The WiiU gets a pretty bad rap these days, one would consider it Nintendo’s “red-headed stepchild” if it weren’t for the literally red-headed Virtual Boy *rimshot*. But I will always maintain that the system did have some good games. Not a lot, mind you, but some. Unfortunately, the system did suffer from a number of missteps. Games that had potential but were bogged down by horrible design choices, just to make use of (or prove that there was a point for) the second screen on the system’s controller. While not the worst perpetrator of this crime (I’m looking at you Star Fox Zero…), Paper Mario: Color Splash (PMCS) certainly fell into this category. It is a game built on the solid foundation of a beloved series, but is bogged down by awful, redundant, pointless design choices.
PMCS, like most Paper Mario games, is a turn-based RPG. But I’m almost tempted to call it RPG-lite because it is missing crucial elements that normally go into an RPG, but more on that in a bit. In PMCS the scenario is set up pretty simply. Mario and Princess Peach get news that something bad is happening on Prism Island. So, the heroic plumber and princess sail off to this new land to investigate. Upon reaching the island, they find that the island, and it’s inhabitants have been drained of their color, leaving them lifeless pieces of white paper (because this Paper Mario goes really heavy into the paper gimmick). Naturally, Bowser is the one behind the missing color, as he has an army of shy guys with straws sucking the color out of the world. Mario soon meets a sentient paint can named Huey (the game’s “Navi”) who explains that Mario needs to find the “Big Paint Stars” to help the island return to its full color glory. And from there, the adventure begins.
As the name and set up in the narrative would imply, paint is a big deal in PMCS. Upon meeting Huey, Mario gets the power of the paint hammer. Using his hammer, Mario can splash color wherever he hits. If he hits a colorless spot (a white spot in the environment) or colorless toad, then his hammer will splash the necessary paint to color it in, restoring it to what it should be. Of course, doing this (and many other actions) requires paint. The paint hammer has an always present meter displayed on screen, showing Mario how much paint he has (divided up in red, blue, and yellow meters). Paint can be acquired by hitting virtually anything in the game’s levels (unlike earlier Paper Mario games, PMCS is divided up into levels that can be accessed via a world map). Hit a tree and globs of green paint will fall. Hit a red flower and red paint will sprout out from it. And so on.
Why is painting colorless spots important? Well… for the most part, it isn’t. Filling in a colorless spot in a level will usually result in getting a few coins or a new battle card (much more on that in a little bit). But mostly, it’s pointless. Levels are full of colorless white spots. And most of the time, that doesn’t matter. Getting a level colored 100% results in getting that level’s music added to the sound gallery. That’s it. While the music in this game is some of the best I’ve heard of any Paper Mario game, a sound gallery is hardly enough incentive for me to 100% every single level. Especially when you consider how much of a pain it is to search out every single freakin’ colorless spot. Some of these spots are nearly impossible to see/find. For example, there’s a tiny spot of white in one level, on a very pale light blue floor, in an over lit area (so everything looks white), where the camera angle is so bad you can barely see the floor in the first place. Spots like these are just a pain. Repainting levels in and of itself is just pointless busy work. It isn’t fun. In fact, it detracts from the fun, because instead of enjoying the game I should be playing, I’m instead playing a twisted and sadistic form of “Where’s Waldo.”
I will breifly mention, that, should you succeed in 100% completion of a level, it is never safe, as any time, at random, when going to the world map, one of your 100% completed levels might be attacked by the Shy Bandit, a black shy guy that runs around the level select world map and tries to drain colored levels of their color. If you beat him to the level he’s marked, then he disappears. Otherwise, you need to reach him and fight him before he drains the level completely. Just one of the many pointless and frustrating additions to the game.
Of course, there are rare occasions where coloring a colorless spot in a level is important. When something in PMCS isn’t colored, it doesn’t work. For example, if a pipe is missing some of it’s iconic green coloring, then Mario can’t use it. Or a moving platform might be stuck, unable to move because a portion of its color has been drained. Instances like these are few, but are the only time using the paint hammer really felt like it mattered.
Of course, paint isn’t just used to color in the levels and toads. It’s also used in battles. Being an RPG, PMCS is based around battling enemies in turn based combat. I wish I could tell you that the combat is as refined and fun as it was in the original Paper Mario and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. I wish I could say that… Unfortunately, PMCS decided to take it’s cue from Paper Mario: Sticker Star. One of my least favorite games in the series. What’s worse, is they somehow managed to make Sticker Star’s combat almost look good compared to the travesty that is PMCS’s combat.
I have never seen a more needlessly complicated combat system in an RPG in all my life. Combat scene’s are, at first, laid out pretty simply. Mario is on the left side of the screen, and his enemies are on the right, lined up in a row. Attacking said enemies, however is an unbelievable chore. Gone are the days where you can just select an action (like jump, or hammer, or item), and then execute it. All of Mario’s actions are now in the form of “battle cards.” These are very similar to Sticker Star’s battle stickers, but with more annoying caveats. So, in order to attack a single enemy, the player must go through a ridiculous process of menus (all done on the gamepad’s screen) to set up their attack. First, they must choose the battle card they wish to use. As I said, all actions are battle cards now, so, the player might choose a “jump” card, this would allow Mario to jump on the enemy to deal damage. Or they might choose a “mushroom” card this will restore health. And so on, and so on. Once the card has been selected, the player needs to send it to the coloring screen. Most cards Mario will acquire are colorless (of course…) so, once the player has selected their card and sent it to the coloring screen, they need to press down on the card (everything in this process of setting up an attack is defaulted to touch controls, but can thankfully be change to button presses). Pressing on the card will fill the card with paint (using up the paint in your paint hammer meter). Once fully colored (or colored to the degree the player wishes [the more painted a card is, the more powerful the attack will be]), the player then needs to send the card to the “ready” screen. Once there, the player must flick the card up, once more, to send it to the battle scene on the TV. Then, and only then, can Mario actually perform his attacking action.
So, to summarize this awful process, these are the steps the player must go through before every action in battle: select card -> card ready -> paint card -> done painting -> “flick” card up from gamepad to TV -> attack.
I will note, that “timed hits” have returned from previous entries in the series, making the actual combat at least somewhat familiar. If the player presses “A” at the right time, they will be able to deal more damage with their attacks. The same mechanic works for blocking as well, pressing the button just before being hit will reduce the damage taken. It’s all about timing the attack just right, and by this point in the series, is a well known and well established mechanic that works well. Even in this game.
Starting out, Mario will only be able to select one battle card per turn. But as the player progresses through the game, they will receive upgrades that will allow them to select multiple cards per turn. When fighting more than one enemy, however, this can become confusing. Mario cannot select which enemy he will attack. As they are always lined up, Mario’s first card will attack the first enemy in the line, his second card will attack the second, and so on. This can get confusing, however, as some cards have multiple attacks on them. For example, the “Jump x3” is a single card with three jumps. All three jumps will be relegated to one single enemy, though (unless the enemy is defeated, and there are still jumps remaining, then it will move on to the next enemy). Whereas if Mario played three single jump cards, he would switch opponents with each jump. It can get a little confusing, and resulted in some bad planning on my part at times.
Planning your attacks can be a bit of a problem as well. Enemies don’t have health bars, instead, they lose paint with damage taken. While fun and obviously going with the theme, it’s a pretty mediocre to tell how much health an enemy has left. It’s often difficult to know how many jumps, or hammers, or whatever it will take to take out a group of enemies. So I often found myself overcompensating. I would select four cards that I think would do the job for my one turn, only to find I only needed two of the four cards to defeat all the enemies on screen. The only reason this is bad, though, is because those unused cards do not go back into my inventory, even though they were not used, they are lost forever.
Needlessly wasting cards is kind of a big deal in this game. As I said before, everything is based around cards. I yearn for the days when Mario could just use basic jump and hammer attacks without concern, but that’s not the case in PMCS. Players must manage their cards at all times, otherwise they’ll be stuck in a whole lot of needlessly difficult situations. This is aggravated by the fact that Mario can only hold 99 cards maximum (this is not a lot). And this number can never be increased.
In fact, for an RPG game, there is very little the player can do to upgrade anything. There is no leveling system in place for PMCS. Mario can upgrade how many cards he can play (mostly just by playing the game, it happens naturally). He can also upgrade how much paint his hammer can hold by picking up “hammer scraps” which are dropped by defeated enemies. And his health will increase by 50 hit points every time he finds a Big Paint Star (again, this just naturally happens). Because of this, it felt like there was no meaningful progression throughout the game. With no XP, or leveling, fighting enemies (which is already a colossal chore thanks to the battle set up) felt even more pointless. It left me severely wanting, which leads me to call PMCS “RPG-lite.”
Pointless, frustrating, redundant, unnecessary. These are all words that constantly went through my mind while playing PMCS. And it’s more than just coloring white spots and a horrible battle system. There are so many other questionable choices in the game’s design.
The “cutout” mechanic comes to mind. Yet another mechanic taken from Sticker Star. The cutout mechanic was used in numerous ways, for pointless reasons. At any time, Mario can activate the cutout. If there is an appropriate cutout area in the level, then the level will drop from the TV to the gamepad, with Mario hovering outside of it. On the level, there will be a dotted white line that the player must trace on the gamepad, this results in that section of the level to be temporarily cut out.
Cutouts serve multiple purposes, but all seem to spawn from one single reason: the designer just decided to put one there because why not. Sometimes, a cutout will result in Mario “transcending dimensions,” walking along the cut out section to reach an area otherwise inaccessible. Other times a cutout will remove some environmental obstacle by literally cutting it out of the level. And other times still, a cutout will be used so Mario can use a “Thing” card. Things are 3D, non paper objects that Mario can turn into powerful cards. When used in cutout, however, they affect the environment. For example, the fan Thing can cause a pirate ship to start sailing by blowing a fierce enough wind. Or the battery Thing can give power to a dead computer, etc. There was never any real rhyme or reason to the many uses of cutouts, I just learned that when I was stuck in a level, if I pressed the cutout button, the solution would usually magically appear.
Another annoying addition were the unfurl blocks ([!?]). When Mario hit an unfurl block, he would have a very short amount of time to run to the object that needed “unfurling” and hit it with his hammer, before the timer reached zero. This was always used as an environmental puzzle, usually to unfurl bridges and ramps. But it was never fun. And could often be frustrating as the item that needed unfurling didn’t always show the [!?] symbol, leaving me not knowing what the heck I was supposed to do before the timer ran out, forcing me to return to the unfurl block and try again.
Roshambo temples were another addition to the game that left me frustrated and annoyed. Progressing through the game unlocks Roshambo temples. A series of increasingly frustrating rock-paper-scissors tournaments… that’s right… These temples are purely optional. Winning them results in getting a ton of coins (useful for buying those all important battle cards) and getting a single rare card not found anywhere else. While I didn’t bother with these wastes of time during my latest playthrough, on my first run, I was determined to 100% the entire game (and I succeeded). But I cannot tell you how frustrating these tournaments were. I didn’t know I could hate rock-paper-scissors with the passion that I did when trying to beat these things.
Perhaps most annoying of all, though, is Kamek… This freakin’ magikoopa will show up at random during any given battle and wreak havoc with the player. He’ll usually do one of three things. He’ll turn all cards in the inventory into the weakest card in the game. Or he’ll flip over all the cards in the inventory, so the player will have no idea what card they’re playing. Or, he’ll temporarily steal all but a handful of cards, forcing the player to use those cards in the fight, whether they want to or not. No part of this is fun. What’s worse is, it happens WAY too often. I don’t know how the designers chose his appearance algorithm, but it’s awful. And it makes frustrating combat even worse.
One final note on battles (sorry). I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the boss battles. The bosses in this game are the Koopalings. I appreciated this to no end, as I love those guys, always have. But battling them in PMCS is just a chore. Skill tends to fly out the window with these fights as it really all boils down to Thing cards. Each boss fight requires certain Thing cards. And the player must use the card(s) at exactly the right time, or suffer an immediate game over. For example, in the fight against Lemmy Koopa, the player needs to wait until he has upgraded his ball to its second form. Then the player must play the mirror ball Thing, then the ice pick Thing, to pop the ball. If the player does not do this in this precise order, it’s game over. This is such an unnecessary pain. Unless you’re really into investigating the game’s little hints, most players will most likely be forced to go online to figure out how to beat the bosses. No skill, just doing what they’re told. Boring, bad design.
Even from a narrative standpoint, this game frustrates. Past Paper Mario games used to be full of character and heart. PMCS, though? Toads. Just toads. Generic, boring, nameless toads. And virtually nothing else. It’s really hard to care about a game’s world that is so lacking in character. This diagram puts it best. The top section is characters from Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. The bottom section is PMCS…
It is truly a shame that there are so many poor design choices in this game. Paper Mario was once an amazing RPG series. And even PMCS shows hints of greatness at times. There were times where I could find a lot of charm and fun in the writing. And certain levels were just a pure joy to play. The homage to Super Mario Bros. 3 in particular was an absolute delight (even if it did spit in the face of almost all of the game’s established mechanics). And the scene where Luigi gives Mario a ride on his go-kart to go up rainbow road is just pure gold.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to enjoy the bright spots in the game, when it’s constantly bombarded by so much unnecessary, bad design. Yes, there is fun to be had in PMCS. I’m just not sure it’s worth the effort to find. I truly, truly hope that Intelligent Systems gets its act together if they make another Paper Mario. Stop trying to “iterate” for the sake of iteration. Go back to the basics, and understand what made the first two games in the series so great. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll finally have a new Paper Mario worthy of the name.
