@rdm22 I mean, Sticker Star and Color Splash were turn-based. That alone the magic does not make. I’ve been thinking about this a lot today, for obvious reasons, bit while there are mechanical deficiencies that take the afformentioned two (and likely the new third) away from being what I want from a Paper Mario, it’s something else that ruins it for me.
It would take way too much to do all put here, and ain’t nobody got time to read all that, but I’ll give a very concise and not-at-all nuanced version for ya.
The good Paper Mario games use “Paper” as a reference to how they feel like a fantastical storybook adventure. They are full of locations with odd, quirky, alien, and interesting characters. The partners, even if of a species familiar to Mario games, are different, and they all have their own personalities, motivations, and eccentricities. The scope, scale, impact, and “weight” of the story itself isn’t as important as that it feels like you’re playing a JRPG Mario Fairy Tale adventure; finding a magic box in a vacant house in town that shrinks you down and takes you to a toy world full of shy guys, going through a magical gate to the flower realm where you have to free the sun, raiding the dragon’s castle for its treasure, having to go to the creepy tower in the horizon of the perpetually twilit town in which someone turns into a pig every time the tower bell rings. This is why, while I would hardly want all goes that came after it to play like Super Paper Mario, I thought Super Paper Mario was a good addition to the franchise.
It goes hand-in-hand with that meme image of 50 identical toads for Sticker Star/For Splash and the slew of different and unique toad designs from TTYD.