super paper mario flipside pit of 100 trials flimm

I said in my original post about TTYD that The Thousand-Year Door makes the player believe he/she is playing a standard Paper Mario sequel shuffling through familiar locations for the first chapter or two, but then by Chapter Three spreads its wings and becomes a more complex tale filled with lore, prophecy, and examinations of power and love beyond the standard Mario/Peach/Bowser conflict we would expect from a Mario game. What was this? (COMPLETE SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW) Whereas Odyssey began to lose momentum in its second half, Super Paper Mario simply gained more, and more, and more, until by the last frame of the game I was crying. I somewhat remembered and knew from its reputation about how Super Paper Mario has the deepest story of the Mario lineage, but I had forgotten just how much. But at the same time, I remembered that the storyline got more complex as the game progressed, so I continued playing… I had major issues with the mechanics when I first played SPM many years ago, and upon the first few hours of my new playthrough, these mechanical flaws were still bothering me. Overtime, as the prophecy states, The Void grows in size until it threatens to swallow every world whole and erase them from existence. This dark artifact powers what characters refer to as The Void, a purplish, black-hole-like mass that hovers over the worlds of the game. At the start of the game, the villainous Count Bleck forces Bowser and Peach into marriage which unleashes the Chaos Heart. So why not replay the game that, in my mind, has the opposite problem?įor those who are unaware, the Nintendo Wii’s Super Paper Mario tells the story of a lost prophecy called the Dark Prognosticus. I had just played a game with perfect mechanics but with a storyline that lost steam overtime. Yet, while I recognized that the game mechanically was about as sublime as a game can get, the story began to lose some steam in the second half of the narrative, with a particular fake-out at the end of Act Two irking me most, due to it promising an idea of progression in the narrative stakes, before immediately removing said progressed stakes from the story (no, this isn’t an Odyssey post, but bear with me).įrom this experience, I decided to give TTYD’s immediate successor, Super Paper Mario (SPM), another try. And I was struck by the number of similarities that Odyssey drew on from not just TTYD, but its predecessor Paper Mario (PM64). As part of this post, I compared this game to its potential successors and why none of them quite reached heights that TTYD did.Īt the time, I had yet to play Super Mario Odyssey, but, having more time at home lately because of obvious reasons, I recently had the chance to do so (see an expanded section of my original post or more details).

About a year ago, I constructed a design blog post maintaining that Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (TTYD) was the greatest Mario story, that it built off of the Mario structure while also combining it with a multitude of rich narrative themes and characters.

Super paper mario flipside pit of 100 trials flimm