The supporting characters are excellent. Each have there own induvial personality and are a joy to spend time with. You actually connect with the characters emotionally and (no spoilers) there are some moments which are actually quite sad. The humor is excellent and it all comes from these characters. Oliva's excitability over mundane things, Bobby's laidback-ness, Professor Toad's coward-ness and anything with Bowser all bring some very funny moments and I even laughed out loud a few times playing this game. The story is delightfully silly (some of the villains include a hole puncher, colored pencils, scissors and Rubber Bands (some of the scenes before these characters have a slightly creepy vibe making the pay off of actually seeing them even funnier)). Yet the game is never too silly to get involved in the story. The world around you is huge and there is plenty to explore that isn't necessary to complete the story. The battle system has been the most criticized part of this game and in some ways I understand this opinion and in other ways I'd argue with it. The battles took me a little bit to get used to but once I got used to them they can be fun. They mix the normal Paper Mario fighting with a puzzle system which is an excellent idea (the way this system uses Boos is brilliant). What was not as great of idea however is the absence of Exp. points. In the original Paper Mario games I went into fights often to level up and make myself stronger. Here you get coins and confetti (used in this game to fill in various holes that you could fall down) for defeating the enemies. While these items are useful, they are not hard to obtain in other ways. You can hit your hammer on a tree or find a bag to get confetti, and you can fill in a hole, or hit a ? block or dig (when you have Professor Toad with you) to get coins. Because of this despite liking the way the battles are done, I found myself avoiding them when I simply wanted to get on with the story, because I didn't need a reward. This can make the battles a bit of a nuisance at times. As a whole this is an excellent game and I love it. -Michael J. Ruhland
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