Paper Mario: Color Splash

Genre: Turn-Based RPG / Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Paper Mario: Color Splash is an RPG with Action-RPG elements released on Wii U in 2016. The existence of this game is proof that Nintendo is a company that definitely marches to the beat of their own drummer. After the widely-hated release of Paper Mario: Sticker Star on Nintendo 3DS in 2012, rather than seeing this as a sign that they should return to the mechanics that game abandoned, mechanics that Paper Mario series fans loved, Nintendo instead decided to double down, and the results are… you know, probably the most telling way I could end this sentence is to say that just trying to think how to end this sentence made me pause and give a long, audible sigh.

Look, as I said in my review of Paper Mario: Sticker Star, I try not to judge a game based on what it isn’t, I try to judge it based on what it is, so while I can bemoan how this game once again abandons the straightforward RPG mechanics of the earlier games in the Paper Mario series and replaces them with something far worse, I’m not even going to get started on that this time. I’m just going to say what this game does.

In terms of presentation, Paper Mario: Color Splash is absolutely wonderful, with truly creative use of 3D visuals to create a beautiful, lively, creative, and yes, colorful world that looks like everything was crafted from paper, with extra visual flair given to the game with the splashes of paint your attacks can slop around the place. While there’s some argument to be made that this game doesn’t have quite the same level as character as the series’ pinnacle, The Thousand-Year Door, it is nevertheless visually-stunning well beyond what any game in the series up to this point has had to offer, all backed by a good, jumpy soundtrack that fits the game’s light-hearted themes very well.

The story is… well, nothing terribly inspired, but the game’s excellent writing and wonderful sense of humor make it work. Mario and Peach discover that someone has been attacking the people of the island resort of Prism Island, stealing its citizens’ color and leaving them lifeless and flat. Well… okay, even more flat than the paper-thin characters normally are. Upon arriving at the island, Mario meets a magical paint bucket, and sets off to restore color to the island. Yeah, this sounds pretty similar to the plot of Sticker Star, with that game’s stickers traded out for color-sapping enemies here.

However, the plot isn’t the real problem here. Paper Mario: Color Splash has enough charm and quality writing to make the story enjoyable even if the plot is stale and disposable. No, the problem here is the combat.

Again, let’s just set aside the lack of experience, levels, and stats. We’ll even gloss over the way this game makes you collect stickers for every single basic attack much like in the previous game (though they’re not stickers here, they’re “cards”… whatever, same deal…). All of that, in itself, would be pretty depressing for a Paper Mario game, as it was in Sticker Star. But no, I want to talk about something more simple, more basic.

Let me take you through the process you need to go through to use a single basic attack on a single basic low-level enemy.

First, let’s assume you have cards in your inventory, and have some paint as well. You’ll need both. When combat starts, the game will run through its little intro animations for a few seconds, taking even longer to have your cards splay out on your touchscreen on the Wii U gamepad. Oh, not all of them, just the first page. You’ll need to tab through multiple pages if you want to seek out a particular card, and they aren’t sorted, they’re just in the order you got them.

Anyway, you touch to select a single-use card. You can’t use the standard gamepad controls to do this, only the touchscreen. Then, you have to go to a touchscreen button elsewhere on the screen to confirm your selection. Then, you have to tap to hold onto the card to fill it with paint, with more paint making it a stronger attack. Once done with this, you have to tap another touchscreen button to confirm.

Then the action moves to the main screen, where you have the Paper Mario series’ traditional timed button presses to further enhance your attacks to do more damage. I will point out that at no point in this whole process did you get the opportunity to select an enemy to attack, the game simply has you attacking the closest enemy first and working your way back.

There you have it. I just took three whole paragraphs to describe the process of using a basic attack on a low-level enemy in Paper Mario: Color Splash, something that in any other Turn-Based RPG would just require selecting “attack” from a menu, pressing “A”, then selecting the enemy to attack and pressing “A” again, boom bang done. Yet this game drags you through its whole ridiculous, tedious process to do the most basic of actions in any RPG.

And you need to do it over. And over. And over. And over again.

I hate it. I hate it so much.

I could go on to say that this game makes things even more tedious by making players hammer on objects in the environment to grind for paint, which you use both inside and outside of battles. I could go into the absurdity of collecting zillions of cards, making the acquisition of any one card feel meaningless. I could talk about any number of things here, but… ugh… no, I’m just going to make myself more upset.

Despite how terrible this game’s gameplay is… I still can’t help but like Paper Mario: Color Splash a little. The presentation is so very good, the writing is great, the characters are adorable… take this exact same story and presentation and give it standard, traditional Mario RPG gameplay, and I could see myself giving it a grade in the A-range. The good parts are really that good… but unfortunately, the bad parts are really that bad. If you’re a Wii U owner wondering whether to get this game, I suppose just ask yourself how much frustration you’re willing to put up with for the stuff this game does right.

tl;dr – Paper Mario: Color Splash is a Turn-Based RPG with Real-Time elements during combat, and for better or worse (mostly worse), this game follows in the footsteps of the highly disappointing Paper Mario: Sticker Star with Nintendo saying, “sure, fans hated that, but maybe what they really wanted was… more of that stuff they hated!”. The presentation and writing here is excellent, but the gameplay is so needlessly tedious and just plain bad that it’s hard to enjoy it. This game isn’t without merit, but you need to have a lot of patience to enjoy it.

Grade: C-

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