I’m the polar opposite as I always, always battle every enemy I encounter in any rpg game to stock up on exp points and levels

@@SpicyWah I just do that because I wanna see if it's even possible if I can die, cuz most of the time, if I avoid fights, I just get bored and never even have to worry about being healed. Or, in other words, I'm a masochist

Main reason, the writing is on point. But the gameplay is awful as can be. While the video does show you that you need the fire extinguisher for the fight, if you don't have it and use it at the right time, game over. All bosses and some mid bosses are like this. Watch a let's play or stream of this game you'll enjoy it far more that way.

Hey dude, not coming off as irritating at ALL, appreciate the comment, really well thought-out and respectful. What I like about Color Splash in specific is that it is less compromising on those design goals compared to other Paper Mario titles. Due to the lower HP curve of other Paper Mario games, they couldn't really afford to not have a Heart Block near boss fights, as you couldn't really guarantee players would be in any shape for a boss after aforementioned obstacles like the Koopa Bros. Bullet Bill Firing Squad. The best you have for endurance is the surprise matches against Bowser in TTYD after the Magikoopa Glitzville Fight and Grodus. I don't think it's a flawless concept, and my favorite Paper Marios are still TTYD and Super and yes please I'll take another game in the former's style, I'm more just surprised at what Color Splash managed to pull off and how neat the focus shift is. Most of the criticism I hear toward the game is in its battle system and the differences it takes from Paper Mario, and I found that the way the game designed around that system was comfortable and complimentary, despite taking a more adventure game approach to it than a dedicated RPG one. Sorry if I came across at all that "this is how it SHOULD be from now on" in the vid, was not my intention - just that I enjoyed my time and found the design interesting and enjoyable when compared to the classic formula. If people dislike it, that's totally fine, I agree that it's a super easy game that's simple to break by the third big star (though so is every PM). Just kinda wish that the conversation moved to it being flawed for what it IS rather than the usual focus, where it's said to be flawed due to what it ISN'T.

@@pyrrhickong The HP curve is an interesting point that I could agree with and that I didn't think about. I do give pros to the more creative environmental interactions in later games as I do wish they were in older games in some extent. I just think that, they would eventually get better at how Mario interacts considering the gradual more interesting stage design in each game, even if they didn't all play the same. Thanks so much for reading my comment tho and explaining more!

good point but the ":/" makes you so passive aggressive i instantly hate you

I don't think I was going for passive aggressive, but I can see how it could be interpeted that way. You may now turn me into an eggplant. u_u

@@metaknight1285 oh right I’m not *THAT* eggplant wizard it’s an inside joke

I disagree but see where you were coming from. Maybe because i'm still stuck on 2-1 of SPM.

I think you’re valid to dislike the game for this reason, but I don’t think you can say it’s a bad game because of it. The way I see it, this EXP-less phase of Paper Mario has been a series of attempts to avoid another tricky element of turn-based RPGs: implicitly encouraging grinding. And I’d say they succeeded in discouraging grinding… probably a little too well, but still. Most particularly, I don’t see it as them “punishing you for engaging with the core system”-that’s something you have to do sometimes pretty much no matter what. I find it’s more that they reward creativity and skill in avoiding encounters-in other words, rewarding engaging with the OTHER core systems instead by saving cards and paint, where TTYD might implicitly punish you for avoiding battles because you miss out on the Star Point reward. And while it’s fine if you prefer one to the other, I don’t think you can say one is Objectively Worse. CS discourages engagement while encouraging creativity; TTYD discourages leaving enemies unbeaten while encouraging engagement. The latter is a more RPG-style approach; the former tries to make things more Mario-like, however well you think that succeeds.

I definitely agree with the thought here, I just found it interesting how the game goes for a core design that makes more sense for a "Mario RPG" than what we've come to know as the Mario RPG series. I like the idea of it being focused around resource management, and these encounters serving as a punishment in place of a given encounter with a group of, say, Buzzy Beetles in a previous Paper Mario, which likely won't inconvenience Mario at all. It's there in place of the random encounter that'd whittle away at your MP in a classic Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy as you try to approach the boss. Admittedly since making this, I do think that the game doesn't QUITE capitalize on the potential this concept presents - it peaks halfway through with a Metal Gear Solid parody and then the game kinda just does its own thing. But Color Splash has enough interesting peaks to be an enjoyable little game all its own. Not GREAT or anything, but charming enough and worth, at least, more of a look through than Sticker Star and Paper Jam!

Agreed , Even in games with amazing battle systems like Pokemon or earthbound, many people still try to avoid fights more often than not. Making the battle system a waste of time on purpose only serves to make the required battles far worse.

Usually the way I try to frame it is less about "punishment", because resources are abundant and combat isn't bad in its own right (DON'T PUNISH ME WITH A GOOD TIME); not as robust in modularity, but the motions are the same, and still rather satisfying. It's moreover a different path to the objective. It just struck me as interesting to set up enemies with an intended through-line to navigate around them that a sharp-eyed or skilled player can take. The resulting level design emphasizes obstacle courses that can be handled; kind of like overcoming hurdles and ending up in a random encounter being the equivalent of stumbling over a hurdle. In my opinion it's less about providing disincentives to engaging combat, but more providing incentives to pause, examine the overworld, and navigate carefully. The enemies in the overworld present puzzles of their own, and it can be satisfying in its own way to successfully juke all the enemies; CS's design is better at providing a through-line than its predecessor on that front. tl;dr I find it really fun and interesting CS takes the Sticker Star criticism of MAN YOU SHOULD JUST AVOID EVERYTHING and builds the overworld to do that in more clever ways. Origami King seems to pick up on the puzzling principle and makes combat encounters a microcosm of this philosophy, which I like; you cam muscle your way through, but you can gain an advantage with clever thinking (and it also has cues from CS's overworld); if people like TOK, I think they'll find a lot to find to like in CS, they aren't -so- far removed in execution.

In fairness, even the golden boy TTYD kind of had an issue with killing its own pace at times, though if anything in a sometimes less avoidable fashion with its increasingly infamous backtracking and corridor-like level design that often seem to exist just to funnel the player through the number of encounters it expects you to fight to be around the intended level to progress. Which, it's good that the game pretty much never requires you to grind, even for its optional content, but the fact that most areas of the game have you double back through the first half of a chapter at least once means by the time you get to the second half you'll have long ago solved every enemy lineup the game has been throwing at you up to that point, which unfortunately means the game's excellent customization system is often used for the sake of minimizing the tedium of relatively predictable encounters, and only gets to shine in full during rare boss battles. It's rather telling that Chapter 3, which many seem to consider the best chapter in the game, is literally nothing but a series of completely unique from one another enemy encounters interspersed with story, and next to no dungeon-crawling or field traversing outside of occasionally navigating to new areas in the Glitz Pit. Not that one can't make the case that one could potentially better balance out the "adventure" and "RPG combat" aspects of a game like this than either game does, but it is interesting to look at the various extremes the franchise tends to favor one aspect or another, and how it faces design problems, solves them, and what issues can potentially crop up from said solutions. It's also interesting seeing discussions of these games and how different camps have different ideas of what constitutes "gameplay". Like, some will use that term to exclusively describe battles, but then you have to address what that means for the rest of the game. Is the 20 hours of running back and forth, jumping around, and solving puzzles *not* gameplay? If it isn't, then the game is really wasting a lot of time on filler. If it is, then why is it okay to downplay the significance of that aspect but not the standard encounter-based combat?

Yep.

People love punishments that’s why dark souls is so popular and why everyone complains when games are too easy and also why spicy food challenges are so popular Everyone loves to be punished and challenged

If only they designed the normal battles to be as fun as the bosses

exactly how i feel as well rance man

I swear, everything is made of glass in that stupid game. I wound up using the Master Sword only to save durability on everything else; it got that bad.

Forcing you to backtrack along the same path 4 times in a row, or across the entire game world to advance the plot a single step, is also bad game design

@@denpadolt9242 Making a boss one shot you if you don`t have the right item beforehand and giving no hint on that is atrocious game design.

And furthermore, suggesting that Things are the only way to defeat an enemy when there is definitely more than one way (and then taking away that option, and then replacing that with the better of a puzzle battle system that is still quickly repetitive) is also bad game design.

I prefer to let the games prove it themselves.

@@cradiculous Old ones had a ton of unnecesary grinding, there were even memes mocking this, until Stickey star came out, which is the trippy transition.

Yeah. Ironically, it is Sticker Star that is the most punishing if we measure by that metric, and that is because it’s fights are horrible and the better fights involve going to more horrible levels (except if they are in World 4). It is also because you would almost never want to battle that it is the most like a stealth game, though depending on the person both Color Splash and The Origami King quickly outstay their welcome and are far more infuriating with their pretensions of being RPG-like. All in all, the modern Paper Mario games do a very good job of making you hate battling and therefore half all of those games are hated.

Also none of this excuses are the fact that you have to go up the tower, fight the boss, last long enough to get a hint, let The boss kill you- as you can't run from the boss battle and there's no give up option- then try to find what you need without a reliable means of knowing what half of the world map it's in, just to actually experience the preservation the level is designed for.

@Ice Goomba I find myself thinking about this a lot as we're going through it, actually. It's weird to me that even though it's a completely different game from Paper Mario, in a lot of respects it feels more "Mario" than Paper Mario. If both this and Thousand-Year Door were released today and only one of them could be called "Paper _Mario_ ", I'd expect Color Splash to have that title more than TTYD. Sort-of along the lines of Super Mario Galaxy versus New Super Mario Bros. Wii; the latter's clearly closer to invoking the spirit of the original games. Mind you, being more "Mario" doesn't make these games better - Galaxy's in my gaming top 20 while NSMBWii... isn't, and I still probably prefer what PM1/TTYD have to offer than Color Splash (jury's out until we finish tho). There's a lot to be said for evolving the template into new contexts rather than applying modern tools and design principles to the tried-and-true template. Just interesting to think about.

@Ice Goomba The first 3 games were the Mario Story games. The new ones are the "Mario: Ha Ha We're Paper" games.

Mixed with literal bad game design

Thank god that Paper Mario had a separate name in Japanese such that we can actually give the better titles its *original* name